Equipment
In all linguistic investigations fieldwork is a central activity and the necessary equipment to conduct it effectively must be procured. The collected data needs to be studied in more detail and suitable equipment is also required for this aspect of the work.
For fieldwork, both transportation and recording equipment need to be considered. The dialect fieldworker must be able to visit all parts of the country - even those not easily accessible - in the course of finding and choosing informants. For this travelling a suitable vehicle is a necessity if he is to complete interviews and recordings within a reasonable time. It need not be much more than a small robust vehicle able to carry the fieldworker and his equipment to his place of investigation. Under more arduous conditions a vehicle able to withstand rough road tracks and inclement weather would have to be used. For more sophisticated projects a recording car properly fitted for the purpose is often employed. Such an arrangement, however, calls for the services of a recording technician as well. 22
As the recorded sound material is subjected to painstaking auditory analysis and will in most instances be deposited in a sound archive for future consultation, it should be the aim to make the audio-magnetic recordings of the highest standard, bearing in mind of course the field conditions under which the interviewing takes place. Professional tape recorders, reel-to-reel, should be used where possible as domestic equipment is hardly suitable, and great care should be taken in choosing the right machine. The technical requirements for such equipment are further considered in the appropriate chapter of this publication.
As the fieldworker is at the same time the interviewer and the recordist, a high quality portable recorder which can be operated where there is no electricity supply, if needs be, should be chosen. Consideration must be given to microphones which match the recorder. Two high quality condenser microphones of compact size, one for the interviewer and one for the informant, are at present the best means of coping with recording two persons. Such a microphone can easily be clipped on to an article of clothing and arranged at an appropriate distance from the speaker's mouth. The voice level for interviewer and informant can then be adjusted separately.
An alternative method is to use a cardioid response dynamic microphone positioned on a boom arm stand. The microphone can be placed between interviewer and informant, again at an angle taking into account the voice levels of each.
Stereo recordings are far more difficult to complete and require specialist expertise. In spite of the great strides made in developing compact cassette recorders they do not appear as yet to equal reel-to-reel recordings in performance.
Additional equipment will have to be acquired for use at the archive. Here, listening in detail to field recordings in order to analyze the speech sounds of each variety and prepare phonetic transcriptions calls for a playback system that reproduces faithfully and clearly what has been recorded. It should comprise a tape recorder deck that can withstand periods of intensive use in replaying portions of tape, a good amplifier system and a separate loudspeaker. No erase head is required on the tape recorder since it might cause accidental erasures. Greater clarity in reproducing a recording at any required sound level can often be achieved by using a pair of headphones and their use has the advantage of not disturbing other people in the vicinity to the same degree.
For preparing copies of tape recordings other tape recorders are required and where funds allow the purchase of studio equipment should be considered.
A great deal of time is taken up at the archive in listening to the contents of tapes and to particular sound qualities within the 'utterances' (i.e. the complete response offered by the informant) so as to prepare accurate transcriptions. Two other pieces of equipment are useful aids in this listening process. The one is a 'tape-repeater' by means of which parts of an utterance can be selected from the interview tape and re-recorded on to a tape loop on another tape-deck. As its name suggests, this recording can then be repeated any number of times without having to replay the interview tape interminably. The complete section or parts of it can be concentrated on in greater detail to further the analysis. An even more specific portion of speech can be analyzed by means of the 'speech segmentator'. As before a portion of the interview tape is re-recorded and any brief part of the speech event - the onset to a particular consonant, the offglide of a vowel - can be isolated for repetitive listening and closer analysis.
- Hedblom, 'The tape recording of dialect for linguistic sound archives', in Svenska Landsmåal och Svenskt Folkliv; 1961; pp. 51-100
