Guide to mobile phone audio recording

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Just last week, a colleague resorted to her mobile phone when her digital recorder broke down during an interview. The resulting audio was satisficing, or in other words, good enough for her work.

I’m a huge fan of mobileactive.org’s guides for, inter alia, mobile activism. Their latest guide is Mobile Audio Recording in the Field (And How to Get a Clear Sound From the Streets). It’s well written and comprehensive. It’s also timely, since the recording quality of some higher end phones closely match what one gets from lower end digital recorders.

I penned this comment to the guide,

Kudos on http://mobileactive.org/audio-recording. Brilliant, as ever. I wonder if you could pass on to Melissa that www.utterz.com (the URL behind the Utterli platform noted in the report) is defunct. It’s also good to point to www.drop.io. It’s a platform I tell investigative journalists in Sri Lanka to use when capturing field based narratives too sensitive to carry back to HQ on any media on their person. It’s a US based service, but IDD call rates are quite affordable in Sri Lanka, and in most cases, the cost of an assignment for this kind of information gathering would be borne by a donor or media institution. Another use case is detailed here https://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/election-monitoring-using-new-media-notes-from-my-experience-in-sri-lanka.

And though it’s strictly not a mobile phone and currently in the hands of very few compared to those with mobiles capable of audio recording, the Apple’s iPad offers decent recording quality using its in-built microphone. I use the free QuickVoice Recorder on the iPad for short voice memos – the quality is crisp and clear in environments with little or no ambient noise. Certainly more than adequate for brief interviews. There’s also a paid version with more features and the app runs on the iPhone as well. Of course, there are many more apps for audio recording on both devices (search for ‘audio recording’ here).

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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