In Frankfurt, Germany, 135 years ago, an 8-year-old boy named Ludwig Koch was given an Edison phonograph and wax cylinders by his father. It was the latest in technology, allowing anyone to record sound easily and somewhat permanently for the first time. Young Ludwig did what any 8-year-old might do with such a gift: He recorded the chirps of his pet bird. And with that call, a domesticated white-rumped shama inaugurated an artistic tradition that has changed the way people hear and understand the world around them.

What Koch captured that day is widely believed to be the first-ever field recording. While the term conjures up images of the natural world—and, to be sure, many field recordings feature the sounds of birds, running water, wind whistling through trees, and insects humming—the term “field recording” applies to any kind of recording made outside of a studio. That means that Stuart Hyatt’s The Fair State, which includes everything from mooing livestock and clanging machinery to murmuring voices in an attempt to re-create the feeling of the Indiana State Fair, is just as much a field recording as Smithsonian Folkways’ self-explanatory Sounds of North American Frogs.

It didn’t take long for composers to begin integrating field recordings into music for orchestras and other ensembles. In his 1924 piece Pines of Rome, Ottorino Respighi calls for a recording of a nightingale to be played on a phonograph in the third movement, marking the first time a recording was used in conjunction with a live orchestra.

John Cage, who would dramatically push the boundaries of music thanks in part to his use of nontraditional sounds, was working with field recordings as early as 1942, when he included street scenes in his score for the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat.

Cage’s ideas broadened the musical possibilities for field recordings. In his deeply influential 1952 piece 4'33", which famously features no actual performance by the musician but instead comprises whatever sounds happen to occur within the piece’s duration, he suggested that we’re surrounded by fascinating sounds—or rather, that all sound has the potential to be fascinating.

Early recordist and electroacoustic musician Luc Ferrari took Cage to heart, recording sounds he heard from his window on the Dalmatian island of Korčula for his 1970 composition Presque rien no. 1. The piece captures both the vast emptiness of the ocean and the low-key bustle of small-town life. Ferrari’s careful layering of sounds—he places roosters and donkeys at varying distances, introduces murmured speech, sends an ancient truck rumbling through, and more—feels every bit as much a pocket symphony as “Good Vibrations.”

The Beach Boys themselves were no strangers to field recordings, having famously taped barnyard animals for their 1966 album Pet Sounds. Field recordings have played a major role in non-orchestral music for decades, from the Gulf Coast samples of electronic group The KLF’s Chill Out to the work of UK musician Burial, who uses the crackle of vinyl records and the static of steady rain to keep his soul-influenced dance music just out of reach—his way of re-creating his feeling that he’d missed out on the rave scene’s brightest moments.

Frequently, field recordings function in this way, enriching, deepening, and completing traditionally composed pieces of music. It’s difficult to imagine The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” having such a strong effect without the quotidian chatter that expertly bridges the ennui of John Lennon’s verses with the playful morning routine of Paul McCartney’s. Steve Reich’s 1988 work Different Trains is made more poignant by his using recordings of people discussing their experiences in World War II as a melodic base, while the sound of whistles adds to the sense of anticipation, drama, and foreboding carried by the locomotive chug of the string quartet.

Some composers position themselves as a kind of field recorder, capturing natural sound using staff paper as the recording apparatus and the orchestra as a playback device. At times, this music can be incredibly beautiful, as in Gabriella Smith’s evoking the wash of surf through violins in her Tumblebird Contrails. Olivier Messiaen was more direct in his approach, compiling hundreds of recordings of an individual bird species, then using them to compose what he saw as the ideal form of that bird’s song. His works don’t adhere to traditional Western musical notions of harmony, melody, or rhythm—but neither do the birds that sing them in the wild.

Even when they’re not combined with other music, field recordings can carry a surprisingly heavy emotional load. The environments series of albums made by Irv Teibel brought the insect drone of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp and “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” to tons of people looking to lose themselves in the natural world. The moans of whale song that Roger Payne captured on his album Songs of the Humpback Whale can be intense and nearly human in their longing. Jean Ritchie and George Pickow’s Field Trip—England includes the sound of playground games, handbell choirs, pub songs, and more that the couple recorded on a 1952 trip to the UK, making it a nostalgic portrait of distinctly British life.

It may seem unlikely that sounds you hear every day could possibly be as moving as the most banal piece of music. Surely a recording of a farm isn’t even as musical as “Old MacDonald,” you might say. This is a fair point, and one with an unsatisfying answer: You’re right. A field recording is unlikely to make you feel the way the “Ode to Joy” does. What it will give you, though, in a way that no other form of music can, is a new way of experiencing your surroundings. As composer Lawrence English puts it, "The most affecting recordings offer a focus that lays beyond the everyday listening we experience. They reveal a depth of presence." In other words, field recordings bridge the distance between our subjectivities and the rest of the world. They draw the natural sonic background of life to the fore of our consciousness and remind us of the vibrancy of a world hidden in plain sight.