to really listen to an environment I personally don’t feel it helps to give oneself a time limit. Perhaps the point is that the ‘music’ of a place exists & can be truly heard when it is accepted rather than restricted. There is a question of framing in relation to any creative work that comes from these experiences but I have found it much more interesting, and ‘closer’, to allow that frame to be defined by an intuitive response to the place. I feel also its an important point to say that for some the act of ‘field recording’ is indeed always about recording, for others it is about listening & sometimes pressing ‘record’ doesn’t feature at all. This has always been the case & it would be, shall we say, helpful if the history of ‘sound art’ doesn’t forget that the art of listening is something that most field recordists & acoustic ecologists have always had a deep relationship with. The fact is that the constraints of the technology have created a picture of listening that is not a true reflection on the activity. Hours & hours of listening, of becoming engrossed in an environment are, archive-wise, represented by a few minutes or seconds of audio recording. Technology has moved on for those who want to record of course & yet still the dominant durational choices, both of recording and of listening, remain those established by earlier technologies.