OFR – Open Field Recorder

OFR is the Open Field Recorder created by Invisible Flock (and friends).

With support and in collaboration with Bournemouth University and Professor Amanda H Korstjens from LEAP.

The OFR was created by Invisible Flock to solve a specific need we had whilst recording large sections of a rainforest in Sumatra.

We needed recorders that would function in the difficult conditions of the forest for long periods of time in order to monitor the biodiversity of the area and that we could sync together to create large scale multichannel sound installations with audio quality as close to our main field recorders as possible.

The OFR for us was an attempt to bridge a gap that was not currently being fulfilled by other products on the market allowing us to record stereo audio from high quality microphones that were synced via GPS.

The OFR has been deployed in Sumatra in 2019 and will return there to help monitor and establish an elephant migration corridor. It has been deployed throughout the COVID -19 lockdown during 2020 and into 21 in the North of Finland to record the sound of the yearly freeze as part of an ongoing project with the Sub Zero collective of artists and scientists working on the edge of the artic.