On Tuesday, disaster struck.
The day started auspiciously enough. I had the brilliant idea to use my iPhone 16 to record some videos in the field. I had already recorded the audio of some songs from one of my groups, so my plan was to rerecord these same songs as video using my iPhone. Since I have no stand for the phone, I just propped the phone up on some books on my desk, yielding a kind of upper body shot of the two ladies in the group. I tried to get the phone as close as possible to the mouth of the singer in order to increase the sound quality. Once we shot the video on the iPhone, I sent it to my Mac using Airdrop, and played it back. It was beautiful. A really nice video. I got excited about the prospect of high-quality videos made with my iPhone. My mind starting racing.
But the place I am working is noisy. There is a lot of background noise, including motorcycles on their way to the market, and people talking in the street. The regular west African village scene. As a result, the sound quality of the video was not a great as I wanted it to be. It was not bad, but not great. Just a tiny bit murky with lots of background noise. So I started thinking that maybe I could use the Zoom H4n as an audio-interface to the iPhone. The Zoom has excellent sound quality and I could place it closer to the singers. But to do that, I needed to have AA batteries for the Zoom H4n, which I did not have.
Another brilliant idea: use the rechargeable green batteries from my radio. They are charged. They are AA size. So it makes sense that I can just insert them into the Zoom H4n, and they would work as usual. I inserted them, and tried setting up the audio-interface. But at that exact moment, I started smelling plastic burning. I quickly removed the rechargeable batteries. When I tested the Zoom H4n to see if it was affected, I found it had been totally fried. It did not work anymore. Apparently the rechargeable batteries were not meant to be used in other appliances, only in the radio for which they were designed. My stupidity overwhelmed me.
My whole research project for the summer depends on that Zoom H4n. I am writing a dictionary of Kpelegbe, and one of the central activities is to record the new words with different speakers. Those recordings are essential, both as a record of the work, and as tool in transcription. So without a recorded, the work comes to a halt.
The consultants were sitting in front of me waiting for instructions. My relatives were nearby worried about what had just happened. I was a shocked. But I did not panic or lose my temper. Since being on Wegovy, my whole personality has been sanded down a bit. I just sat there looking at the inoperable Zoom H4n, feeling a bit nauseated.
Luckily, I had brought along an extra recorder, the Zoom H4Essential. I had tried to get a second Zoom H4n before leaving the US, but they are no longer being produced. They have been replaced by the Zoom H5n (on the higher side) and the Zoom H4Essential (on the lower side). The problem was that I had not bothered to set it up and make sure it was working before leaving the US, so I needed to tinker with it for about an hour to set it up and get it to work the way I wanted. For example, when I recorded onto Praat using the Zoom H4Essential, I could barely hear the output. So I consulted with Gemini to finally figure out that I needed to set the output in the computer settings to use the computer speakers, not the mic speakers. This issue has never come up with the Zoom H4n. I am not really that comfortable with the Zoom H4Essential.
Finally, I got the system working and we were able to do some recording of words before the end of the session. In spite of the disaster, we had a fairly good session, recording the three beautiful videos and recording some words, with only a hour of wasted time.
My next step is to see if I can get a Zoom H4n or Zoom H5n replacement in Lome. I kind of doubt it, but you never know. More and more people are doing recording at home and producing social media content, so they might be sold. The place to go is called Dekon, which is close to asigame (big market) in downtown Lome. I have already gotten the Whatsapp numbers of the major electronics shops (via Gemini), and I will now contact them to see if the Zoom series is available.
The reason I call this post “the weakest link” is that fieldwork is like a chain. And if the chain breaks somewhere, the game is over. Your whole project is only a strong as the weakest link the chain. Concretely this means that in doing fieldwork you need to have back-up equipment for all the essential components, because any one of them could go out in the field leaving you totally stranded. Even though I don’t really like it, the back-up Zoom H4Essential basically saved my whole project.
Now, if the backup also fails, I am really in trouble. I guess my last resort would be to try to use my iPhone 16 as a audio recorder. I am suspicious about that, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.
Here are some of the lessons I learned from this experience:
1. Think through chain of work from A to Z, and identify the weakest links.
2. Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid with valuable electronic equipment.
3. Bring along backup equipment for all essential components of the research (e.g, recorders, computer chargers, etc.).
4. Set up all the equipment (e.g., recorders) and software (e.g., FLEx, ELAN) before leaving the US.
5. Test all equipment twice (including cables, chargers, etc.) before leaving US.
6. Bring along backup batteries for all relevant equipment.
7. Identify possible sources for equipment replacements in-country.
