Urban pedestrian is the creature I am today and the exercise is about hearing. The town of Tucson, Arizona has jump emptied of all the University students and people speak of the peace and quiet that the summer months bring to this little desert community. And how strange it is that they think that even a small city such as the municipality of Tucson is quiet in the least; it’s full of sound.
Curiosity led me to the documentation of this creature walk with a focus on sound.
Today was very very windy. The wooshing sound of the wind was noticeable and prevalent even before I started the walk.
The first part of the walk found me listening to the sounds of my own footsteps. I was wearing flat-soled plastic flip-flops which squeak when I walk because they are somewhat new. The pattern of my own steps made me listen to the gendering of this sound as well — that’s definitely the sound of a female, I thought, as the squishy squeaking, lighter paced shuffling along the sidewalk made me think of how other shoe-sounds are referents for gendered subjects: the sounds of high-heels will make men look up before the wearer is even in view, for example, or the clunking of large, heavy workbooks is an indicator that a service man has arrived to start fixing something in the streets. These sounds carry with it a learned responses.
I noticed the subconscious aquisition of ‘unwanted’ sounds that I considered an instrusion of my thoughts such as the bad music coming out of a boutique. The irony of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Strange Magic” entered my brain as I walked by. Since the beat of the pop song matched the pattern of my footfalls, I found that i had inadvertently picked up the tune and carried it with me the rest of the walk. The strange magic of the spirit of the boutique followed me and set the tone for my associations.
The complex layers of audio soon fell into a heirarchy based on proximity and decibel level. Birds swooping by would swing to the top of the heirarchy, but their proximity to me could easily be trumped by a passing truck or a person on a cell phone. The symphony and caucophony of sound was overwhelming if I allowed my brain to compile a list of identified sources. I soon realized that since most of the sources of each of the myriad of audio ‘tracks’ were identifiable and could be traced to visible sources, these were the ones that our brains can dismiss on a daily basis and move to the storage shelves of the backgrounds of our brains. Since I knew what a Cadillac, an SUV, a bird, another person’s flipflops, a loudspeaker, a utility truck, a car stereo sounded like, I could easily put these in the back of my conscious awareness.
It’s the sounds that are unidentifiable or strange or disconcerting that garner our attentions. I tried to listen intently for any sounds that fell into this category. There weren’t any! Hence my environment was almost completely known — and easily explains why people think of the ‘empty’ town in the summers as quiet.
Listen to the twenty-minute audio track of creaturewalk2 here (mp3 file, 96mbps):
Filed under: creaturewalks | Tagged: audio, creature, hearing, listening, walking
