Sound Walk Notes

The first thing I noted when we began the sound walk was the door squeaking as we entered the stairwell.  This sound moved us into our first space in my opinion, since we needed a few moments in the hallway to really settle into to what we were about to do. Next I wrote how the collective footsteps echoing in the stairwell sounding like a waterfall. There were construction related radios coming from either the top floor of the stairwell or the bottom, I couldn’t tell. As we waited in the stairwell and all the footsteps settled down I could hear the cars from the other side of the door. I could hear faint construction sounds and a few muffled voices.

Then the door opened and everything changed. The outside rushed over us and consumed us. I could then hear the frantic writing of everyone in our group. There was distant construction and squeaky breaks. We passed a man on the phone and I heard just an excerpt from his conversation. I wish I wrote it down. We came close to the busy street and all the cars sounded different. We passed a church where kids’ voices were nearly drowned out by the traffic. We moved through an invisible barrier that contained a high-pitched A/C noise that disappeared once we moved away from it. Makes the outdoors seem like it is composed of an infinite amount of contained sound rooms.

I could hear the birds. And a boy and girl walked past in a light inconsequential argument. I heard their voices and nothing else about them. A plane flew over the campus. There was dated music outside Littlefield that disappeared when we went inside. A trashcan was being emptied and then wheeled around; plastic being shaken and the floor being scratched. There was a beep I couldn’t place. I’m still really frustrated about that. The workers were speaking to each other; I want to say in Spanish but I couldn’t make it out so I might just be prejudice.  There was a loud ice machine. And someone was whistling.

At this point I might have gotten bored with what we were doing and I wrote “my own thoughts”.  This had two different meanings for me. First, when we were in Littlefield people kept staring at us, clearly curious about why a group of nearly twenty students are standing still and taking notes. Thinking about this distracted me from listening to our environment. The part of my brain that processes what my ears are taking in was busy processing my own thoughts. So I thought it might be worth writing. The second way in which I meant that was the noises I would project onto things I couldn’t possibly be hearing, for example once we left Littlefield we walked by a man eating lunch inside his truck. I heard his chewing. Even though I couldn’t literally hear any sound coming from the man I have seen enough movies where I understand the idea of hearing minute sounds like chewing as if I was in the characters own head with the reverberated crunches echoing through his ears.

Anyway next we moved into a garage where the fucking crickets or cricket were/was the most prominent sound. A man threw trash into a trashcan that made a loud echo. Then we went back upstairs and that’s all I wrote.