My essay touches on soundscapes, acoustic ecology, phenomenology and noise pollution so I’ve been thinking of ways to incorporate some of these aspects into a sound piece and pieces that I find aesthetically conceptually pleasing.

I recorded this sound outside my house the other day, the sound was made by builders drilling into a wall with a screwdriver. Depending on the angle the screwdriver was positioned against the wall, different pitches were produced. I wasn’t sure if this was intentional or not but the sounds produced by the builder, to me, sounded like a mijwiz (a middle eastern wind instrument) in terms of the intervals and rhythms I perceived. This could be considered noise pollution following the redefinition I will put forth in my essay as following the recognition of a pattern our attention is automatically brought to the sound. This sound made me think about attempting to play with the listener’s perception through subtle incorporation of patterns into a soundscape. This sound also made me think about this piece by Hildegard Westerkamp.

Westerkamp also plays on the expectations and perception of the listener by taking sounds with meaning, the minuscule clicking sounds of barnacles feeding, and narrating what she imagines these sounds as in her dreams. For example, she explains

‘In another dream, when I entered a stone cottage, I entered a
soundscape made by four generations of a peasant family sitting around a
large wooden table eating and talking: smacking and clicking and sucking and
spitting and telling and biting and singing and laughing and weeping and
kissing and gurgling
and whispering’

Once the listener has been given context to the sounds it’s almost as if they change timbre slightly, fitting into my perception of what that scene would look like. Certain types of sounds start to stick out more that fit with my imagination of that scene. I would like to make a piece that also plays with context and the expectations of the listener.

The Piece below is also inspirational to me. Chris Watson creates a ghostly soundscape from recordings taken along a now defunct train route between Los Mochis and Veracruz in Mexico.