Thursday morning I listened to the sounds of the city as I walked from my hotel on 45th to Central Park. But as I was soon to find out, I had no idea how much I was missing.
Doug Quin teaches at Syracuse University in the Television, Radio and Film Department. Two years ago at GEL 2007 he gave an extraordinary talk on the sounds and songs of the birds and other wildlife he had recorded in various vanishing habitats around the world.
He handed us all bandanas to use as blindfolds. Someone nervously asked if he was going to wear one and he assured us that no, that would be like “the blind leading the blind.” (”That’s the Wall Street tour,” I thought to myself.)
He divided us into two groups and passed out guide ropes and instructed us to grab a knot. Then he led us into the park with instructions to just listen.
It was an extraordinary experience and after about twenty minutes we took the blindfolds off and Doug solicited our feedback (not surprisingly, he’s an excellent listener) and provided some useful context for what we had heard, using words that took on a whole new meaning: volume, pitch, frequency, direction, and duration.
My challenge was to train myself to just listen, to check myself from drifting into an associative memory, and concentrate on the beautiful, rich, varied sounds, all by themselves. At first I tried to picture what was making the sounds, what whatever was making the sound looked like, but then I just enjoyed the sound itself. Where did it come from? In front of, behind, to the left, to the right, above, below. How did it blend with other sounds? Cacaphony or a John Cage constellation?
I re-imagined (or more accurately never really knew) how sound waves wash over you from every direction. From the low frequency inaudible rumble that you can still feel on your skin to high pitched whine that sounds more like a hiss.
Footsteps on gravel. Lonely saxophone in the tunnel. Baby carriage. Impossibly rich and varied bird songs. A bat hitting a softball (squarely and not so). Shuffle of feet on the infield. The wind. (I could write a thousand words on the sounds of wind I heard during this walk alone.) Stop and start of children chasing each other. Shuffle of feet in the grass. A man taking a sandwich out of a paper bag twenty yards in the distance. A conversation on a cell phone. Bicycles slowly skidding to a halt on the dirt. Traffic. The low rumble of buses. Squeaking and grinding of brakes. Click click of shoes on pavement, and the contrast between the roar of a helicopter above and the synchronized walk of lovers in the park. The gentle splash of a boot in a puddle. Diffusion of all of these sounds when we walked through (and sat in) Sheep’s Meadow. An eighteen month old’s tiny fingers catching a softly tossed rubber ball.
I mentioned to the group that this had felt like the quintessential Gel experience providing as it did new ideas and tools with which to, well, experience the world.
And I’m just learning how to listen.
Thank you Doug!
