What I Hear (Soundwalk Assignment)

So I decide to do my sound walk walking home from Hunter College. I walked from 68^th street and Lexington Avenue to 92^nd street and 3^rd Avenue (usually a 30 minute walk, but I walked home slowly to give myself time to focus on the sounds around me). To answer the first question about the texture of the sound, I would have to say it was a combination of both smooth / organic (human sounds) and mechanical sounds. The reason I say this is because I was on the left-hand of the street walking uptown on Lexington and got two different experiences in my left and right ears. 

It was around 6pm as I started my soundwalk. In my left ear, I heard very smooth organic sounds like people walking by, people talking, the swishing of their clothes and sound of the wind. It was very calm on my left side. Honestly, going on that, it could have been any neighborhood. With my right ear, it was like an assault on my hearing, all mechanical sounds of taxi-cabs and buses blaring their horns, police cars blaring their sirens, and all of them revving their engines as they sped-up and drove by. This was definitely a signal that I was in the city, cars and buses are definitely the instruments of the city. I also began to become more conscious of the sound of their wheels rolling over the pavement, it was almost like a sticky sound. 

The keynote sounds I noticed from my sound walk were the sound of the wind and this weird swishing mechanical hum and my own footsteps (this was weird). Some of the foreground sounds that I heard which attracted my attention were the car horns and sirens and revving engines. The sound of the cars passing by and the wheels on the pavement I would say are the soundmarks. These were also the sounds that I found to be unique and meaningful to me. Unique in a way that they are not experienced in any neighborhood, or not as frequent in other neighborhoods. The have meaning because they remind me of being home in the city. 

There were some unexpected sounds that came up in my soundwalk that grabbed my attention and made me turn my head. I got so used to hearing calm sounds on my left side that when I passed a hair salon with the door open, the sound of a woman using a hair dryer startled me. I also took notice of a child’s voice on my left side, even though they were more than half way down the block, their voices travel. Or whenever I got to a corner, the sound in both my left and right ears almost equalized because now I have traffic passing by in front of me and mechanical sounds would now pass to my left ear.

I thought the soundwalk was interesting, if I was blind, I think I would be able to tell when I was at a corner or in the middle of the block, or when there was a red light because the sound in both ears would level out or the sound in my right ear would calm down (cars stopping) signaling a red light.