“In order to listen we must stop, or at least slow down – physically and psychologically.” (Wrightstson, An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology). Listening involves more than hearing, its an active process that involves interpreting the din and noise around you into meaningful signals. For my soundwalk, I did just that in the neighborhood I go through everyday. The Gramercy/Murray Hill/Kip’s Bay area, I walked up First Avenue across twenty-eighth street and down Lexington until Gramercy Park. This neighborhood is bustling with Indian restaurants, hospitals and students. As I actively listened and interpreted the noise around me, I was able to focus on certain sounds and their purpose. I was shocked at my ability to hone in on a certain noise and concentrate on it.


KEYNOTE: A very strident keynote, or background noise during my soundwalk was the incessant drilling of a construction worker on a manhole on 1st Avenue and 26th Street. As I left my dorm on 25th, I could hear the rhythmic drone and drill of metal on pavement. It started as a hum, escalated to a crunch and culminated in unbearable drilling noise, in which if I had tried to say something to the person next to me, he would have had to cringe to understand. An interesting thing about this drilling noise is that might have began as a typical cityscape keynote; a background noise to fill the space. Because sound waves attenuate, the noise was bearable from afar, yet upon approaching them they could no-longer stand as passive keynote.


SOUND SIGNALS: One sound signal or foreground sound intended to attract attention that I could not ignore on my soundwalk, was the loud Bollywood-inspired music that roared from a the Banana Leaf Restaurant on Lexington Avenue. The owner consciously played this music from the dining room in hopes of attracting customers with an appetite for naan and curry. The music first grabbed my attention as I turned the corner from 28th to Lexington. An allegro tabla line combined with the squeaky scales of the main female singer. Perhaps, because I could not understand the language, I could concentrate on the intricate rhythms and layers of the music. This music is meant to be inviting to customers, and it says, “We’re an Indian Restaurant, Exotic! With Music! Come EAT!”


SOUNDSCAPE: Because this neighborhood does not have a definite identity and is a cluster of medical and professional buildings- hospitals, clinics, dental schools, and Stuy-Town, it would be difficult to name a soundscape. But as a resident of the area, I could easily pinpoint the most recognizable sound for the neighborhood—the blaring ambulance horns. In fact during my 35 minute stroll, I heard a total of 4 individual ambulances blaring through 23rd Street, Up 1st Avenue or down Park Avenue. These sirens have the implication—of medical concern, haste and precedent over any other vehicle in its path. Yet because of the neighborhoods dynamic, it also means you are close to a hospital.

HN543

Walking into Hunter North 543, any Media 150 student may wonder how much media can they fit into one black box room? The answer, of course, is “a lot.” A huge filming screen, an audio room, Mac computers with interactive games, a big screen TV, and projections onto cloth canvases lined the walls of the Hunter’s Media Department’s Graduate Showcase. After an hour or so of perusing, a few pieces stuck out. The clever iAM by Megan Speary is a visual play on words, and commercialism. The repeating lists of “i + VERB,” conclude with the double-entendre “iAM a buy-product.” Just as thought provoking is the clever “Bare Market” coloring book collection, which allows visitors to color in the depictions of bailouts and white collar con-artists. Another interactive installment included a digital “slot machine” of commercial image. The visual bombardment exemplifies the tendency of the human mind to correlate unrelated images. Further down the line, a rather tasteless (in my opinion), computer program attacked the American disease of obesity. Unclear statistics coupled with a slide show of exploitive, and seemingly unoriginal, images taunted the issue, instead of comprehensively suggesting ways to improve the epidemic. While I found the majority of the pieces inspiring, one video-short captured my attention because of its ability to parallel visual and audio elements with the emotive aspects of the narrative.


“Wives of Spies (or where they found it),” by A.E. Souzis “explore(s) the physical and psychic collisions between global politics, surveillance, secrecy and public and private lives.” In the course of four and half minutes, the viewer experiences the lives of three women, as they narrate, in their native languages’ where they discovered that their husbands were double-agents. The piece begins with audio “bleeps” and a small blinking google map. The first wife names the a location of her discovery—“Arriba (upstairs).” More bleeping, blinking, zooming in and naming of domestic locations culminate into a chaotic aesthetic overload of nine google maps, radio transmissions, and three different languages. These artistic choices mirror the mounting drama of unraveling a secret. A “blinking” glimpse of data will confirm a “bleeping” suspicion until thousands of pieces of evidence berate the investigator/viewer’s mind. The installment ends with one of the wives cooly declaring, “locked in a box.” Just like a secret kept hidden from your spouse, the video medium is locked in a box—a television screen in Hunter North 543. I found it astounding that the artist’s concrete and technical choices mirrored the human experience behind the piece’s narrative.