MEDP 160: What I hear

Main Street in Flushing, Queens. Photo: Will Steacy
Photo from http://www.nycgo.com/slideshows/must-see-flushing

This exercise has two parts. First part is spending an hour doing a “soundwalk” which was invented by R. Murray Shafer. Soundwalk is a kind of walking meditation to increase sonic awareness. While doing a sound walk doing anything but walking and listening is not allowed. Second part is blogging about the experience.

I walked around the subway station in Main Street, Flushing, Queens between 4:30 to 5:30pm. The area is like a little China Town and it is a very busy area so it has lots of popular brand stores and lots of Chinese stores at the same time. In addition, there is a High School nearby and it was time for the students to leave the school.

When I started doing a “soundwalk” I could hear all the sounds mixed together in low base. Buzzing sound from the traffic and chattering sound from the people on the streets. Since all the sounds were loud, all the sounds were blended and sounded like droning. After a while I was able to start recognizing the sound separately. From the traffic, I could hear drone sounds from buses constantly near to far away. I could keep hearing the subway noise under the ground because one of the three trains departs or arrives in the station all the time. The background sound in Main Street is the screeching noise of the trains and buses.

I hear cars beeping sounds with high pitch and airplane noise once in a while. Sometimes I hear loud giggling sounds from teenagers who just came out of school and door slams from stores. Those sounds caught my attention so I will call them foreground sounds or sound signals.

Definitely the soundmark in this area is the Chinese language spoken everywhere. It was more common to hear Chinese than English or other languages in Main Street.

It was an interesting experience. When I tried to recognize the sounds separately, I was able to do it. However, whenever I was distracted all the sound combined together. The sounds would pile up on top of each other because they were all occurring simultaneously; it was so hard to focus for one hour on one sound so I kept finding myself just hearing instead of listening. The varying sounds would sometimes cancel each other out in my head and my focus would at times move to my eyes. I have never noticed all the sounds I might have overlooked (overheard) prior to this exrcise.