Sounds of a City – Hearing Landscapes
Location, I have realised, becomes an entirely different concept when you are searching for sound.
This week we were directed out of the classroom and into the world to collect and edit together a one minute piece focusing on ‘attention’. Because of this, we weren’t half an hour in before I found myself in the foodcourt at QV, awkwardly cradling a mic and the absurdly long headphone cord, trying to ignore the Sumo Salad’s server staring at me with a perplexed look on her face.
Seeking out images is something I am very much accustomed to. Before making films I took photos and so my relationship with landscapes has really developed into one that intrinsically evaluates how visuals convey emotions and context. I am not so used to, however, how to engage with soundscapes. What locations deliver emotional queues, how to texturally convey a landscape: these were all things that I was contemplating for the first time as Tessa and I walked side by side through QV, seeking out sounds that resonated with the theme of ‘attention’.
Early on both of us decided that we would do a more abstract expression of how technology has altered our ability to be attentive, by experimenting with the intensity and changing nature of the soundscape we created. We wanted to overlay sounds to give the audience an inability to pay attention to any one sound; making them lost within the soundscape, unable to find their footing. Knowing this, we were faced with recording space. We needed to set a background scene that slowly grew more hectic, alongside much closer sounds like text-tones, conversations, and typing noises. The background sounds would serve to make the physical scene feel more and more claustrophobic, whilst the soundbites and conversations would serve to keep the listeners attention constantly flitting between different pieces of content.
Thinking of recording in this way made exploring spaces that I have been occupying for years incredibly interesting as I was seeing, or should I say hearing, them in a completely different light. Hearing space is a strange concept, even stranger when you try to seek it out, as our memories of spaces naturally (in most cases) revert to what they look like, rather than what they sound like. Exploring space made me engage with environments in a frameless way; I was not honing in on a space to fit within a screen, rather I was engaging with the space as a whole. This causes one to think about size and density, how sound is being tunnelled through a certain area and what emotions that sound incites. It is not simply a factor of what sounds are there but where they are, both in relation to the microphone, and in relation to each other. Just as objects do in physical landscapes, sounds interact with each other. That is how scenes are created. This was a really enchanting concept for me because I never really conceptualised background sound like that; as hundred, even thousands of sounds erupting at once to create what we recognise as a single landscape.
As someone who had already used Audition before (although only in correlation with video productions) I knew that my main aim in editing would be to phase the audio in and out; layering it enough that it became incomprehensible. Making it so that no aspect could be grasped as the focus of the piece. The background would need to be layered in equal portion to the soundbites and that layering would need to overwhelm the soundscape, speeding up the pace to give a sense of urgency. This speed would naturally happen with multiple sounds competing for focus, but they would need to be phased in so that the acceleration was smooth rather than sudden, as to not break the authenticity of the environment.
Whilst editing this together I reflected less on how I was creating a soundscape in the activity we were given, and more on recording sounds and how audio environments differed from physical ones in the way we recognise and engage with them. What created a soundscape and how that conveyed narrative and emotion was a really interesting notion to explore as I walked around the city. I found it offered me things, creatively, I had never been able to notice before, exploring the city through a lens.
