Soundscapes on the Wesleyan Campus

Seeing as this is my first formal post outside of reading responses, I figured I should give a quick rundown of what’s going on for anyone who might have stumbled upon this site. This blog is a graded part of a World Music course that I’m taking at Wesleyan University, but anyone is free to check it out. For this assignment I went to two separate locations on the Wesleyan campus for 20-30 minutes and listened intently to their “soundscapes." R. Murray Schafer, a prominent voice on the subject of sound, describes a soundscape as "consist[ing] of events heard not objects seen” (Schafer 8). Essentially, a soundscape is a landscape for the ears. Schafer also notes that it’s nearly impossible to accurately record a soundscape, but I wrote down what I heard as best as I could and this blog post will be dedicated to describing my sonic experiences in these two areas.

For my first soundscape, I sat on a bench on the lawn in front of Olin Library. The following description should help even those unfamiliar with the campus understand the area I chose well enough to follow along. Both the library and the sidewalk leading up to its stairs were positioned behind my spot on the bench. A fairly busy street stood a little over 50 feet in front of me. There was a tree directly to my left that’s branches crept out so that they were partially over my head and there were sidewalks fairly close by to my right and left. I chose to start my soundscape at 10:26 pm on a Friday in the hopes that there would be fewer people out and about to interfere with the sonic environment. I set my timer for thirty minutes and started to open my ears.

Almost immediately after I started recording in my notebook, two planes passed by overhead, one after another. As soon as the drone of the first one faded into the distance, the second plane took its spot. The planes’ faint roars were not loud enough to overshadow the crickets, who consistently chirped throughout the half hour. Each chirp had a tone, and I came to notice that whenever I started to focus on the crickets I would unconsciously give them a key based on the harmonies I heard between the bugs. I have no way of telling if the key changed every time I shifted focus back onto them or if it stayed the same, but my theory is that it changed based on which tones were most prominent to me around the time I started paying attention to them. For a long time the crickets disguised the faint, constant hum produced by a building across the street, but eventually I picked up on it and was able to discern it from the chirping of the crickets for the rest of my time there.

Shortly after the planes, a person walked across the lawn in front of me. His footfalls on the grass were distinctly different from those of the people that had been walking on the sidewalks nearby. There wasn’t a hard surface for his shoes to scrape against, so the scuffing sound people make when stepping on cement was noticeably absent. I could also hear a plastic bag he was holding crinkling in time with his steps. The most surprising sound of the night occurred about halfway through my time there. My focus was on the crickets, when suddenly a leaf fell from the tree above and brushed my paper before falling to the ground. Almost all of the sounds I heard grew and faded slowly or stayed fairly constant so I wasn’t expecting to hear something so close to me.

There were several sounds that I heard frequently enough that I was able to recognize them and what they meant. For example, people walked up and down the steps to the library fairly often, so I came to recognize the sounds of footsteps on the stairs (which were slightly louder than those on the sidewalk) and the creak of the door followed by the light taps when it bounced back into the place. The cars on the street in front of me all made slightly different sounds depending on their weight and other elements (one truck sounded like there were chains clinking together, another throbbed to the beat of an unidentifiable song), but they all made similar revving sounds when they were accelerating. I heard a slight bump from all the cars I paid attention to that came from my left, likely from some protrusion in the road.

My efforts to go a little later in the evening proved fruitless as I didn’t account for how many people would be out and about on a Friday night. The soundscape was punctuated by loud groups of people walking by and whooping in the distance on a regular basis. On one occasion I heard a girl’s voice chanting “fight, fight, fight, fight” in the distance, followed by a playful, high pitched laugh from someone else. These sounds didn’t necessarily detract from the experience, but it made the experience different from what I was expecting.

For my second soundscape I tried to actively seek out a different environment. I wanted to find a more isolated location that wasn’t next to a busy street. I ended up choosing a courtyard bench in the Center for Performing Arts (CFA). I decided to start this session a little earlier at 7:02 pm to cut back on the cricket sounds, since I felt like I’d given them enough attention the first night. I only ended up going for 21 minutes this time around because there were less noises in the area in general.

Buildings surrounded the grassy area on most sides and my bench was slightly in front of a tree. There was also a sidewalk to my right which I soon discovered was far less frequented by passerby than the one by the library.

As it turned out, I didn’t start early enough to miss all of the crickets, but their chirps were very quiet in this area. Different continuous sounds took their spot though. One of the buildings emitted a humming sound similar to the one I heard from the building across the street near Olin Library. There was also a curious electric buzzing sound that I couldn’t identify, but it didn’t seem like it came from a building. Finally, while I wasn’t close to a street, I could hear the sounds of traffic behind me in the direction of Middletown. The sound level ebbed and flowed so that in a strange way it sounded like a wave.

When I put my phone timer back in my pocket, it bumps into my keys and I hear them jangle a little bit. A little later, two different sirens start to go off. I think they might have been for a police car and an ambulance. Although the two noises started in different places, they both seemed to end up travelling the same direction.  Shortly after I heard a “fshhh” sound that appeared to be near one of the buildings I was facing.

Unfortunately, I ended up picking an area with an inordinate amount of bugs. They didn’t end up contributing much to the acoustic environment, but my reactions to them did while also partially distracting me. Whenever I shifted to get a bug off of me, the bench would creak (which didn’t happen at the bench near Olin Library) and I’d hear the pages in my notebook brush against each other.

As I mentioned, this courtyard had far less foot traffic than the library, even though it was earlier in the afternoon. I still heard the occasional footsteps coming from the sidewalk to my right, but the people were almost always walking alone. Twice I heard bikes go down the path, which is something the library never got once in the half hour period. One of the bikes sounded like it was clicking a little bit as it went while with the other one I could only hear the wheels turning.

Thank you all for reading! Although I did this for an assignment, I would highly encourage trying a similar exercise where you focus the majority of your attention on sound if you have any free time. For more information, look up articles on soundwalks online. Soundwalks are a good way to focus on the aural environment while moving through a space. I’ll be posting some summaries of the readings I’m doing in class but my next ”real” blog post will be in about a month, so I’ll see you then!

Works Cited:

Schafer, R. Murray. “Introduction.” The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994. [Reprint Excerpt from 1977 The Tuning of the World]