SOUND RECORDING

As a project of the class Writing Across Media we had to record sounds in the city Champaign. This weekend I was very busy, but I found the time to walk around. The experience of recording sounds was really interesting. I found it fun, because I had to walk a lot and saw places I didn’t see before. When I got to the interesting places and heard interesting sounds, it was a challenge to get the same experience of sound by listening to the recording from my phone. That was why I made several recordings at each place and took the one that felt the most realistic for me. It was a challenge for me to try to find different kinds of sounds in Champaign. If you are thinking about random things while you are walking, the sounds can feel the same. I had to focus on the sounds in my surroundings to actually hear the different kinds of sounds at different places.

Another experience while recording sounds was that sometimes an interesting sound was just for a fraction of time and was not recordable for that reason. This is relatable with the article of Quiet American that said: ‘Most good recordings are a result of hard work or good luck, not having just the right piece of equipment’. The thing about this project that I liked the most is that it made me aware of the sounds in my surroundings.

Some things were interesting or frustrating while recording sounds. A frustrating part was that you can’t actually record everything the exact way you hear it. As I said before, I was trying to have the same feeling by the recording as by actually standing there. This was in reality a hard thing to accomplish. Besides this frustrating part I had a lot of fun while doing the recordings and a few interesting things came forward. I found it interesting that you hear sounds in the memo (after listening to it for a few times) that you didn’t hear at the actual place. Because of the recording, it was possible to focus on different sounds each time you listen to the memo. So you can have different experiences with the same memo. Another interesting thing about the project is that I had the experience of a soundwalk after a lot of walking and recording. A soundwalk is as Westerkamp says: ‘Simply put, a soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment’. It is extremely interesting how you can be aware of the sounds in your environment and that the focus on different sounds will lead to different experiences.

I also learned new things about Champaign-Urbana through the process of recording. I noticed that there are different places with different sounds. If you walk in the city you don’t really hear the different experiences of sounds, because it feels like a smooth transition when you walk to different places. When I listened to the recordings, in the end I finally realized that there are different sounds everywhere! Also was it interesting that it challenged me to go places I have never been in Champaign.