blogs tagged "listening"

This year, World Listening Day was on Saturday, July 18th, 2020. The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and civil unrest (caused by social injustice) have dramatically altered the world. I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate the soundwalk I did last year in hopes of making a recording that could demonstrate a sonic contrast.

In order to be more faithful to the previous recording, I took the liberty of doing the soundwalk on Friday, one day before the actual official World Listening Day. I met up with my colleague Wes downtown at noon, and we wore masks and stayed outdoors and socially distant. There were a few surprises along the way.

20200717_world_listening_day_pdx_1024

First, the wind was considerably stronger than prior years. I decided to try the windscreens that came with my in-ear binaural microphones, but I wasn't sure how they might be impacting the recording volume (plus, it was just really quiet downtown). Once we were walking for a few minutes, the wind really wasn't that bad and I'm not entirely sure how necessary the windscreens were (although they probably helped). The recording did end up being quite quiet, so I applied a constant 15dB amplification, which I think sounds pretty good but maybe calls up the background hiss/noise floor a bit more than I'd have preferred.

Second, the route I chose last year winds along the Willamette river via a stretch of private greenway (shared use path). Sadly, this year the path was closed due to construction in parts and covid-19 concerns. We ended up with more sidewalk time than I had hoped, which probably makes contrasting with the prior year more difficult. The upside, however, is that we got to find and explore some interesting new spaces, like a parking lot under the Broadway bridge. Ultimately, this detour caused us to be out recording longer, and we captured closer to an hour (compared to 50 minutes last year)

During our walk, I found it harder than usual to concentrate on my intentional listening. The sights and sounds of the city seemed more alien than they normally would, and so my mind was easily distracted and my focus drifted. While this is normal for me (and probably for most) during soundwalks, I found the sense of distraction elevated from previous times (especially visual distraction). Every new bit of graffiti seen brought me back to thinking about our current crises. I tried a new technique of purposefully "softening my gaze", and I think it helped fair amount. Before today, I genuinely didn't know that this was an actual thing, let alone that it's leveraged in Buddhism, anxiety therapy, and yoga (drishti...which I have unknowingly used both in eagle pose and while track-standing on a bicycle).

This is a binaural recording, so good stereo headphones work best. Click here to visit the archive.org page for this recording or just listen to it here:

See you next year for WLD.

Background: 5 years ago I decided to guide a soundwalk for World Listening Day.

5 years later, I decided to do it again.

My employer is awesome. We are encouraged as part of our happy employment and ongoing professional development to engage in "thrive time" -- essentially expansive work that may not be directly related to daily business deliverables, but work that makes us better, stronger, healthier, and happier. I offered this sound walk.

Here is the recording I made on World Listening Day in 2019 in Portland, OR. It's a binaural recording, so listening on headphones with little/no background sound works best.

Click the link above or listen to it here:

See you next year for WLD.

Archaeoacoustic analysis in Eastern Serbia

Tue Apr 07 2015 22:49:41 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

tags: acoustics sound listening

Super interesting read about some archaeoacoustic research in Serbia:

http://www.sbresearchgroup.eu/index.php/en/notizie-in-inglese/205-archaeoacoustic-analysis-in-the-imperial-palace-felix-romuliana-in-eastern-serbia

(via mediateletipos)

There's only a single sound clip available right now, but the effect is pretty mesmerizing.  It's wild to imagine ancient people performing sacrificial blood rituals while bathed in this soundscape.

A Short History of Acoustic Ecology

Sat Jan 03 2015 12:54:22 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

tags: sound audio sound-art listening

This is great.  If you're interested in active listening, field recordings, soundscapes, or amibent sound/music, this is a pretty good primer and talks about the origins of the term "acoustic ecology" as a movement.

World Listening Day 2014

Sat Jul 19 2014 21:12:20 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

tags: sound audio listening worldlisteningday fieldrecording recording

In observance of World Listening Day 2014 (July 18th), I guided a lunchtime soundwalk around parts of downtown Portland, OR.  I decided to organize only at the last minute, and there were 5 of us who showed up for the nearly hour long sound walk.

We started with short discussion about active listening and purposeful sound observation and some of the philosophy/ideas behind it.  We walked and listened for about 20 minutes, then had a short chat about what we had noticed so far and what we thought was interesting in the act of observing.  We continued on for another 35 minutes or so and completed a wide loop. The small group of participants seemed to have a really good time (and it turned out to be some decent exercise too).

I recorded the walk on my binaural in-ear microphones with a Zoom H2.  The raw recording is available on archive.org:  Portland, OR World Listening Day Soundwalk.

Embedded here:

See you next year for World Listening Day!