When we were first assigned this project, I started to hear the sounds of my everyday life differently. I began to notice the sounds that reoccured throughout my day. The ten sounds that I chose to include in this project are the ones that I found occurred the most, and have become the soundtrack of my daily life here at UVM. I chose to not have all my sounds be one minute long because I wanted them to be as authentic and representative of my real life as possible.

The second sound in my podcast is the sound of me getting out of bed. As you have heard, my bed creaks like an old basement door. When getting into or out of bed, or even when sitting on it, every spring can be felt, and definitely heard. The vibrations of each spring’s creak ripples through the cotton-polyester blend and into the body of whoever has sat down. I felt that this was a good demonstration of the vibrations that make up sounds, as we read about in Hearing Vibrations. Instead of just hearing the vibrations like we do with the majority of sounds we hear, when it comes to my bed, you can feel the vibrations that make up the sounds as well, proving, and reminding who ever sits on it, that sound is in fact vibration, which was the main point that Shelley Trower was trying to get across.

The seventh sound in my podcast is the sound of the fan that sits next to my desk. When I recorded that sound, I was doing homework with the window open, and although you cannot hear it in the recording, I could hear the sounds of people walking through the pebbles outside of Harris-Millis. I hit record in the hopes that my phone would be able to pick up those sounds, as well as those of people walking up and down the stairs outside of my dorm, and people talking outside my window. To my ears, those sounds were just as loud, if not louder, than the sound of the fan that is so prominent in the recording. I chose to keep this recording and include it in this project because it shows the difference between what human ears can pick up and what technology can, as was discussed in The Sounds Around Us: An Introduction to Field Recording. This example also connects to Hudspeth’s The Energetic Ear, because my ear was able to pick up and focus on the sound of people’s footsteps outside, even though they were seventy-five feet away, and the sound of people walking up and down the stairs even though there was a thick door between us. Even though the sound of the fan is what is predominant in the recording, that was more of a background noise to my ear, allowing my brain to unconsciously focus on the new sounds that were being produced around me.

This project made me slow down in my busy every day life and listen more closely to the sounds happening all around me. I noticed small things such as people talking behind me in class, or the sound of longboards going over the cracks in the sidewalk as I’m walking to class that I would’ve disregarded previous to this class and this project. I also contemplated sounds’ deeper meaning, with Hillel Schwartz’s quote, “Noise may be unwanted or incomprehensible sound; it is never insignificant sound,” in the back of my mind. In the past month, these ten sounds have become most familiar to me, and in hindsight, have been essential to me adjusting to my new life away from home, here at UVM.

Citations:

Trower, S. (2012). Introduction: Hearing Vibrations. In Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (pp. 1-12). New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group.

Schwartz, H. (2011). BANG (a beginning). In Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (pp. 17-35). Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Hudspeth, A. (2015). The Energetic Ear. 42-51.

English, L. (2015, February 8). The sounds around us: An introduction to field recording. Retrieved September 24, 2015.