1.Thursday 1/30/14 6:45pm. 614B Portsmouth House, Colonial Square.
2. Boys playing soccer in the hallway.
Cars on the street behind C-Square.
3. Suitemate humming as she gets ready to go out.
Shower head running.
Lana Del Rey playing somewhere next door.
4. Heater blowing out air.
5. Generally calm, save for soccer balls slamming into the walls that are jarring and alarming.
6. Dense
7. Soccer ball hitting the wall outside
Humming
Lana playing in background.
1: Wednesday, February 27, 2013, 3:14 am, Alliance Hall, 7th Floor Bathroom
2: Identify and list the sounds farthest away from you.
Inside the shower, water falls steadily in thin, high-pressure streams onto an assemblage of plastic, toiletry bottles, of which the varying degrees of emptiness create an array of tonalities. The water also drums on the edge of a plastic shower curtain, creating the full, soft sound of rain on wide-leafed flora – the sort of sound one hears on a recording of a lush rainforest, meant to work as a relaxation/sleep aid.
3: Identify and list the sounds at a medium range from you.
A girl sits in a stall on the other side of the bathroom, talking on the phone in a low yet urgent voice. Each syllable, no matter how hushed, ricochets off the smooth, Formica countertops and the hundreds of small tiles, echoing onto the start of the next syllable and garbling her words so that only the vague sounds of pleading and apologizing can be discerned. The conversation has the intimate, shameful tone of a confession to a romantic partner, and she seems to have sought relative privacy in the bathroom at 3:00 am, presumably to not disturb her sleeping roommate. The sound of me showering has made her self-conscious, and she murmurs sheepishly for the better part of my shower.
4: Identify and list the sounds closest to you (– you can include internal sounds if noticed or relevant).
Outside the bathroom, a resident can be heard strumming his guitar inside his single room. However robust the sound may be within the room itself, when emanating through the wood of the bathroom door and the curtain of water, the notes sound eerie and thin. Compounding this effect is the slow, lilting pace at which the player strums as he tries to find his way through the ill-remembered chords.
5: Describe the general sound level and amount of sound activity.
The sound level is somewhat low, in keeping with the time of night and the solitary nature of the various, simultaneous activities, from my ablutions to the girl’s chagrinned confessions to the boy’s meandering guitar practice.
6: Assign a one-word description to the “sound environment”.
“Intimate”
7: Select and list 3 sounds that are essential to the sound environment. Note: you need to try and figure out what sounds make up this environment and which of those sounds need to be there for the feeling of the environment to stay intact.
All three levels of sound work well together, however disparate the individual sounds may seem in character. Each is the product of a private activity, carried out alone in the latest hours of the night, and thus creates a sound suiting one such mood. As a result, the tone of each sound fits nicely within the theme of the collective.
Identify the location of the clip – I got a lifeproof case for Christmas for my Iphone. A lifeproof case is completely waterproof and so I decided to do something entirely new and different. This field recording is taken from inside my shower stall with my phone placed on the soap holder.
Identify the sounds heard in the clip – The first sound that you can hear is the background noise of the water hitting the bottom of the shower floor and then the ting of me setting my phone down on the soap holder. You can then proceed to hear me rinse my hair and the surges of water drop and hit the shower floor. As the recording continues you can hear me fill my hands with water and then drop it to the floor. At the end the water is shut off and you can only hear it drip off of my body adn then the shower curtain opened. The final noise is me grabbing my towel and drying off which is a lower “boomy” noise. Overall the sound is very tinny and echoey because I am in the shower stall and the tiles of the walls reflect the high frequency of the sound waves as the water hits the ground.
1- 2/12/13, My dorm room shower, 10:30 P.M. After State of the Union Address
2- TV News Station talking about State of the Union speech, Roommates talking about the speech
3- Smooth Jazz pandora radio station being played from an ipod in the bathroom, water running through pipes in the walls
4- Water splashing against shower walls, water rushing through shower head
5- Dull and muffled outside the bathroom, the bathroom gave the sounds within an echoing effect. If I focused on the sound of the water in the shower I couldn’t hear anything else, but if I focused on sounds other than the water I still heard the water of the shower just as easily.
6- Resonant. The news and my roommates were reflecting on the speech that happened prior, resonating in a figurative sense, and the sounds in the bathroom resonated, literally, withing the bathroom itself.
7- Water from the showerhead, the News, sound of splashing water
