1: Thursday, February 14, 2013, 6:14 pm, Hofstra Student Center
2: Identify and list the sounds farthest away from you.
The sound of over a hundred voices bounces around the high-ceilinged, hard-surfaced space, making any sound beyond the room in which I sit completely inaudible over the din. At its farthest, the sound of voices constitutes more a continuous, singular noise than a collective of individual voices – a humming, steady roar.
3: Identify and list the sounds at a medium range from you.
At my table, several people eat their food in solitude, sitting rather close to me on all sides because of the way the seats are configured around the table. The sound of plastic forks and knives scratching against the cardboard of their to-go boxes makes a cacophony of irksome scratching noises. One girl sits close enough to me that I can hear the wet, tearing sound that her soda makes when she sucks it violently through her gnawed, spit-covered straw, as well as the smacking of her lips as she eats her pasta. Without such proximity, I would not be able to hear anything from my fellow diners. After all, I can hear very few individual noises from the next table over, due to the general noise level in the dining area.
4: Identify and list the sounds closest to you (– you can include internal sounds if noticed or relevant).
On my laptop, I am live-streaming the audio from a show in Boston’s Café 939, via Birncore.com. I can hear the noises in this venue in Boston: I can hear glasses clinking, peals of giddy laughter, and the three male musicians tuning their guitars and making Valentine’s-related jokes to their largely female and thusly doting audience. With no visual knowledge of the inside of the space, it’s a strange experience to be able to hear so vividly so finite moment and so intimate an environment, as it exists miles away from and yet simultaneous to all the hubbub in the student center. Such an overlap is the closest thing one can get to a concrete experience of the multiverse.
5: Describe the general sound level and amount of sound activity.
Many individual sounds can be heard, but the general racket begins to sound very monotonous the more I sit in it. Again, the overall noises level is quite high.
6: Assign a one-word description to the “sound environment”.
“Rambunctious”
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.
The audio livestream is interesting, but not necessarily integral to the essence of the space at large. Much more important is the incessant, buzzy sound of dozens of conversations at once, juxtaposed with the individual sounds of people scraping up their food, as well as the slurping sounds of the girl eating nearest to me.
