Response: Sound Map of the Hudson River - Annea Lockwood

TCS121: Intro to Sonic Arts

October 4, 2015

Blog 2

While listening to Annea Lockwood's Sound Map of the Hudson River, I was brought back to my summer adventures with one of my best friends. 

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I used my laptop to listen to this piece while I was in my bedroom. Besides listening, I was going back and forth between my room and the bathroom brushing my teeth for the first part of the sound map. Later on I was organizing myself and preparing for the week ahead by writing in my planner. In between all that, I was on social media on my phone and my laptop. Throughout the whole piece I did not stop the recording or stop listening because I wanted to hear it flow as it should be as one continuous piece. Because I was doing other things during most of the recording, my concentration was not solely focused on the piece, except for a few minutes at the end when I was just sitting and listening, trying to pick out the different elements that composed this sound map. 

While listening, I did feel a sense of nostalgia for the summer, especially for one memory when one of my best friends and I went to Garden of Eden in Santa Cruz to explore the hidden watering hole. The sounds of the water rushing in the soundmap instantly brought me back to this moment in time, which was a happy memory for me. I was able to feel the same sense of freedom, openness, and felt once again one with nature like I did back during the summer. 

This sound map is different from the ones we looked at online on Thursday because this does not have any voice over and it does not emphasize certain sounds within that space or seem like it is traveling through a space, like the audio walk example we heard. This sound map is different from that because it sounds as if the recorder was stationary, and recorded from the same fixed location near a river amongst nature and wild animals. 

It might be related to what we heard in class last Thursday to the sound map of the world. Those recordings were all snippets of soundscapes from a fixed point in that country's specific city. They did not attempt to make the listener interpret the sound differently or try to create a certain sensation or emotion. It was objectively there for listeners to hear what it sounds like in that particular region.