As I walk to class, I often opt not to look at my phone, but
instead take in the beautiful campus around me. I just noticed, last Thursday,
birds – chirping quite loudly, chasing each other around in circles above my
head as I walked past in the morning. No one around me noticed. As I walked
back the same way to my second class, a little later in the day, I looked up
after hearing the chirping, and there flew the same three or four birds, chasing
each other in the sky above. And once again, the people walking by only saw and
heard what was on the tiny screen in front of them. I didn’t know there was a
name for this. A name for the sounds that nature itself provides. It’s funny
how things work out that way.
Now, as I
type away, I hear the roaring of the A.C. on this hot spring day, this noise in
particular overpowers all others… but occasionally, I hear the sporadic yells
of children outside as they play – happy to not have school. When I’m lying
down in bed at night, I often hear the sounds of I-40 close-by. The occasional
angry hum of a semi-truck beginning to run off the road & as he/she does
so, runs along those ridges lined up off the side of the highway to wake people
up when they’ve dozed off…I often hear other rumbles of traffic. But on my walk
to class at UNCW, that’s where I hear the best “Soundscape Art”…the campus
itself seems so quiet to me, so serene. Besides the birds I mentioned before, I
often hear the sound of the leaves swaying as the wind hits them, the minor thunder
of a skateboard rolling over a bridge. Next time I’m on campus, however, I’ll
be certain to take note of every noise I hear…as I’m becoming more & more
interested in it all.
I was most
especially interested in the article that spoke about people in Japan voting on
a sound they liked most in nature. They decided on the sound of a "wave hitting
a particular shell of a particular creature on a particular beach" of Japan
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