My Sound Walk

I attempted my sound walk on Halloween. The reasoning behind this was to compare the sounds of my neighborhood in the afternoon to the wild chaotic sounds of Halloween night. To do the comparison, I took advantage of the fact that I had to work from 12pm-7pm and during this shift I would have to walk around nine city blocks to and from work. This was due to me having to pick up a client's at her house and bring him back to my job (dog daycare).

On my way to my client's house I could hear the wind brushing against all the trees and brushes around me. Accompanying the wind was the sound of idle car engines as the drivers were waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. An interesting thing I noticed was that as certain streets got narrower (which is common in Harlem), the easier it was to hear bits of conversations from strangers whether it be from their phones or their friends/family. Along my afternoon walk, I came across a brownstone building that was preparing for Halloween night by testing out their speaker system and blasting classic horror music. One song caught my attention, the theme to John Carpenter's Halloween. It felt weird hearing that horror theme playing in broad daylight.  The theme only invoked the imagery of the pumpkin in the opening credits to the Halloween franchise, not the masked killer Michael Myers. I did not feel that sense of dread one would feel while listening to that song. That gave me a real lesson about how not only does audio invoke emotion, but the atmosphere around you can also have a great effect.

At around 6pm I went back outside and Halloween had officially started. The most noticeable thing, audio-wise was all the laughing and screaming from nearby children. The wind was picking up speed and kids started to yell at each other across the street from one another about how scary one particular building was or how much candy they received from said house. Off in the distance I could hear Michael Jackson's "Thriller" playing faintly. Once again I heard more classic Halloween songs playing from multiple houses as children walked inside. Just hearing the music and the children having fun brought me back to the time when I used to go trick-or-treating with my parents. I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise, especially comparing the calm relaxing sounds of the afternoon to the chaotic sounds of Halloween night.