When approaching my soundscape, I wanted to convey a space that is meaningful to me, and so I decided on a campsite loosely set in the blue ridge mountains. Having grown up in Asheville and reaching a time in my life when I will be saying goodbye to it in a more semi-permanent way, the mountains are something I have thought about a lot recently. As a group of good friends and I have been planning our camping trip over spring break, I thought a campsite in the mountains was a very fitting choice of soundscape for me at the moment.
Focusing in on the sounds that surround and penetrate a space is a fairly untouched territory for me. Much like most people, and in some ways even more so, I am highly reliant on and often consumed with my visual field. Sounds typically fall into one of three categories in my mind: music, voices, and utilitarian. Music is a substantial part of my life. My father is a music producer, and has always immersed my siblings and me in good music and knowledge about the world of music. With music (at least that on my iPod), as Michael Bull suggested, I am choosing an aspect of my atmosphere, juxtaposing it against my visual and physical world. I am able to do this because sound, in a sense, is an optional part of functionality in our daily lives. For able-bodied persons, we cannot really choose to do without our eyes actively involved in our goals as we go about our lives, though sometimes we give it our very best when checking a text while walking. Our ears, on the other hand, have some flexibility. While sounds may be helpful cues, we can afford to drown them out with music and create our own space within our auditory sphere. Of course, this does not always hold up, as voices play an extremely important role in our functionality as humans.
It is the sounds I describe as ‘utilitarian’ that are, to some extent, optional. Utilitarian may be a narrow word to describe them, but I merely mean to say they are related to the operational quality of things as opposed to an intentional aesthetic quality. For me, these sounds go unappreciated the majority of the time. Unappreciated in the sense that I don’t truly listen to them, they are simply a constant part of my environment. When reading Karin Bijsterveld’s article on industrial noise, I was at first surprised by the workers’ discomfort with the lack of sound, but upon thinking about it, I became uneasy when I thought of sound being stripped away from my functional environment. These sounds that I have typically ignored have a profound effect on how well I function as a human, but also, as Bijsterveld suggests, may have an aesthetic value in my interactions with the surrounding world.
This longwinded introduction was my mindset as I sat down to search for sound clippings to use in my soundscape. When thinking of the fundamental sounds of a campsite, I found that two things automatically came to mind: fire and insects. These are two sounds that represent the continuous background of camping at night. They gradually become a static default, almost like when you re-calibrate a scale to zero after putting something on it. I then tried to think of sounds that conveyed humans interacting with the space. The sounds of tent fabric and zippers popped in my head as something that is highly recognizable. At times I found that the impact of sounds I included unintentionally suggested something about the space. For instance, I included the sound of leaves crunching and a branch snapping without thinking about it much, but then I realized this conveys a campsite likely in late fall or early winter when the leaves and branches are dried up and on the ground. I then took note of the fact that I had been visualizing the woods in the fall with leaves changing color despite the fact that I had my spring camping trip in mind. Even in a space that has certain sounds associated with it, I found telling variation of possibilities.
The Second Fig 