Drift 1 Assessment

While I was out on Drift 1, I got a little bothered when I couldn’t seem to find any noises other than car noises. I felt like everywhere I went, there was a car in the background of my recording. However, as my soundwalk brought me into neighborhoods and away from major streets, I realized that this was not worth being bothered by, because I ended up recording many sounds that did not have cars in the background. Another thing that kind of stressed me out during Drift 1 was once when I ended up in a neighborhood (on the other side of Oakland) that I didn’t know anything about, and everything was really eerily quiet. I got a little scared, so I purposefully had to turn around and go back towards Oakland.

I felt more emotions than simply bothered or stressed during Drift 1; I also felt at peace and contemplative at times. As I walked through the park in Shorewood, the sounds of nature caused me to think a lot about how people rarely stop to just listen to what is around them. This contemplative mood was good, and heightened my awareness to soft noises or potential noises, like the wings of birds, for instance. Another time I felt really at peace was when I turned off of Maryland Ave (at the beginning of my soundwalk) and entered into the neighborhoods there. The noises of cars died down rather abruptly, and I felt really at ease at how my project would turn out.

One thing that really surprised me while I was on my soundwalk for Drift 1 was when I was on Cramer Street, and all of a sudden my microphones started picking up a noise. I couldn’t tell where the noise was from, and I was pleasantly surprised by this! I stood still for a few minutes and just listened into my headphones to try to decipher what the noise was. It turned out it was the bobcat that I ended up recording a few seconds later! Another time I was surprised during Drift 1 was after I recorded myself stepping on fallen crabapples. I thought this noise would be really neat, but when I listened to it, I was surprised to find that it was actually pretty boring! On the other hand, a noise I thought would be really boring—when I patted on the yellow bouquet of flowers outside of Sendik’s grocery store—turned out to be a pretty interesting noise! This surprised me, and taught me that sometimes, subtle noises are more interesting than quick and kind of “loud” noises.

My absolute favorite experience from Drift 1 was definitely in the park when I recorded the birds flying out of the big bush. I wasn’t sure if the microphones would pick up their wings, although this was my hope. Even with my headphones on, I couldn’t really tell if the wings were recorded, so it was a wonderful realization when I listened to it on my computer and found out that I could hear the wings really well… and that they sounded really good, too! This made me feel really proud of my homemade microphones and of the sound that I had found while on my soundwalk. This experience affected me because through it, I learned that many of the best sounds I’ll pick up are soft, and I learned that my microphones do an awesome job picking up these soft noises.