Imagine(it seems like everyone has that experience) you are walking on a busy street along with stores, compounds, and urban landscapes, what kind of sound will you notice?
For me, the sounds on the street appear like a comic strip, though always mixed together, they have a unique “linear order” as we walk through.
Click HERE to listen to my soundscape
In this project, I tried to combine several separate sets of experiences together to create an artificial soundscape with a unity of complex feelings.
The inspirations are from three kinds of real-life scenes: busy streets, parks(natural sceneries inside of the city), and floating water.
The reason for this choice is that the three topics have some inner connections to my personal experience and memories. My favorite thing to do in my free time in the city is to wander the streets of downtown, to feel the “hustle and bustle” of the modern city, to meet and collide with the natural landscape, from a tree standing still along a busy road to a lake sleeping in the middle of a jungle of skyscrapers.
I collected some typical representations of each scene, like the sound of busy downtown traffic on the street, the twittering in Fuxing park for scenery, and the sound of running water for the floating waves. I added clips of the noisy crowds, indicating walking into a crowded spot on the street. And the sound of an old bicycle, which I encountered from time to time in some old blocks in Shanghai, the sound of metal friction somehow enriched the whole soundscape. The water flow runs through the whole soundscape as a background. For me, the sound of flowing water is calming and refreshing, reminding me of fluidity and freshness.
The experience that I want to show through the soundscape was to some extent flat and normal, but that is what those memories exactly are, as plain and vivid as a slowly flowing river.