Bob Baker Fish goes soundwalking
We're standing in front of Petersham RSL at Newtown. It is 1am on a balmy Friday morning in summer. All the performances at the Now Now Festival have finished for the night but a group of about eight of us assemble on the footpath and wait.
`When was the last time you went somewhere just to hear the sounds?' asks Melbourne-based sound artist Anthony Magen. The sound walk is a simple exercise. It is free! It requires no additional paraphernalia other than your ears and some walking shoes. There is only one rule: no communication within the group. Talking or otherwise. This helps to allow the sounds to become the focus. Magen is the facilitator of our sound walk. A chance to walk through the streets of Sydney and experience the diverse sounds it has to offer.
`The group is one unit, he says, and it is best to stick together through visual contact, especially at night as it can be easy to get lost or separated from the group. Whether experienced as private meditation or as collective silence, soundwalks can refresh your ears and reset your sensual awareness to where you are, live or work. As the facilitator of the walk I do reconnaissance before the walk, to determine the route to follow and it will take roughly one hour to complete.' He then proceeds to tell us about World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, an international association of individuals who share a common concern with the state of the world's soundscapes. And then we walked.
There is something incredibly strange and empowering about walking in silence with a group of people, many of whom are strangers, for an hour. Once communication had been removed we were free to tune in our ears on that which we normally block out. As we walked through the abandoned streets it felt like the sounds had been prepared specifically for us. Our collective footfalls; a woman screaming to her husband as she puts her rubbish out, only to stop dead in her tracks as the eight of us silently pass; the whoosh of a bat's wings; possums; crickets; far-away cars; even some bogans cranking out some metal on their car stereos in the parking lot; all felt like they had been placed there specifically for our benefit.
'Sonically there were some fascinating moments, and serendipity is one of the joys of soundwalks,' offers Magen in retrospect, 'when you forfeit control (or the desire to control) to just be present in the moment. Stuff just happens. As the facilitator I can't make things happen, all I can do is guide them along and hope something interesting is going on.'
At one point we walked down a deserted suburban street. On the nature strip sat a large box. Attached, a small handwritten note: `Free Macintosh Computer'. One by one we all looked in the box. It was empty.
`I don't know if I should say this,' continues Magen, `but I took a wrong turn at one point and we had been walking about 10 minutes and we're due to have a respite moment. A park with a big old fence appeared and I thought that the size of the trees compared to the surrounding architecture was interesting. It wasn't my plan but I thought we needed to have the first not-moving-but-listening experience, which, from experience, is the most profound (as it brings every sound into clear focus).'
Fruit bats, possums, the distant din of traffic were all audible, then these frogs (most likely white-striped marsh frogs) piped up - one in a stormwater drain and the other behind a wall in a pond. They were chatting away, invisible to see but echoing each other in a very beautiful way, creating a frog room stereo field that was good to listen to from a distance or standing in between them. It is a moment when I wished I had binaural recorder going.
`I remember the highlight being those amazing frogs chirping in indeterminate rhythms from beneath the road,' reflects Joel Stern, who programmed the film component of Now Now and was also on the walk. Transfixed by the beauty of the sounds, the two of us held back when the others had moved on, almost unwilling to let go of this incredible sound. Yet when we finally relented, within minutes we were amazed by the next sounds, these semi-industrial buildings that possessed amazing drones and rhythms.
Magen reflects: `Just the change in sound fields that were constantly shifting I found really beautiful on this occasion; perhaps emphasised by the clean night air and the lack of urban hum that exists during the day. The top of Sydney Park also contrasted so much with the earlier dense suburban streets of St Peters and Newtown, sounds coming from every direction and from variety of distance.'
After an hour of aural feeding it was over. It felt too short. We could have easily walked for hours, devouring the sonic landscape. We all felt a wave of gratitude for Magen for sharing such an amazing experience with us, and also with each other. `What he is doing is very special,' offers Rod Cooper, who first introduced me to Magen earlier in the night. `The sound walk is an ancient idea. How powerful is it to walk as a silent group through the urban environment and soak up its sonic offerings? I'm glad he introduced to me the quiet places of Sydney.'
`I like sharing the walks with others,' offers Magen. `To me it's natural. I do them all the time alone so it is fun to share. It is easy to dismiss such a simple act but those that say that to me "I do them all the time'' are the ones who generally will get the most out of it. Because focusing on listening and concentrating - it takes some practise. We are good at blocking out sounds and tuning out, but listening can actually be hard too sometimes.'
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