Recording Where I Live in Sounds

I used to record street music secretly whenever I encounter a street musician on my way. The snippets of music remind me of places I travel, the corner in Berlin, the square in Copenhagen, the airport in Paris, the tube stations in London. But I’ve never thought about listening attentively to something other than music, and appreciating the emotion it brings to oneself.

Until I read Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence. It changed the way I experience the world so much that I decided to create a show from it.

One Square Inch of Silence is written by a man who’s spent the most of his life doing field recording in the wild. Gordon defines the real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise. More specifically, natural soundscape that’s undisturbed by plane, coal-mining, traffic or any other man-made noises. He actually shocked me by pointing out that silence is disappearing like endangered species. This is so obvious yet so ignored by me. Maybe because I’ve never heard the real silence all my life! Since picking up the book, I started to look for the “one square inch of silence” myself. And really, I could hardly find a tiny fraction of moment or space where the nature is left undisturbed. Even when I’m traveling in the mountains, silence is really rare.

Part out of a reader’s curiosity, part out of the R&D necessity for the project, I’ve started to pay attention to sounds that are not music and record them. Limited by budget, my recording equipment is only my iphone with its inbuilt voice memo app. So there’s some noises from the system that can’t be treated. However, they are still vivid enough to say something about the spaces and the subjects. I can share with you some of the recordings I’ve had, and you can have a listen to find out about how those soundscapes make you feel. Remember, listen through your whole body, not just your ears and don’t judge your feelings, as Gordon taught his readers.

Here’s where I sit when I type or work. We are very lucky to live in a community with a big garden beneath our window.

The first thing that comes to your awareness might be the birds. But then you realise that the sound of cars and other unidentifiable machines are constant. No long ago I realised that the low drones I heard every few minutes from nowhere is actually the underground train passing!! It is truly amazing that I can hear it since I live on the eighth floor of the building.

Here’s the sound of Yangtze river. I walked closer the to the river put my phone really close to the water.

The sound of water is always brings all kinds of emotions. It sounds like home, or memory.

It surprises me again and again how sound can define a space, for example, this one I recorded in the train station. Because of the space, whole station is resonating all the sounds it contains within. (my hand is also creating a bit of noises because I had to hold lots of things)

For me it is like a surreal dream in which all faces and dialogues are blended into blurs. You might feel the space in this tracks most vividly compared to other sound tracks.

Last year in December I was in Shanghai, I travelled to the “Zhongshan Park”, hoping to find some natural soundscapes, annoyingly, no one seems to appreciate the value of silence. Loud music filled every corner, be it from some woman carrying a loud speaker on a square or from the speaker hang in the lamp posts at various places. In this recording, you can hear music coming from both kind of sources.

But I was actually standing beneath a tree, recording a light-vented bulbul, I guess it has grown to sing extra loud if it has always lived here. You can imagine how hard it can be for birds to communicate with each other if those constant background noises are there.

Sometimes sound can bring presence to something that’s no longer there, maybe even more strongly than films or photos. A friend of mine is particularly concerned about the rapid demolishing of old buildings in Shanghai. Because of Shanghai’s development scheme, a lot of old communities are being evacuated and pushed down to make space for new projects. For us, this process is also pushing out a way of life. Lots of places will disappear this year in March, and I joined her and her friends in a city walk before I left Shanghai. In one old lane, I walked very slowly and recorded the sounds there. I sent her the track after I went back. The second time she went on city walk, she listened again “it is so amazing! It creates such an alienation effect on what I see.”

(photo: old neighbourhood in Shanghai)

I guess with sounds there’s more of a life coming forward from the medium than pictures. After all, you hear it because the world is moving, because there are frictions, waves through the air. And because we are built to listen to the world around us, we can never shut our ears like we shut our eyes. And maybe because we are constantly hearing things, we’ve taken hearing for granted and forget to really understand what it feels to really hear our world, and how the way we move as a society is shaping how we feel and live.