From my night walk, two things became evident to me; firstly, the sounds of the night in Fauldhouse were ambiguous, just the same as any other town; and secondly, sound editing was something that I was not particularly good at or enjoying. So I rethought my stance.
After realising the sounds of the night walk were just the same as any other town I had been to, I thought of my original purpose in these projects over the past couple of months – to connect to this environment that I was struggling to feel a part of. However realising this town was just the same as anywhere else made me realise it was my lifestyle and the mounting pressure I placed on myself that made me resent this place so much.
So, I made a sound map of the sounds of my everyday life – waking up early, going through the same daily routines, travelling over an hour on the bus to work, the experience of work, and coming home exhausted – using onomatopoeic words instead of the actual sounds so I could ‘talk’ my way through the day. My experiences here have all been dictated by my human emotions, and I feel therefore appropriate to address this with human sounds.
I started with a quick and simple map of the sounds of my everyday life:
This was influenced by the sound walk by Emily Fong from the ‘Normalised Interfacing Plymouth’ project.
A collaborative soundwalk and sound map with Amble Skuse (Disabled artist) and Emily Fong: https://www.ambleskuse.net/plymouth/?fbclid=IwAR0klGla3i-K-TxlSHhqHO6Ljzl3y1TpyD0WRE4fmX038cTpONJLs2JTIMc
Emily’s map is simple but the almost child like sketches are easy to immediately understand and show more of a quick process of going through the city as opposed to a long drawn up work.
I then continued with this idea, repeating talking through my sound map, getting faster just to show the repetitiveness of my days, then coughing more and more towards the end (partly because I have a cough and my throat was sore, but wanted to exploit this!), to emphasise the idea of working through this pandemic , getting ill from the stress and workload, the coughing linking immediately with the coronavirus symptoms.
