Assignment 2 - Hero Haas

12 ECHOES

Sydney

This walk shows the walk from the Hurstville train station to Owen Hodge Lawyers (located on the second floor of the building on Ormonde Parade). You first leave the train and then head to the stairs located by the bread store. Front here you cross the street and walk a straight path until the building will be on your right. The creative aspect that I have put into this walk would be that it is a rainy day. This adds more noises to be heard from the pitter patter of the rain on umbrellas passing by, to the splashing of puddles, to the closing and opening of umbrellas. There can also be heard a bus squeaking to a stop on the wet roads. The techniques used to acquire these sounds involved a zoom mic. I walked around to different locations to gather these sounds, some being around campus while others being somewhat near the site. I also used sounds from my peers; including the walking, rain, and ambiance. There are multiple spots where I have the rain fade out nicely to indicate times where there are cover and the rain cannot be heard as sharply as the sidewalks are mainly covered. The echo is supposed to be simple, not too complex or eery; nor dramatic. Walking to work is an every day task which typically doesn't have much good or bad to it more so just a matter of fact. This is what I was aiming for within my piece. While things could happen to make it very eventful, the likely hood of that happening is rather low. I had to wait for a rainy day to collect the bus squeaking sound of the tires over the water. The context of this walk is that this is one I experience everyday. I do not know of many locations in Sydney as I am still relatively new to the area; moving here in January. To pick something that was familiar and I have walked through for a couple months now felt right and solid to me. Everyday I experience a new ambience of noise, from the people around, to the weather. It is a reassuring and comforting walk; since there's things that are different but yet the main walk will always be the same. I wanted to make it feel like it was a comfortable walk, I didn't want to make it sound like it was scary or uncomforting. I used different types of audio, ones being made from humans, ones being made from nature, living and non living. This is a common usage of sound composition. While as my group members supplied a lot of the sounds that come from human creations to really tie together my composition. I did not want to put too many sounds as to drown out any of the others or to make it seem as though there was too much going on.