Open Up The Gates: Stepping into the Sonic Nature of Campus

by Eva Fava-Rodrigues For my station I chose to acoustically exemplify the path into campus. When one takes their first steps through the campus gates, they become surrounded by both the anthropophony and biophony of the natural world. They are amongst animals and trees, students walking between buildings, and the sounds of the bustling city of Worcester down the way. The front gates truly showcase all aspects of nature and the different relationships it contains. When thinking about how I would portray the campus’ sonic beauty, I reflected on the different forms of field-recording I could pursue and ultimately decided what better way is there to encapsulate the richness of the natural world than with a musical composition. I have done this once before in my class and really resonated with how the song changed my perspective and allowed me to listen more intently to my surroundings and notice all of the patterns and complexity that makes up the rhythms of nature’s music. I utilized a portable microphone with a wind cover so as to receive the best quality recordings I was able to and recorded sounds during the afternoon, allowing me to have access to more variety of sounds. I recorded squirrels, birds chirping, stones hitting against each other, tree branches scratching tree bark, and wind blowing, as well as car horns, train whistles, people walking, construction sounds, and planes roaring. The multitude of sounds allowed for a vast array of opportunities for the outcome of my composition. Using a backing track I created with percussive instruments and stone and tree sounds, I generated a foundation, upon which I layered beats using car horns and sticks in addition to various transposed interlays of bird and squirrel sounds to formulate a nice mixture of all of the sounds one may experience once they walk through the campus gates.