For this assignment I went out into my backyard at night and listened. Compared to the daytime sounds I noticed that most noise was indistinguishable.


The University of British Columbia, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
For this assignment I went out into my backyard at night and listened. Compared to the daytime sounds I noticed that most noise was indistinguishable.
I looked at a variety of sounds in my space, and examined the intensity in relation to its proximity, frequency and pattern.
Katie Hunks
In Class Assignment
Scent Mapping
In class activity:
Homework:
Katie Hunks
In Class Assignment: Analyzing Sound
Tuning In: An Experiment in Auditory Observation
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BLkASzTNNEHqV4R5LdtcuMADTXbYyuZR?usp=sharing
Windplay
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ABLrfIK47aNeSGHwCSalbtMT9dNOxdC4?usp=sharing
In class exercise
When I was standing at my backyard, I heard three types of sound: wind chime, neighbor talking, and noise in the atmosphere. I labelled their relationship as I am inside the cube. Then I recorded their frequency and duration in the diagram above.
Assignment 8
Tuning
I chose to use a more abstract drawing to visualize the sound experience for this assignment. I was standing outside of my house with my eyes closed. I hear and I imagine. This drawing is how I felt at that moment. I forgot about the physical world and I would imagine I am standing in the darkness. It was chilly outside. I heard dry leaves jumping on the ground. I heard a bus and a bird in far. There was a hammer or some smashes that was not loud but unpleasant. And these sounds were wrapped by a wave of noise in the atmosphere. I was in the center of a tornado. I felt insignificant and weak compared to that noise. I felt like I was standing on a wire. The noise seemed like holding me in balance on a wire, but it was actually pulling and pushing me in all directions.
Windplay
I made three pinwheels with three types of paper material: regular printing paper, flyer, tracing paper. They have different weights so I want to compare their movements in the wind.
It was not windy outside so I just blew them……
For this assignment I chose to tune-in to one common sound in my apartment and analyze it in the context of working from home. The sound I chose was typing, which I considered through a written reflection and visual interpretations at the scale of the paragraph and the single word.
What does working from home sound like? There are the background sounds out the window, and the appliances whirring in the kitchen. There are the neighbours vacuuming the hallway and the unintentional slamming of doors. The apartment is not quiet, but my focused attention to the screen sends these noises to the background. I block out every distraction and focus on my own presence and the screen in front of me.
I usually forget to listen to music while I work. I like the sound of marker on paper, and the auditory feedback of clicking a mouse. We are trained to rely on touch and sound to navigate the keyboard of a computer – reserving vision for the results at eye-level. For the first time ever, I am considering the sensorial harmony of the keyboard as a comfort, even an extension of the body, rather than simply a pragmatic tool.
At first it is unsettling to realize that I can not hear my body over the tapping of the keyboard, but then I remember that it is my body and mind producing this sound. Brain, fingers and computer come together in a complex dance of thought and muscle memory to conjure and record ideas, whose auditory representation may only ever exist in this sequence of keystrokes. I am subconsciously responding to these sounds as I work – alert to the subtle tonal variations in the slip of a finger or a rogue extra space. An almost-rhythm accompanies my thoughts as they solidify in the form of words. A startlingly long silence settles when the line of thought dissipates, prompting a small but short-lived surge of panic before the tapping continues.