In this second class in the unit Sonic Doing and Thinking, we’ve accompanied our lecturer Jose to Sydenham Hill Wood to experience a Soundwalk. During the walk some of us would be blindfolded and guided by a classmate and we swapped roles consequently to focus on the sounds from the environment.

The experience was really interesting and I achieved to perceive the sonic environment perfectly, I found sounds like the leaves shaking, the cracking of branches, lots of birds, vehicles and planes at a very far distance in the stratosphere. The birds made very interesting sounds and I also felt capable of feeling the distance at they were located or even the speed at they where moving in 360 degrees space, and I also enjoyed the sound of the planes which had a kind of flanger effect probably created by other echoes in the environment.

Here is a little recording from a fragment of the walk, recorded on an iPhone 13:

In this recording we can find the beautiful sound of the birds and specially our own steps, cracking branches and moving stones, and even my own breathing, something to what the same Hildegard Westerkamp refers on her page, can we move without making any noise?

I found these high frequency sounds really pleasant and I’ve done a little composition adding some music to the recording, I also recorded the Soundwalk to cassette tape to give a lo-fi texture and I processed it with Intellijel’s filter ‘Polaris’.