For sound walk research, I decided to check out the “Passing Strangers” experience in the East Village. Since poetry was my emphasis in undergrad, I thought it would be nice to take a physical tour of a field I had mainly only engaged with on the page, and it really did turn out to be a really exciting way to delve deeper into the history of these poets. Well, exciting might be an exaggeration; If I hadn’t been marching around the neighborhood, I’d have fallen asleep.
First off, I love this medium. I’m all about participation, and I think sound walks are a great way to engage audiences in novel ways. There are a lot of aspects of the form that have their drawbacks though, especially sound walks that have people going to very specific physical locations — how do you design an experience around objects that may not be there in the future of the listener? I dragged my partner along for the sound walk, and the first location we arrived at was the gorgeous old church that was supposed to be the setting for the first 10-15 minutes of the piece. It was really nice to look at, but closed, so we couldn’t engage with any of the very site-specific audio tour until we changed locations. Not a great start. Seems like these pieces have a significant risk of getting out-of-date really quickly. Halfway through the sound walk, I wondered if this was a sound walk about the history of poetry in the East Village or about gentrification. A handful of locations clearly had been replaced very recently, like the important-sounding church across from Ginsberg’s apartment that was now a condominium complex (only 1.45 million per unit!).
Throughout the piece, I kept thinking about the subtle background activities of participants in sound walks, mainly about how great a way it was to trick people into exercising. The pacing was set very expertly (really, how do they account for groups with various walking speeds?), but I couldn’t help notice how much walking we had to do over the hour and half. My stomach noticed also, and there were a few times I got distracted as the voice directed me to walk past very delicious-seeming local restaurants. I had a hard enough time focusing on the myriad of faceless poets and their voices, but you tell me to walk past a steaming tower of lamb or a plate overflowing with loaded french fries? Sorry beats, but the real Howl is coming from my gut. Great way to tour local businesses though, going down all those random streets.
I figured with my poetry background I would have found the whole thing illuminating and inspiring, but it felt more like I had been tricked into taking a history class. I can’t imagine what someone who cared nothing about poetry would’ve thought. I definitely want to try another sound walk in the future, but hopefully one with a bit more artful experimentation and less droning on about a muddled slew of faceless men.
— HW Update —
Our sound walk group meeting went amazing, had a great time brainstorming our piece and beginning to collect sounds. Here is the link to our group’s material thus far:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HtgBdYrjOe-Sz6uwbTCsY0tVsEtPOEz4?usp=sharing