Since Anne-Marie and I have started leading weekly soundwalks on campus back in February 2018, we haven’t had many participants. We usually end up with a handful of faithful regulars that come back around for a few times, but eventually dissipate for unknown reasons. Who knows? Maybe it’s just the Arizona heat that’s repelling people in these first few months of the semester.
Recently, however, Anne-Marie have been extra determined to expand our program and reach out to more students, faculty, staff, and community members. We have created our own website (https://asusoundwalks.weebly.com), we made (arguably cute) business cards, we updated our logo and printed flyers to post around our school, we have presented our program to various classes in the School of Music to gain more student participants, we performed a Pauline Oliveros piece at a School of Music social event, and we’ve done many more behind-the-scenes planning that we are excited to begin to enact. We are ready to take this program to the next level!
On our Wednesday, September 12th, 2018 soundwalk, we had a total of six participants! The majority of them were first-year music school students who heard about our soundwalk via my presentation to their class earlier this week. They were very engaged with our pre-soundwalk description of what the acoustic ecology lab does, some basic modes of listening, and things to “listen” out for while on our journey. Some of the questions they asked before we started included, “What kinds of things should we look out for?” — a great question for someone being introduced to a soundwalk. We explained that soundwalks can use many different modes of listening, including picking out individual sounds, listening to the entire sphere of sound at once, comparing two or more sounds together at once, and countless other possibilities.
After our soundwalk, which was wonderfully led by Anne-Marie, our eager participants fruitfully participated in the discussion that we initiated, and began telling us all of the new things that they noticed while paying closer attention to the sounds of our campus. From being more aware of animal presence to noticing how truly loud machinery noise can be, I’d say that we successfully introduced our participants to the wonderful world of acoustic ecology. We hope that they’ll all come back to join us on a soundwalk (or many more soundwalks) in the future, and we are excited to see how much more our program keeps growing! Stay tuned for more good news from the Acoustic Ecology Lab in the future!