Student Profile | Interview Project

Listening Tour

Silent listening in Greenpoint Brooklyn 

I walked out of my house at 12 am after a day of rain. The rain had stopped but the ground was still wet. Greenpoint is known for busy bars, and residential streets. Newly occupied green taxis, and livery cabs are now a permanent part of the temporary landscape. These are all sounds that I think will create the “soundscape” I am predicting. 

As i walk down the first street ‘West Street’ there is no real sound, it is silent except for the occasionally tacky, wet sound of a car or truck driving by me. The sound of the tire on the street has the sound of something sticky being pulled apart. The noise of the engine working is juxtapose to this tacky tire noise, it sounds like exactly what it is, a machine working then slowing down, with a cyclical “whirring” noise, all these sounds together even though they are set against the blank background of silence they seem to blend into it, that is they seem like background noise regardless of the fact that there is no other sound present with them. I turn the corner and come to a busier section of the neighborhood, franklin street, where busy bars and shops line the street. This busier commercial block is broken up by large apartment buildings and houses. On these blocks I hear the dull monotone of quietly held conversations during smoke breaks. I can make out little words or blurbs of conversation but nothing that really conveys any message. The volume and tone of the voices is barely different than the passing cars and cabs. Now standing out among the sounds is a voice, a woman’s voice, that is loud and aggressive. Her words come out nasally and they seem to cut through the other sounds of quiet conversation and passing cars, her voice is very much in the foreground making the other sound disappear. Her voice seems to grab attention like a crying baby’s would with the same intonation and force. Oddly enough the further i get away from it for a few block the more irritating it becomes as it echoes and reelects off of the walls and buildings that act like canyons. 

I am now on the main commercial block of Greenpoint; manhattan avenue. By the popular late night deli there are two groups of men one group speaking polish the other speaking arabic. I try to compare the languages in my head to hear what stands out as different. The group speaking Polish has a lot of sounds that sound like “sh” and the delivery of each word comes in a certain monotone, that is there no hard inflection, the words just seem to spill out one after the other. Even though the words themselves are hard the that is not reflected in the volume. While this is all going on i hear a car brake hard. The tires screech and the brakes squeal, this noise itself silences the conversations and takes the foreground and becomes the only sound on the block.  The wet tacky sound of tires against the asphalt is the noise that is most memorable to me. It is the sound of NYC in my mind. I am sure this sound is common in every city in the US, but in NY its common occurrence at such a late hour makes it the canvas that all other sounds are painted on.