My first experiment was counting sounds. Over the first week I created a grid comprised of 24 hours and proceeded to take note of the different sounds I heard to create an aggregate picture of a ‘day in the life.’
Cars, trucks, motorcycles. Sirens, people, airplanes. An angry cat. The soundscape became distilled into categories, and those categories into colored dots representing each sound. The process was tedious and I tired of it quickly. Counting felt meaningless. A collection of dots representing sounds, but what was I seeing anew?
My next experiment was describing sounds. I took note of the different types of sounds, breaking down the soundscape into words. Whirr. Thrum. Whoosh. Buzz. I then chose a typeface that felt representative of the word. Script. Sans serif. Italic. These choices became meaningful, and it felt closer to a new truth.
My last experiment was visualizing sound. I placed paper on different surfaces in my kitchen and rubbed the paper with a black pastel crayon. I then took those rubbings and broke them down into pixel patterns using my iPad, in the hopes of finding a way to express sound visually. The experiment yielded a glimmer of something, but was largely unsuccessful in communicating much of anything.