Following the third week of feedback, I decided to develop the idea of scoring the soundscape as if it were music, creating my own notation for each sound.
The initial experiment fell short of my expectations, but allowed me to realize that I was missing the most important part of the soundscape: silence. Showing the silence in between each sound gave the work structure and allowed for legibility.
Furthermore, I became aware of the importance of showing sound in the way that it is experienced, rather than the way that it is intellectualized. That is, when a plane passes overhead it registers as a plane, not as a collection of sounds (whirr, roar, whine) like I had been working with.
Creating a notation for the physical sound itself (airplane, footsteps, passing car) gave the work the context it lacked.
Finally, arranging the sounds in a circle with 60 spokes (one for each minute in an hour), created a structure that was both repeatable and easily understandable, resolving the ambiguity that had plagued the project from the beginning.
