With Sound being one of my passions it was no surprise that I focused on Sound for my senior thesis in grad school at New York University. I wanted to illustrate the sonic ecology of a city and the different segments/locations, which make up that city or town. I do believe that listeners can extract other non-quantifiable or computable information from sounds around us, provoking a sense of feeling, rhythm tonality while embracing the timbre which may constitute to the uniqueness of such location.

For my focus I sat on a bench at Union Square Park in NYC near the East Village and recorded the environment sounds using my homemade Binaural headphones/ microphones for 17 hours. Each recording lasted 10 minutes each and was taken every-hour on the hour totaling 17 different sound recordings. During the process I learned new things about that location, from why the church bells stopped ringingat 10 pm, the indiscriminate chatter of people's intermit personal lives, to the constant barrage of light traffic and the never silent moment of the New York Subway cleaning crew at night. I wanted to bring this experience to others hoping to capture their attention. One approach I chose was a visual scape where sound can be translated into a three dimensional sound field reacting to volume and frequency and illustrated by volume and colors. During my presentation I was told that it gave some a meditative experience, something I was not expecting. It did draw some interest and many would like to see me continue with my pursuit. I do plan on collecting other location around the world and presenting my findings in a 3D visual projected space. I also hope to have a visual listening room where many can sonically experience another locations sonic ecology, at least for ten minutes.

Look forward to excerpts at www.omorphy.com/blog

Link to Sound and the City PDF: APeters_SoundandtheCity.pdf [ 2.7 MB]

Also, Souns and teh City is part of the Village Nomad Radio archive: