Really Great Soundwalk Blog Post

Heather Molloy wrote a particularly beautiful Soundwalk blog post that I wanted y'all to read...

As the Queen of Absentmindedness, I always seem to be running a little (if not a lot) behind in getting to the places I need to be. More often than not, with a wandering mind and a Mood™ playlist blasting in my ears, I spend little to no time actually listening to the environment I happen to be rushing through.

Luckily enough, most of my days at Hunter turn into nights, which results in a lot of late night walks home, arguably my favorite non-rushed pastime. 

 So, I decided to do my soundwalk from around 9 PM to about 10 PM,walking from Hunter at 68th  to my dorm building at 96th, where the Upper East Side and East Harlem just begin to blend into one another. 

I think that, when most people think of NYC, they automatically experience a sort of auditory hallucination where breaks squeal, jackhammers go off, someone shouts "I'm walkin' here" from a distance, which is then quickly punctuated by the blaring of a car horn. Granted, those are all elements of the city, but they don't really make up the whole - especially where a weekday evening is concerned. 

At about 9:20, I was starting to worry that I was tone deaf to the kind of ambient noise that comes with living in the city - it seemed like the soft, almost hollow succession of my sneakers hitting the uneven pavement, step after step, was the only sound I could focus on. Then, it got a little windy, and the absence of the smooth, echoing sounds of metal wind chimes made me miss home. The wind of the city seems to have a different character than the wind of upstate, Western NY -  at home, the wind is a rustle of overturned leaves, an empty, dry-bone caress of hay yet to be cut. In the city, wind is booming, hollow and refracted - every gust seems to be amplified off of tall, glass buildings, becoming somehow colder and more staccato than any breath you could ever take. The wind of NYC isnever gentle.

 From somewhere behind me, I suddenly became aware of a soft, but very rapid clip of metal against metal, a sound I could only then think of as "TINK-TINK-TINKLE" - GIVE ME A BREAK, I HAD A LONG DAY. For some reason that I can't really explain, the sound, even as it approached from somewhere in the background to the foreground of just nipping at my squeaking heel (these are some REALLY worn Converse I've on, mind you), I couldn't help but smile. That rapid clip? It turned out to be the rattle of a dog tag on a collar, as a woman with no less than three little dogs rushed past me - without even fully recognizing the source of the sound, it seemed that the sound itself had triggered a 

knee-jerk reaction from me:

"SMILE - THERE ARE DOGS NEAR YOU."

The best kind of noise to be aware of, though? The snippets of conversation you can overhear walking literally anywhere, in all kinds of languages and emotion. The other night, shuffling through a cloud of cigarette smoke, I heard a kid of no more than 20 tell his Mother over the phone, "Ma, it ain't that bad. It'll work out." And for some reason, that really got to me. How freakin' poetic, my guy. This big burly dude, young in literally nothing but his facial expression, in a voice deeper than the Grand Canyon, soothingly reassuring his Mom, who herself could've been miles away. I'd passed by him just as he said the "bad," and the "It'll work out" faded into the background of my left side, creating a sort of lead-out, flutter effect. Strong, but calm. 

I hummed a 4 Non Blondes song the rest of my way home - hopefully, someone didn't pick that up on their own soundwalk. YIKES.