1A Project Reflection

On a regular basis we tend to drown out ambient sounds we are accustomed to hearing.  There are so many noises we zone out because they are ordinary and typical with our routine.  Waking up to a cell phone alarm in the morning, driving to campus, walking to the buildings, sitting in class; all of these habitual doings flood our subconscious with clamor.  However, we either ignore the background noises all together or balance them out with images we associate them with when noticed. 

            After playing with the H4n mics and the sound library project, I started to be more aware of the sounds of my daily routine.  I generally take the same route to my classes (unless I’m running late and park outside of my designated zone), and one day last week I was ahead of schedule and off to my French cinema class. Since time was not an issue, I decided to walk the unexplored route from Trask to central campus.  I took this route to see if there would be any difference in travel time since there seemed to be less congestion of confused, lost freshmen, and as I was looking at my phone to check the clock, I decided to take a gander at Twitter too.  No one was around except for maybe one other guy at least a couple hundred meters ahead, and as I looked down at the screen, I heard a rustle in the leaves right next to me.  Normally, it wouldn’t have caught my attention seeing as we have odd squirrels around campus that aren’t afraid of people, but because I had been thinking about sound and noise recently from this project I quickly stopped looked up and saw a tiny bunny among the flowers and the bushes to my left. (precious bunny pic from this occasion)

            This project helped me realize that even banal repeated procedures can have unexpected bouts of excitement if you just tune into your environment.  Take the effort to examine the noises around you because they can bring new perspective or even add a smile to your day!