The Sound

The Story

I love it when unrelated sounds are forced to share the same space. To most people’s ears I imagine moments like those in this short recording sound abrasive and chaotic, but to me it’s a sort of magic. It’s only recently that I’ve fully identified the precise nature of this eccentric pleasure. It came together during my trip to New Orleans last March, where I found myself drawn back to Bourbon Street, again and again, especially at night, when it was the crowds were largest and the noise was intense. I was puzzled by the attraction, since, on the surface at least, the Bourbon Street scene is complete anathema to me. I don’t like crowds in general, and a crowd of drunken college students howling around…that’s really not my sort of scene.  Still, I kept confusing myself by going back. And eventually I figured it out. It was all about the sound. The bars on either side of that narrow street blast out music so loud that it sometimes hurts your ears even from the street. Some of the music is recorded, some of it is live, and it’s mixed with the sounds of shouts and screams from both inside the clubs and out on the street. At one point I found myself just standing still in the middle of the street, listening. Four or five different songs were audible all at once and the music blended together like minerals in a volcanic eruption. It was an aleatory sound collage…simultaneously obnoxious and eerily beautiful.

The short recording here is not nearly as intense as that, but I was drawn to it for precisely the same reasons. I made it in San Francisco when I was there recently for a medical appointment. As I came up to the BART station at 24th and Mission, I heard a chaotic mixture of music that I couldn’t easily sort out into its component parts. Coming into the plaza saw a dozen or so people standing in a circle singing what seemed to be a political song. Several members of the group were beating tambourines. A few feet away from them a middle-aged man and woman were sitting at a table with a sign offering free meditation classes. The man was playing guitar and they were both singing an off-key chant of some sort. (It sounds like they’re singing “Hidey-Ho,” but I’m pretty sure that they’re actually sort of Hindi or Sanskrit mantras.) At first it seemed like the two songs were competing with one another. But as I stood watching and listening it became apparent that they were simply co-existing. Each song proceeded as if the other weren’t happening. When the Spanish song ended, the meditation promoters continued their chanting.

I pulled out my recorder and was able to capture the last few minutes of the chaos. What you hear in these thirty seconds is the end of the Spanish song, after which the chanting continues.

The Recording

The recording is pretty dirty, so I’ve applied some processing to clean it up a little. It was a windy day in San Francisco and since my hand-held recorder doesn’t have much of a wind screen, the recording picked up some loud low-frequency gusts. I used an EQ plug-in aggressively to filter out these sounds as best I could. You’ll be able to hear some of the artifacts of that filtering on the recording. I also applied a bit of stereo field spreading in order isolate the different elements of the recording. Still, it’s a messy recording. Which is precisely what I like about it.