Sense Hunting a sound walk

I made a sound walk with Lulu and Tianxu. We started off our process by thinking about which space in the ITP building we would want to use. We eventually landed on the stair well between the 1st and 4th floor because it is clear which way to walk as long as we say to walk “up” or “down” the stairs. We also found it a relatively blank space in which we could create lots of different types of narratives.

We each came up with an idea for the narrative and then thought through what kinds of sounds we would need for each walk. We eventually picked the most abstract idea which was to imagine that the listener has no senses and that through the process of walking up the stairs the listener would be introduced to 6 senses; sound, sight, touch, smell, feeling (in the form of light), taste and emotions.

We then each took 3 senses to record, this meant that we would end up with overlap so that some senses were explored by 2 people.

Below I am recording the sound of masking tape sticking to my fingers which was eventually used when we introduced the sense of touch and asked the listeners to feel the stair railing.

At our next meeting we worked out the narrative for the soundwalk. We each wrote our own interpreration of how the narrative would go and then combined them into the final narrative.

Below is my first draft of the sound walk narrative:

Once we semi-finalized the narrative we read through it in the stair well to see if we were missing any instructions and to see how the timing would work out. Once we made a couple more changes to the text we recorded the full narrative using the zoom recorder and a shot mic.

At that point, we had all of the sounds we needed! We then split the text into 3 parts and each worked on a separate section the sound mixing.

We did one last walk through with the finished recording to make sure that the timing and directions made sense. Our last step was to make a map!

The Sense Hunting recording can be found here .