Easy Listening

How often do people really listen to the noises around them? What bleeds into white noise and what noises are meaningful? I guess I don't feel bad about drowning out certain sounds on a day to day basis because it's what we as humans do subconsciously. It is rather interesting once you do actually take the time out of your day to do something as simple as listening though. That's how the listening experiment made me feel as I roamed the hallways outside of my Video Art II class. There is so much detail in the audio we hear. When I boil it down in my head I think of it simply as the bustle of life around me. After I recorded my two minutes of listening in three separate places I chose to continue my assignment with the sounds I recorded in the stairwell down the hall. I liked the beat that peoples feet made on the steps and the door slams resonated beautifully. I tried to recreate that atmosphere as best I could with Final Cut's sound effects. After I did that the assignment continued further in that we had to make our audio piece more musical. I'm a drummer and have been for many years, but my sense of song structure is lacking almost entirely. I decided to use the beat of the steps, the door slams, and other noises along with musical percussion to get the feel I wanted. If I was successful in doing this, well, that's another story.