A long time since I last came here and a few things happened. The occasion (or excuse) to start writing again comes from Sound Diaries, a curious project from the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University:

The Sound Diaries initiative is focused around sound-recordings and sound-texts and the ways in which we can use sound as a document of our lives (from the project’s webiste).

We hear “sounds” every day, hour and minute, but only seldomly we do listen to them. Our mind is full of images and thoughts, but we often loose memory of the sounds that crossed our lives.

I like this comment, because it explains the motivations behind the idea of a “Sound Diary”:

…If my sounds are taken by you and then remixed to form tracks, I think there is a danger of the sounds becoming completely decontextualised.

The purpose of keeping a sound diary or creating one is to document life in sound…

I think recording your own sounds is almost the most important aspect of developing a sound diary project…

The act of listening to the ever-unfolding soundscape around us … (just imagine all the sounds that are happening in the world right now as I type this!!!) is an essential element within the process of creating a sound diary… (by Felicity)

I did a little experiment with “my” sounds, taken at home, while working. I did a three minutes recording, then I edited the file and shrinked it to less than a minute. It’s like “listening to you from the outside”.

(I would add my soundscape, if only WordPress allowed my to do so)