For the first CL: Video & Sound assignment, Russell and I worked on a sound walk of 370 Jay Street, focused on creating a narrative arc for the evolution of the building’s usage from the 1950s until today. 370 Jay St. was erected as a headquarters for New York’s Transit Authority (the MTA) in the 1950s, and served that function for more than 40 years. Throughout the 1990s, the MTA slowly moved into a new Manhattan headquarters, leaving the 370 Jay building partially empty and unproperly maintained. Once regarded as a landmark of modernism in Brooklyn, the building fell into decay until 2012, when New York University acquired it, expanding its Brooklyn campus.
In terms of format, our sound walk is quite similar to an informative podcast: a narrator (❤️ Russell) guides the listener through the building’s history, while the listener makes their way from the 4th floor of the building towards the subway stop across the street.
In terms of process, we started out by doing a session of sound recording throughout the building, before really knowing what topic we were going to focus on. We recorded a few samples of background noise on the ITP floor, elevator sounds, door sounds, footsteps, construction noise. While we ended up using very few of the samples recorded in this first session, it helped us get familiar with the recording equipment and explore the building.
Once we had a collection of the building’s environmental sounds, we split up and individually researched the history of the building (which has a pretty extensive Wikipedia entry.) The story we wanted to tell emerged from our conversations around the building’s history, and the fascination with the fact that both the MTA and ITP are truly dynamic entities, aiming to move people and ideas. We took it to the whiteboard in order to come up with a structure for the audio piece.
After deciding on the four main sections of the story (ITP, MTA, the dollar van and ITP again), we wrote a script and recorded Russell narrating it, using the ZOOM field recorder and a shotgun mic. The recording process was smooth—we captured two takes for each section, which proved to be more than enough during the editing phase. Nothing needed re-recording.
Once recording the narration was complete, we cleaned up the audio files in Adobe Audition (mainly trimming and noise removal) and edited together the backbone of our sound walk—the narration from start to finish. During the editing phase, we kept going back and forth between researching sound effects and music tracks for different segments of our piece, and adjusting the timing of each chapter.
After exporting our first rough cut, we started mapping the sound to the moving through space, and iterated on timing until the walking pace felt right. We were initially planning on having the walk start on the 4th floor of 370 Jay, go down in the subway station and end in the lobby of our building, but this was too ambitions: it would have taken way more than 5 minutes. We ended up reducing the scope of the walk—start on 4th floor, end outside the subwya stop—, and still had to stretch the audio content in order to account for slow walking.
Looking back on the process and outcome, I am happy with how our sound walk turned out. The collaboration felt natural, as we complemented each other well and brought different perspectives and skills to the table. One mistake I believe we’ve made is that we started thinking about mapping sound to the space very late in the process. Given that a sound walk is a site specific audio piece, I believe we should have considered movement way earlier during our ideation, instead of retro-fitting it on our first audio export. It would have also been a good idea to add more audio clues to signify the space one is in, and potentially have audio directions instead of written instructions. Regardless—working on this piece was a lot of fun.