Back to Audio Walk Archive

Beyond the Vocal Track

(Field, Underscore, Foley, Sound Bed, Overlay)

Taking a speaking voice as the most common guiding element of an audio walk, a question opens: what sounds surround the voice? 

One option is to add no further sound, but most audio pieces—since they are experienced on headphones and so to some degree will eclipse the ambient noise of the actual place where the walker is walking—add layers of sound to the voice. Here are five different types of sound layers to consider.

FIELD

Many walks repeat the sound field of the walk in some way, whether the vocal recording is made as the speaker moves through the site, or by taking field recordings of the site and adding them as additional tracks in the editing interface. This move ensures that the site’s acoustic signature is baked into to the recording, restoring the site’s sound for the walker on headphones, or delivering the site’s sound to a listener who is not actually on the walk, or walking somewhere other than the site. 

With Field layers, the possibility also exists to layer in fields that do not correlate 1:1 with the site. Here is the sound of this same bustling place in the middle of the night, or in winter while we are in summer, or during a famous event that took place here some time in the past. A further possibility exists of pairing sites, so that this city where the walker is walking is given an underwater acoustic field, treated as if it is supposed to be the actual audio signature of that place. Or a place where one is accustomed to hearing one language in the crowds and passersby, is now rendered in another language. 

Here I am thinking of field sound as unmodified recordings of the world, taken as field recordings and embedded into the audio. 

FOLEY

Foley is the name for the sound effects that make the noise of actions and objects. The sound of the car door slamming, the sound of bike tires skidding on gravel, etc. Foley is used to manifest events and discrete actions in sound. If the field is the wide surround, foley is near-sound, but in a different way than the voice is near. 

(Many free foley type recordings can be found on Freesounds, for creative commons use.)

Consider also the possibility of magical or fantastical foley, like the blinky sound in a video game when your avatar runs through a coin, or the deflating siren of losing a life, or the light bulb ding of an idea in a cartoon. Almost anything could become foley if it is placed in such a way that says: this sound stands for this event. 

UNDERSCORE

Underscoring creates a ground for a figure, taking the speaking voice in an audio walk as the figure in the foreground. Underscoring, usually musical or sonorous in a musical way (even if a single, ominous note) recedes somewhat from your attention and directs your emotional experience. Think of scary scenes in movies, think of the moment when the weepy theme music enters again.

Underscore needn’t be so manipulative, but it does create a tone that tends to control the interpretive range of the experience. 

SOUND BED

I think of sound bed as something that makes place as well as mood—often through loops, rhythms, meter. (In the field recording post, there is a section at the end on turning field recordings into loops to lift the verité into something more rhythmic.) I think of sound bed as the thing that conjures the environment without overdetermining what can happen or be felt within that environment. If underscoring is contour-fit to the dramatic movement of the narrative, a sound bed simply makes a space for events to occur in. 

This sound bed vs underscore is a somewhat idiosyncratic differentiation, but whatever words you want to use, I find it useful to think about emotion-mood vs. place-ambience in these two abstract types of supporting sound. Place here is less literally rendered than it is in a field recording. Think of the lit up interior lines place of the Tron computer world, or the weird, limited sloshy otherworld space that Eleven moves through in Stranger Things. 

If you want to take a theory-head excursion into thinking about the ways rhythmic sonority creates space, check out two chapters from Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “The Smooth and the Striated” and “On the Refrain.” [Placeholder for a future reading on the usefulness of those to chapters for thinking place through rhythm and sound tag.]

OVERLAY

If underscoring and sound beds are there to support the foregrounding of the speaking voice, an overlay is something that, through audio but not through speech, is laid out as if on top of experienced environment. The singing in Viv Cunningham’s Shadow Walks comes to mind as an example. An acoustic equivalent to the graphics markup of images, the circles an arrows and yard lines on top of the replayed football footage, the augmented rainbow haloes of a TikTok filter. Play in thought experiments with this designation of under vs over. To me, overlay suggests a creative interpretation of a site, an effort to read it for the presence some particular element, or to offer that element as a way to maximize its significance for the walker. 

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?