The Soundwalk

            It is 2:02 pm on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.

I am sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.

A quiet, relaxing space, although quite restraint, so a lot can be heard in the background from the noisy madness of the city.

           

 The audio foreground is a mixture of voices of people passing by or sitting at a certain distance and discussing, along with the continuing chirping of the birds. I can notice the crispy sound of the plastics wheels of a stroller rolling on the concrete covered with small branches and other natural waste left by the snow that has just melted.

           

In the background I try to distinguish and identify each individual sound from the constant superposed layers of sounds of urban activity. I can distinctively hear a dog barking for a few seconds and can tell it must be far from my position, although it might be inside the park.

Unrelentless traffic noises are the primary layer of sound in the background. Too many different juxtaposed sounds that seem like a constant sort of wind blowing from which emanates some specific, recognizable, familiar sounds every other second. A police or ambulance siren whistling, cars honking, at times loud noises of probably heavy objects hitting a hard surface, I imagine some construction work is taking place nearby.

A new foreground sound is noticeable as a person sits on the same bench, a couple of meters away, and unfolds a wrapped sandwich. That noise masks the background sound, which disappears as soon as some sound that my brain evaluates as closer can be heard.

 I assume that being now used to the urban jungle, my brain processes the audio background as silence subconsciously, which allows me to rest more easily in a noisy environment.