Route 200: a soundscape assignment
Escaping sounds possible
Most of the literature I’ve encountered about transportation and the city of Los Angeles details on the relationship between transportation and the design of the city itself. It is safe to say that the adoption of the automobile in the middle of the twentieth century played an important role in the future of urban transportation in the city, and how this would then impact the design of the city of Los Angeles. Going from electric streetcar and railways as horse-drawn vehicles, the railways as a modern technological advance converse with the decentralized freeways that effaced certain areas from the conversation. Buses are an important element of the creation of Los Angeles as a modern city, but they are often marginalized, and also erased from the conversation. Instead of looking at a place where these buses pass by, I decided to look at the bus itself, one that connects marginalized –and gentrified– areas of the city of Los Angeles.
I ran into Elizabeth Lo’s 2015 documentary after finishing the recordings. The sounds are so similar. It makes me wonder about the shift in community-building created in buses. Some of the anthropogenic and geophonic sounds I expected to identify during my recording process, or at least in the recordings themselves– microphones might catch sounds that my eardrum/memory dismissed. After two replays, I could only hear well-rounded, seat-padded, space.
There is a sense of emptiness, even when space itself is not empty. Almost half-way full each time around, the buses still resonate as a desolate space.
Space vibrates. Its movement makes us wary of its liveliness, as an overarching keynote sound of the moving bus, those vibrations that “are overheard but cannot be overlooked” (Schafer, 9). The voiceover locations adopt the significance of a signal to those that are guided by the streets, rather than by the outside environment of the bus. However, those sonic signals can also be considered part of the soundmark, alongside that deep emptiness of politeness. I second-doubted myself when I played the recordings back. Those loud voices, the screaming-yelling-singing voices that I have experienced on other buses, I did not encounter on Route 200 during the last week of January. Politeness made the route’s community unique, by acknowledging not only other riders’ presence but the driver as well.
– Thank you.
I heard that over, and over again each time a person got off the bus. I haven’t seen that often. I see it less during car-sharing rides. It was the anthropogenic sound that most struck me and at times the only one I could distinguish.
The bus continues its journey of movement and vibration.
Schafer, R. Murray. (1993/1994) The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, Destiny Books.
