Drift 1 Strategy

No better place to start out than my own house! My first drift location is actually just a short walk from my front steps. A few blocks from me and you can reach the Milwaukee River and the River Walk from Hubbard Park across from Newberry Blvd. I automatically knew that there are very few places to take a drift in this city without picking up the sound of cars, and planes and other transit noises. I wanted to avoid all these typical sounds. I knew that nothing of the city would probably spark my interest since I'm so used to listening to these unavoidable sounds. Instead I wanted to try and get away from these noise centers and see what else I could find. The River Walk runs almost right through the heart of the city, but you'd be surprised about how far everything can sound when you are by yourself observing your surroundings.

Bells Close Out The Day

On a brisk mid-west evening, I left for the park by the river for a stroll with my recorder and ended up walking ON the frozen Milwaukee River. Not a very smart move on my part, I have to say, but as soon as I got to the center of the river, the 6pm church bells started ringing out from all around me. You can hear two distict bells ringing out from the East and West. From what I could tell I was just north of the churches, but about equal distance from both churches to my left and right. My map helps illustrate my location between the churches. What stood out to me, as I was litteraly walking on water, was just how far these bells could be from me, how they sounded so clear and yet so far away with no nearby buildings for the sound to bounce off of. It was minutes from total sundown and as I walked off the river and back through the park I thought about how the church bells were signaling the end of the day and saying goodnight to the sun.

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Coast of Ice

This sound I collected down at the beach of Lake Michigan near Big Bay. Admittedly this area was not apart of my original Drift plan, but I had my recorder with me that day and I found some cool things to record. In this location, the winter has completely taken over the beach with snow and ice. The ice had spread all the way past where the water normally meets the sand and you can actually stand over the lake. The waves have carved out small caves underneath the ice creating a hollow, echoing *splunking* sound. In this spot I also found large sheets of ice floating together with the waves, scraping, crashing and rubbing together sounding much like Styrofoam packing moving around in a box. I know that water sounds are generally to be avoided in these drifts, but I liked how it was one of the first sounds I came across that didn't pick up cars and planes and dump trucks backing up. It is one of the only sounds I have that doesn't have the noise of the city in the background at all.

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Nature Class in the Park

Shortly after I collected the audio from the church bells (above) I ended my drift for the day and started to head back home through the park. On this day, there wasn't anybody else down by the river but me, but the silence was broken by the sound of school children coming up the path directly in front of me. They looked like they were on a field trip with their teacher, looking at animal tracks in the snow. By the time I got my recorder out of my pocket and ready to go, I had already walked by the class and another was walking under the bridge in front of me. So you should be able to hear an echoing from children in front, along with a group of kids behind me. I must have been at least 100ft. from the group behind me, but you can clearly hear the kids feet collectivlly moving together across the snow as they walked to their next location.

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Construction Around The Corner

Here, I stood at the end of an enclosed alley way near Bradford Ave. I'm not sure if you can tell, but the sound of construction work around the corner to this alley is bouncing back and forth off the two brick walls on either side of me. But I think the most interesting sound comes towards the end of the clip when a car approaches from behind me. In this alley the snow has piled up and created trenches from where the cars drive through. Melting snow and a recent rain fall had filled up these trenches with water, creating an almost two-track river in the alley. When the car passes me, it goes right through a huge puddle that sloshes and reverberates. If you can ignore the engine noise and concentrate on the sound of the water displacing from the car, it actually sounds pretty cool. It almost sounds hollow at one point that echo's off the nearby brick walls.

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City Noise

Although this sound is common find in any city scape, I found this sound to be interesting given my location. It was late evening on an unusually warm February day. I was only down on the River Walk behind the park across from Newberry Blvd. Here, I am not all that far removed from the buildings and streets, but everything sounds much farther away. The noises of a big city become reduced to a dull hum in every direction around me and only specific sounds can be picked out of the lull of far off traffic. I just felt as though I should be hearing planes, police sirens and construction noise closer to me than what I heard. It seems like I could use this clip as background noise to a video.

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