Sound-walk

             The soundwalk is an exercise that absolutely everyone should try. Before venturing out into the outskirts of my neighborhood I went over the thought of taking a stroll in order to just listen. To me that is very much undermining the whole experience of the urban landscape. The city offers so much, not just to see but to hear and smell and touch. To focus on one would be to just consuming one ingredient. While it is true that some of us are moving so quickly and so often that we take for granted some of the things that surround us daily, so in order to really appreciate and accentuate the neighborhood I chose to go to one of the noisiest parts of Inwood in uptown Manhattan at a time where there is not a lot of people on the street. At 1 a.m. probably in any other city in America there wouldn’t be as many people out in the street on a Wednesday night as there is here but this what makes this city special. I chose to walk down Nagle Avenue which is under the train tracks of the 1 train. Every 5 to 10 minutes the faint sound of the train gets almost too loud then becomes faint again, flowing from foreground, to surrounding you to background.  There is the occasional yell in the local rhetoric ‘yeeoooo’ responded by a very similar one back in an inverted inflection. As I approached the biggest street in the neighborhood the sounds grew louder and more invasive. There were more cars, more people and not to mention the trains kept coming. At times it was so overwhelming to the point where I had to stop and regroup in order to stay focused.