Everything is tactile

Walking through Picadilly Gardens early this morning, during that period when the city is just waking up, everything and everyone is drowsy, there is calm in the air. Sounds which are normally abrasive when contributing to an intrusive barrage of city noise are clear, soft and understandable. I feel much more in tune with the machinery of the city than I ever have before, everything is tactile.

A hundred Footsteps fall in and out of rhythm, varying materials, weights and speeds each creating uniquely audible sounds, but also acting the role of multiplicity in this grand travelling soundscape. The distantly walled space of Picadilly Gardens provides a perfect space to hear all the individual steps gently touching concrete, subtly reverberating, merging and dispersing.

They are joined by the rhythmic lap and drag of plastic wheels rolling over jagged terrain, exhales of air from the lonely buses, some sharp and loud, others soft and drawn out, interrupted by the high pitched aching squeal they emit upon start up, overtaken by the low warm pur, roar and stutter of the engine breaking into motion.

Its a lovely feeling to be able to appreciate and feel in touch with sounds that so often irritate and confuse me, and also to hear so clearly how the pieces of my daily soundscape fit together. Give it another hour and many of these sounds would be inaudible, or at least their subtleties would be as they merged together making it difficult to hear how everything finds its place.

I guess this is also what it means to hear space, the space between sounds that enables us to distinguish one from another, to locate its source, hear its impact and resolution, but also to hear the acoustic space of our immediate environment, the walls, buildings and pathways that absorb and reverberate in their own special ways.