Sound Trip in the Town of Griffin

It was a stressed me who arrived at Griffin Town Monday night. Hectic week, last minute assignment... Maybe I should walk more often at 70 beats per minute, as required by Lisa's very soothing voice, it definitely slows down life. Before arriving in Griffin town, I just wanted to run through the neighborhood, get to the end of the path and take a picture of me smiling: I was here, I did it. As soon as I turned my Ipod on and heard the man signing, I couldn’t stop smiling. Take me back to Griffin Town too; there is so much to see.
Rule #1: Be Careful, you are moving in a real environment. When I turned on William, I wasn’t sure if the experience and the neighborhood were real anymore. I had never experienced Montreal in such a way. J’étais dépaysée. As the people on the soundtrack were relating the sound of the horseshoe hitting the cobblestones, an actual horse passed by, slowly. Surrounded by the industrial buildings, the cars, the empty parking lots, and the electrical wires, the horse seemed detached from the environment and I just thought: this soundscape is awesome. In about 6 minutes of sound juxtaposition and story telling voices, Lisa captured the essence of the neighborhood. The past intermingled with the present. The natural, the living, slowly stepping on the dead concrete.

When I heard this man talking about how the new buildings refresh the neighborhood and the other people talking about how depressing Griffin Town now was, I really thought that this assignment was made this way. Paradoxical, contradicting stories that resemble the neighborhood, a neighborhood with a past and a present, a landscape both beautifully fascinating and ugly. I wondered: Who would like to live here? I mean, it is truly desolate. I tried to imagine it during the daytime and it didn’t make it better. I thought about the rain, the fog, the grey and the brown. I thought about empty parking lots and dark alleys. It’s sad how the warmth of the past can dissipate so quickly. From what I’ve seen of Montreal in the past three years, the conservation of history and the celebration of actuality is a lot accountable for the eclectic ambiance of the city. Our campus, to me, is the perfect example of this multitemporal blend with the brand new Communication and Sciences Building and the old buildings right next to them. It just makes the city so much more interesting.

To stop and listen. I love stories. Whether they come from random children in the metro, from elderly remembering their colored past, from homeless talking about the hard street life, I stop and listen. But these days, they don’t even start the conversation since I pass too fast in front of them, running from one place to the other. Now, when Lisa actually asked me to stop, I did. And I listened. The reminiscence of people talking about the plane crash and the actual recreation of the crash made the story very powerful emotionally. It was worth stopping for a few minutes. Take the time to look around, observe instead of looking. I swear, this assignment really did me some good. Like a yoga class, that you have to take “time for yourself”. The desolate surroundings and the raucous voices of the old men telling the story made this moment very surreal, once again. It was like a timeless moment in a timeless area. It was as if the neighborhood has been removed from its past and then someone gave it back.

I think this surreal feeling is more like the feeling of being IN a movie. I sometimes think about it when I have those movie moments. For me (because I know that we’ve been influenced so deeply by movies that most people have those moments) it happens when every element seems to act on each another. As if, people, buildings, clouds, conversations and moments have been placed on my way for me to see them. With my headphones on, listening to the story of the place crash, I had this egocentric feeling of being in a movie. I was in a kind of 4D space or a video game in which I had a sensory experience that was not only limited to the eyes and the ears. It was freezing, empty, desolate and the sounds accompanying the recreation of the plane crash seemed hot, violent, charged with emotion, The cold breeze and my frozen feet definitely added intensity to the experience, as much as I thought my empty stomach was metaphorical given the circumstances.

Finally, after I had discovered the neighborhood and had realized that it was a sad part of Montreal, I stepped back and thought that what Lisa has done is really impressive. It challenges my notions of what can be done with sounds or in the sound field and made me think about the endless possibilities of the field. Not only was I really happy that Lisa made this project and gave life back to the area but also happy to discover another very interesting way to interpret the past. We are so accustomed to movies and history books, the latter which often leaves little room for interpretation, that it was refreshing to me to participate in an assignment that left room for interpretation and a lot of dreaming. It was in the end, a really cool assignment. And I thought the project itself was very complex and it was layered with so many different meanings: the accuracy of orality, the credibility of tales, the superposition of sounds, ambiance, and times I feel like I would go back on a summer day or a rainy spring evening and my experience would be completely different. It was open to different interpretations and brought about interesting emotions and thoughts in my mind.