Instructions on Listening to “250 Year History of Fishing in Easton”
Please use earphones, and attach each piece into your ear.
If possible, please make your way to the Riverside Park, right below the Free Bridge, where the Delaware River can be seen.
If you are listening on iTunes, please go to the Equalizer in the Window tab, and change the setting to “Spoken Word”.
Press play, and slowly make your way toward where the overlook area near the Larry Holmes Statue, where you can see where the Delaware and the Lehigh Rivers meet.
Please make your way to outlook area of the two rivers by 2 minutes 45 seconds.
At this point, please look towards the convergence area, and enjoy the rest of the sound art.
This artwork is intended to everyone, especially to those who appreciate the long history behind the City of Easton, and those who are fond of fishing. The document being read in this piece is from 1769, and is a Proclamation made by John Penn, the Governor of Pennsylvania at the time to preserve the fish population. I never realized how much history is behind the fish preservation, especially in the Lehigh and the Delaware River. Thus I wanted this piece to make it a reminder that the fish we catch in these rivers are made possible by the people who worked on preserving the fish population even before the United States became a country.
The piece I decided to focus on was the State Theatre in Easton. The announcer is a women who did a tour of the theatre and she had an interview with the owner. I decided to do a mini history lesson of the theatre and how the theatre has developed over the years.
Instructions:
Grab a photograph that you didn’t have last class
Play the soundtrack while holding or looking at the photograph
For my soundart project, I decided to look at the consecutive floods that occurred in 2004, 2005, and 2006 within Easton. These floods devastated parts of Easton, and because their occurrences were so close in time it made it difficult for people to rebuild their lives. I wanted to capture this destruction and devastation but also the final rebuilding of Easton. This project is supposed to be listened to in a certain environment, so during class that is where we will go to hear this project.
For my sound art project I focused on the Farmers Market. I wanted to do a sound art of the timeline throughout the farmers market. Along the way, through research, I found out some very interesting facts. Such as, this farmers market is America’s oldest open aired farmers market. I was able to download sounds from different websites of old wagons and old market like noises. I incorporated the crime period in Easton that brought the market into a depressing time period. At one point there was only one vendor, and they had to hire more people in order to keep it alive. Around the early 2000s the farmers market began to pick up again, however even today it is hard for farmers market and farmers, to sufficiently make a steady income. I interviewed Megan McBride, who is the executive director of the market, and manipulated her words in order to provide more intact and dramatic effects. The end is very chaotic because even though it is a popular thing nowadays, the farmers are still struggling and it is still hard to keep the business alive.
I put the sounds on my snapchat and a lot of people thought it was a mistake, and were confused by the sounds. However, some actually reached out in person asking what it was about.
Instructions:
Get to the center square(circle) in Downtown Easton.
Put headphones in.
Walk around and listen. Side note: imagining you are walking through the different time periods the market has lived through.
