We encountered a struggle early on in our making process: our recorder’s batteries somehow died. One of our brilliant solutions to this was replacing the rechargeable batteries, before realizing that wouldn’t work. (Anna dug through the trash to reclaim the old ones.) We returned to the sound office and exchanged it for a new one, then began our journey.
First, we created bad audio. We used a fan as background interference noise while recording a mock interview question on a phone audio app, and then explained this clip.
Next we went down the hill and recorded a few different things that we thought were possibilities for each of the categories (non-human, human, and made.) Downtown Easton seemed like a good idea for thoughtful sound recordings. We recorded the Bushkill, the dam on the Bushkill, and various sounds of cars driving past. One of the car recordings became our Made World. We went to the Easton Public Market for dinner and recorded sounds as we walked around there; one of these clips became our Human World. Finding audio to record for the Human World and Made World was easy; the great challenge was the Non-Human. This was disturbing. We knew Easton was a city environment, but we couldn’t find something ‘natural’ to record. We kept remarking on this as we walked, frustrated that any recording we made was contaminated with cars. Even the sound of the Bushkill was unnatural, dammed by humanity.
We were slightly dejectedly walking back up the hill to try to find something natural on campus, when we heard the sound of crickets. We stopped here, recording their chirping; that became our Non-Human World.
