Sound Walk.

7/10/2024

Having never done a sound walk before I found this experience extremely calming, your vision provides an enormous amount of stimulation that your brain is so used to, however when your vision is taken away from you, everything calms down. Your focus first moves onto your movement, at first it felt like every step I was taking I was falling off a cliff, but this soon went. Once you learn to trust your partner you’re able to shift your focus onto the sounds, this is when it becomes really interesting. At first we were in Greenwich Park and the walk became extremely peaceful and solitude, however we soon moved onto the Greenwich footpath tunnel, and as every sound zooms past you in an echo, the whole thing becomes a lot more disorientating and chaotic.

The difference in both locations was important to experience I think, the first walk was so beautiful and the sounds were very slow paced, natural and serene. But as you begin to enter a more urban environment, the whole atmosphere changes and you start to become conscious once again of your movement. The sounds of a city are also much less tranquil than nature and so this obviously makes a huge difference. Even just the sound of groups of people talking, all in different directions, different languages and at different paces, your brain is trying to keep up but very quickly becomes overwhelmed. Therefore you have to learn to shut out a lot and only focus on what is relevant to you, this is actually one thing i’ve taken away from the sound walk, to focus less on irrelevant sounds around me, as I find I can get very easily overwhelmed by them.