Once again, I found myself sitting in Kensington Park. Having forgotten my pen, my bag contained not a single writing instrument. I had just used the space bar on my laptop to record the sounds I heard, a method that proved limited, capable only of capturing the rhythmic patterns of what I heard, not the types of sounds themselves. Sounds were abstractly simplified into black squares on a horizontal time axis, yet this made them visible. Today I still heard the same bird calls, the same footsteps of runners, the same honking horns, the same engines starting, the same wheels rolling over pavement. Yet everything felt vividly alive again.
I recognized some bird calls as distinct from before, only the crows remained consistently sharp. One landed on the bench where I sat, looking clever with a spirited gaze. Its caw as it flew away startled me with its volume. That bird with the white belly looked beautiful gliding down from the tree. I had noticed it before: some people’s footsteps were heavy, others light. These subtle differences still stood out clearly to me now. I placed the black square bars together for observation at different scales. When the time scale was 30 seconds, the rhythms of each voice part were distinctly different. Overall, they didn’t form a pattern significant enough to be called eerie.
Rhythm recorded with spacebar, 2025.
But as the time scale gradually increased to 60 seconds, 120 seconds, 240 seconds, the distinctions between the different sections diminished significantly until all the black squares merged into a thin, intermittent line. At this point, only the continuous sounds stood out. I recall that the longest continuous line of black squares came from a car with an exceptionally loud engine, its sound dominating my world for a full minute. What baffled me was that my feelings in this moment differed from the last. I’d grown more familiar with this park, and people were doing the same things. I never reread what I wrote, only recording my impressions honestly as always. I wondered why sound mattered so much to me here. Because all the benches faced the park, not the street, and because I could sense events unfolding even while sketching or taking notes with my head down.
Is witnessing events that significant? Rarely, a helicopter passes directly overhead—proof that even lingering in the same spot brings occasional novelty. I spot a child swaddled in a blanket resembling a laptop sleeve, so adorable. I remain equally astonished by people’s varied attire and walking speeds, distinctly different, yet somehow the same.