Thursday, April 3, 2014

Sound Walk through Maspeth-Blog #2

Blog #2


For my sound walk, I decided to go around the small industrial town of Maspeth, located in Queens, because of the mechanized feel to the environment. The area is grim in sense of color as most buildings are charcoal gray warehouses. However, one walk around the area and I began to realize that the sounds of Maspeth reveal another side to this dystopian town. Maspeth began to show signs of life through my eardrums.


As I took my first few steps down the long roads, I heard the most ubiquitous of noises; that of forklifts constantly being in reverse and loading/unloading hauls. The prevalent beeping of forklifts plays the drums of the streets. Above this backdrop of boisterous beeping, you can hear orders being shouted which involved curse words from multiple languages. At times, you can sense that you’re in a melting pot of cultures simply based off the profanity. The profanity almost serves as vocals to the drum-like peeping of forklifts. In addition, there was the shutting of large metallic garage doors once workers were finished shipping out orders in their massive Mack trucks. Although it may have seemed like a general clusterfuck of noises, these numerous sounds define the blue-collar urbane haven of Maspeth.

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