I chose to record the sounds of the Durham Freeway for two main reasons, 1) I literally couldn’t leave my apartment after the lockdown was announced so I had to choose a sound that I could access, and 2) I have heard the freeway every single day since I’ve been back in Durham. Thus, it has become a part of my daily routine, and daily experience being back at Duke during this pandemic.
In this particular audio clip, I recorded at noon from my windowsill in my apartment. At this time, there aren’t that many cars and this is usually what I hear until around 5pm when the amount of cars starts to increase more. Therefore, the sounds you hear are just smaller cars driving along the freeway, which to me sounds a lot just like white noise at this point. The cars don’t come in a uniform pattern, so at some points you’ll hear more loud groups of cars rushing on the freeway and other times it’ll be close to silence. There’s also the noises of me accidentally hitting my phone against my blinds, which was definitely not intentional.
During this pandemic, I have gotten really used to staying in my apartment, forcing me to become familiar with the rushing of the freeway. I’ve also become much more accustomed to traveling around in cars and actually being on the freeway because I live off campus. While the noise of cars and traffic is something that I’ve grown up with at home, the freeway at Durham is different, sounding more empty and filled with less honking. I’ve learned to hear of it as background noise throughout the day, although I’ve noticed that I can hear the noise more clearly at night, perhaps because I can’t see the outside in the dark, so I focus on hearing sounds more. Some of the absences in the audio include the large trucks that make loud banging noises (probably from the cargo that bounces on the back). And other times there are the obnoxious sports cars or motorcycles that make an overabundance of screeching noise.
It’s somewhat difficult to try and describe the noise of a highway because it’s something that most people are really familiar with, but can’t really put to words. I’m not sure how to describe it other than white noise or the occasional honking, so I think that certain sounds, particularly ones that we learned to block out, are best captured through recordings.
I chose this image because it was taken from my couch, which is usually where I do work and take some of my Zoom classes and the distance from which I typically hear the freeway. I wanted to depict the actual distance I am from the freeway to better visualize exactly where I’m located in relation to it.
