Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some housesitting for my neighbors. Each of the houses I’ve kept an eye on have gardens that I like to spend time admiring the scenery. I thought I might be able to capture the sonic beauty of these places that have been cultivated by friends and neighbors in the form of short audible vignettes that illustrate a hybrid garden of sorts. This composition is very narrative oriented. The beginning takes place in the morning, I briefly leave the garden around noon, and I return in the late afternoon. Many recordings are bioacoustic oriented, so there is an emphasis on being in tune with nature. Anthropophony like a motorcycle passing by and my brush scrubbing a dirty fountain appear to capture the human activity. 

The vignette style allows time to move swiftly, almost like how it feels on a lazy weekend. This also gives it a dream-like quality where pieces of it make sense in the moment but as a whole the clips blend together. The composition isn’t trying to be entirely realistic. Rather, it’s an amalgamation of memories of things. This work helped me to rebalance my future for developing not only an appreciation for nature, but an appreciation for the hard work put into making the gardens life-filled and peaceful places to spend time alone in. By reflecting in places like this, my mind is clearer and I’m more in tune with my neighborhood ambiance. 

From the start, I knew I wanted a recording that gave a tribute to the local wildlife in my neighborhood. Though I would have liked to have explored something similar to the Great Animal Orchestra, I settled on this project because I was intrigued by the idea of creating a pseudo-plausible recording that had been Frankensteined together from pieces of different neighborhood gardens. 

To achieve this, I aimed to pay particular attention to the space of the hybrid garden. I tried to create an illusion of space by including sounds of me walking around on different substances such as leaves, rocks, and pavement. I added onto this by having some sounds, like the ticking of the water hose timer to fade away as I walked away from it. To imply the passage of time, I carefully chose specific areas to include certain sounds. For example, I use my neighbor’s chicken’s clucking to imply it’s early in the morning. In the later half of the recording, I blended in crickets chirping to imply it’s approaching afternoon/evening. Besides the door sound effect, I used clips that I recorded with my phone’s microphone so as to get a better picture of what the natural garden ambiance sounds like. I also used a microphone at home to record some of my interactions with the world (being surprised by the bee, humming, chuckling at the dog barking). Through this process, I hoped to bring the listener into imagining a garden or natural space of their own. Here, I hope they might find time to tune into the ambiance, and reflect on their relationship with nature and their community.

A Day In The Garden

Conall Barber