Because [of] the beaches I know from the UK—it was sort of stones—I made that connection. It’s very distinct, a very distinct visual of my feet and being quite young. And I get the sense that I probably might have been with my grandparents. Most probably my Gran actually, although I did think of my Grandpa first, but I don’t think I was, I think I was with my Gran. It’s quite, quite unusual to have such a vivid connection to that sound. Although I work with memory and sound, I haven’t had quite a distinct connection to a memory that way.
Susannah

Quite surfy, so you’d be boogie boarding. So you’re quite aware of your movements …It’s definitely really heavy. I get a sense of heavy movement.
A.S.

And it’s a surf beach, but it’s also next to a busy road—between the beach and the road. Then I often think that the sound of waves is very similar to the sound of traffic. The rhythm of it—undulating sort of rhythm—would remind me of the surf, but also of traffic. That sort of white noise, traffic in the distance. Or not so much in the distance, close by sounds to me. Surf is sort of soothing and the traffic’s interrupting, so it’s a matter of convincing myself that it’s surf. There’s also other senses involved, so you’d have light and smell too, involved in convincing [me] that it’s a surf sound.
Lizzy

…the evocation of the sea—straight away beach and also sky. Not completely concrete [images] but the evocation of it. I couldn’t say what beach exactly but the seaside. Somehow—I don’t know if it’s because of this weather—not very sunny, it felt overcast, a little bit melancholy. So maybe not the summer, hot sun kind of beach. Not many people, maybe colder, so maybe autumn, winter…Not that I was thinking of that at all when I was listening to that but I am, at the moment, reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, so that makes perfect sense.
Martin

…when I heard fluctuation of the sound, as it grew and then really quickly faded out—I realised that it sounded a lot like the ocean. It was very fizzy, foaming. It was kind of calming, I guess, because we think of the ocean as a really relaxing serene place—that imagery of the ocean and the beach—but it was actually really harsh.
Gabriella

It was a nice, everyday sound. Ah - surf? Right. Yes. That could be the traffic thing of the road, yes. Because it was wet, a wet road.
Mary

It’s something I know. I’m familiar with. Water, I like the sound. Why do we? Maybe it’s just because of the sound, maybe it’s because of what it is. Where it’s coming from. The water in this case is really soothing and all encompassing. It seems to fill up the space and then that fills you. Maybe it’s like giving you a big hug, because it’s taking up all the space—sonically giving you a big hug.
Matte

But then also, at the same time, I'm sitting by this kind of border…I’m looking down this invisible wall, or a transparent wall, where there’s lots of colors splashing in. The sound makes me feel very small. [The sound is] around me, but I’m not drowning in it. It’s kind of just all encompassing.
Alanna

And the first sort of cycle of it, as it was building, I was starting to have these images of hurricanes, cyclones, like this is getting [dangerous?]. So I felt my body getting more tense and then it subsided again. And it seemed like, okay, it’s a cyclic structure. It’s not going to build into anything too immense. So then I found myself relaxing more and then it went back to the visual image of cyclic waves crashing and dispersing, and then building again. So it was soothing at times and tense at times.
Helen

Because we’re concentrating on response to sound I observed what it did to me in my body and I felt it in my chest and in my gut to the point where I needed to just put my hands behind the head, to open my body out, rather than just sit, because I found the sound quite affecting. I mentioned that I see sound so it’s very easy to see a sound that has a known shape—from dreams, from memories, from physical practical understanding and knowledge of the sea. So of course I had the pictures that came with that, but those were associated with the knowledge, not with a kind of synaesthetic kind of feeling.
Penelope

I think of this drainage pipe at Bronte Beach which you can walk into if you’re a little kid. It almost feels like the person recording is right inside because the waves take so long to travel to the point of the recording device. And there’s this strange reverb to it that makes me think that it’s captured inside, which makes me think: how can waves be inside?
Thorsten

If you go to a sand beach, now that you’ve told me [that it’s not sand], it feels like it comes towards you and crashes and goes out, a bit more rhythmically or something. This recording has more of a flangey panning or something.
MP

Just classic being at the beach. I love it. Being near the beach, waves coming in. It’s unique to that moment obviously, but it sounds very familiar, like a sound that you picked out of the audio dictionary or something. That’s the sound of the beach but obviously every time you hear it it’s unique. It’s natural. It’s relaxing. It could go on and on and it would just have a relaxing effect. Some ambient music is a bit like that. Creates that environment. Yeah, something abut the timing of it is just really relaxing.
Michael

…and feeling nice and warm [even] when it’s not particularly warm outside at that time of morning. And feeling relaxed and knowing that I don’t have to work the next day. It’s probably more generalised, but there was one memory that sparked it when I first thought about it. We used to do envirocorps camp when I was in Year 10. That wasn’t even camping, that was in cabins, but I could still hear the beach really clearly. I said to my husband that we’re retiring by the beach because there’s something about that sound that just makes you feel relaxed.
Meghan

Normally I have earbuds, so with these [headphones] it’s like the sound is moving round, which is quite pleasant. And I just had some time at the beach so that was very atmospheric. I thought you’d done something or you’d recorded or made it in a way that made it white-noisey—that you’d taken it out of the natural and put it into the electronic.
A.

…more than normal. Which is great. It reflects that. And I take pleasure in hearing nice recordings. It’s in stereo. It’s just sort of pleasant layers of fizz and no cars in the background.
Reuben

Because it sounded like the beach and quite a ferocious wind. It was like there were two sounds together that didn't feel like they would somehow naturally fit together. But some kind of forceful nature. The [Icelandic] beaches but also the wind that they have too and the lack of trees and that exposed, open space where the wind can just rip through. It sounded like there was a lot of wind and then the waves. It's sort of reminding me of the wind on snow or ice or something like that. It's almost an abrasive sound because it's not buffeted by any nature—any sort of trees or plant life.
Kim

It feels so full and heavy. The first thing I thought—occasionally if I’m trying to get to sleep and failing—I listen to sounds around me. There’s a meditation where you zoom out from your immediate environment, sounds in your environment, and I always include one of them as the waves crashing on the beach. There are always waves crashing on a beach somewhere.
Susie

I guess my initial response is wanting to know what the sound source is: “oh, it's wind”, or, “oh, it's a whooshing sound”. And then I started thinking more about the movement of the sound. It has this quite nice whooshy flow to it that feels quite hypnotic in a way. So then I was enjoying that and found it quite calming as well. So it's a very satisfying sound, I guess, because it's quite textural, whether it is waves or not. I don't know, but there's definitely that sound when the water is going through the sand. I relate to that in a very satisfying kind of way.
Alexandra

When I first heard it, I thought that it was cars passing on a distant road, which was quite nice. That’s one of my favorite sounds, beause it actually makes me think of, lives passing and that kind of thing. It's almost a metaphorical kind of response that I have to it every time I hear it. But there was something very calming about that sound.
Matt

I was thinking there is that white noise element in it. To me, when it first happened, when I was just kind of getting into it, there was a full-frequency white noise character to it. Then on the spectrum, hissing—higher hissing sounds—but also a bass-y element as well in there too. Variation in volume. Sometimes the sound was louder and sometimes softer giving the impression of things being close or far away. I guess with that kind of movement, loudness and softness, a loose rhythm, a rhythmic element as well.
Jo

I think that had to do with the rhythmicity of it. Cars or trucks wouldn't have a sudden stopping of the envelope. It was so strangely ambiguous. I was asking the question, was it a high pitched recording of traffic with a lot of the low frequencies taken out or something? A not particularly great microphone recording of traffic? But then I thought in the end it was more like a shelly or a pebbly beach. I guess the lack of engine noise, the lack of low frequency sound, or [the fact that] the low frequency sound wasn't dominant, and this detailed, I don't know, granular, granulation of the sound. I think you can hear a highly detailed action of things hitting each other, [where] you could never specify this percussive sound or that one, but [it] becomes a myriad of tiny hittings. There is a pebbly beach down near Bateman's Bay. I think it's called Pebbley Beach. I remember maybe five or six years ago doing quite a lot of recording down there. So maybe I've had that experience.
Jim

The sound of a horse, whatever it does making [that snorting] sound. It’s quite nice. It’s quite relaxing. It’s kind of similar to when you hear people wearing high heels on the cement, but a little bit more gentle. You’d think it would be heavier, heavier [than a] person.
A.S

And we’re in the bush, in amongst trees. I’m on the horse. I had a horse when I was a kid, so yeah, I’m totally at home. And you know, we’re just moseying along.
C.

There’s a lot of them just in the general area. It seems like everyone where I live has a horse in the backyard. And just their hooves I find comforting I suppose. It’s a familiar thing. It sounds kind of trite, but it’s iconic in a way. You can instantly recognise what it is and know and associate that with "ooh horse". There’s a certain rhythm to it. I can picture my nearby road actually because that’s really gravelly. I mean it sounds like a solid surface but not so much like a concrete surface, just something that has a bit of looseness and a bit of feedback, like maybe stones lift as it moves along. It doesn’t sound like grass because it doesn’t have that sort of softness.
E.K.

…of connecting to that sense of riding. I connected more with the environment, which sounded like perhaps some lane ways. I lived in a village so it reminded me of the sound of the horses and the actual hedgerows and things like that. And I felt very elevated. It reminded me of that feeling of the Kent countryside and perhaps even that sense of being elevated from the road. If that makes sense. Yes. I might have been the rider or something like that. It wasn't a memory. It was like I was physically there, or I could imagine myself there amongst the activity that was happening, whether I was riding or I was in a carriage. It was a lot more physical and like I was on location. Whereas [sound 1] was a specific memory.
Susannah

… as humans in this. It's like a deep archetypal sound in our ancestral memory, horse. Even though most of us are not exposed to horses much, there's something I think that takes us straight back to something really evocative and atmospheric. It conjured Europe, a European landscape, and I think that was partly that the the footsteps were very soft. It felt like the foot— the horse—was walking on something soft. So I conjured a slightly damp kind of European—I didn't picture an Australian harder, dryer landscape where the hooves would have made more of a clicking sort of harsher sound. And I was listening to those birds and thinking I can't hear typical Australian birds that I know. They sounded like little birds. The whole picture conjured this really green, lush European forest and European birds, these little tiny birds, and soft ground. And it kind of took me to the European mythologies about horses, the horses in fairytales, the horses in period dramas. So it took me to some kind of historic reference.
Helen

… or if we could see wheels. If I could hear it or if that was part of the evocation. Maybe I couldn’t hear wheels but I somehow thought of that. Partly because of the birds, and I think there was a fly or insect, so a summer day, sunny. I very quickly had the carriage and it made me think of those films—France, beginning of the nineteenth century. There was something very dynamic, moving forwards and this is why I had the feeling that there were wheels as well, very much a forward motion. Different from the sea that I associated with a slightly melancholy feel, not much colour and cold, this was almost the antithesis of that.
Martin

…not the horses, but like a human breathing. But it was at a really irregular point. So I started to listen out for that because it was one of those sounds that you know is coming but you don't know when—there's a sort of irregularity to it. It was hard to get a sense of the space, the spatial distance between the sounds and whether I was there with the source of the sound. I felt like it was moving away at the end—it felt like I was there and then it moved away. So I was on the horse, but then the horse left me or something. There's something quite soothing or reassuring about [the sound]. I don't have any affinity with horses at all, but there's something about that. Something quite, I guess, earthy about it. Or there's like some sort of mythical feeling or quality of what that sound represents—horses hooves in the forest feels like a really nice place to be.
Kim

I can hear that they're horse hooves and the only other time I would have heard that is on TV. We don’t know it from hanging around horses a lot. Although I did do some horse riding when I was overseas recently. It's very recognizable—[like] when you're a kid and you're in kinder[garten] and they have the coconut shells and they're like, "it's a song we do about horsies—clop clop clop". Very recognizable. Horse shoes on bitumen. I'm not sure [about the] quality, other than the coconut shells. It's very evocative of stories. I haven't personally experienced it necessarily, but as a sound it means I'm watching telly or I'm in a story.
Elle

And I was trying work out if the recording was happening on the horse, but then it was a walk by. I could hear the stones. I was obsessed with whether it was one or two, I was trying to get in there and work it out. Were they pulling something? And then I heard the birds. But it seemed to be mostly on this side. I’m photography trained and I often think about Muybridge and the movement of the horses and that discovery that they lift all their feet off the ground.
A.

…but it feels like one dominant bird to the right. It was very much like that is happening and that is happening. It’s a different kind of natural noise and it’s soothing for different reasons. I guess knowing more about how the recording was made [with binaural microphones], that element of wonder was satisfied so maybe I’m not sitting there thinking how is this done. I guess I’m neutral on it. I like the bird. I think I was more in tune with the bird. But I guess maybe the fact that they are distinct noises in each channel, there’s something kind of off-putting with that. Maybe why there’s a slight disconnection.
D.

I don’t really like horses. Did you do this recording in England as well? It reminded me of village country lanes and things like that, because my aunty lives in Somerset and there are lots of country lanes where people take their horses and you hear that noise. But I liked the little birds as a character in that sound.
Susie

That’s only a small part for me. It doesn’t move me.
Michael

I think of horses as feral animals. I don't have a very positive political stance on horses and horse riding so that is a barrier to it sounding pleasant. I mean, the rhythm of walking and the birds are pleasant. And the horses in themselves. The neighing or the breathing out, whatever you call it, the snort of the horse. It's evocative of that warm breath and the gentleness of the creature, but there's a whole lot of political things with horses that get in the way for me.
Lizzy

You know I was even saying "clip clop". I was going this is a clip clop sound. But then I was thinking, no it’s not actually a clip clop sound. That’s just a shortcut. It was like going somewhere but not too fast. A nice rhythm and pace. And there were some tweets and there was the, what do you call that when the horse makes—it’s not the neighing sound its like the [makes a snort shiver]. I found that actually quite funny. I smiled to myself when I heard that. And I was like, this sound that is conveying me somewhere also has a personality. It’s not just going to go clip clopping forever like a machine. It might have something to say about that. It might get tired or angry or interested in something else. And spatially I noticed the birds and the horse and I was thinking of the birds like somewhere else, up, up above, or to side, up above and to the side. And the horse down below me.
Matte

…[makes snort sound]. I think that particular sound, when there’s no visual, it’s always really strange. It’s from the horse, but also, when you hear it recorded it doesn’t seem to match the footsteps. It’s weird, I reckon this particular sound is—maybe it’s just me—it’s very visual. With the [snort], there's the absence of that, but when I hear the clomping, I can picture the hooves or feet, mostly the legs.
MP

I slightly zoned out. Like the previous recording, it felt peaceful in a nice way. It’s a certain kind of sound that is so identifiable but you know I’ve probably heard it more in movies than I have in real life.
Reuben

You had the galloping in one ear and chirping in the other. And I’ve totally got the ASMR [Autonmous Sensory Meridian Response] tingles going it was such pleasant sound. Yeah it was really nice. The galloping reminded me of bubble wrap popping which is a classic ASMR technique which I’m super susceptible to. It’s very nice. It’s calming.
Thorsten

So the first thing I thought of was a carriage and horses and cobblestones. But then it sounded a lot like solid turning into liquid, as time went on. There's a consistent kind of ooey gooey sound. And that made me, think of a video game. I don't play video games. So I'm just imagining that. But then I went back to the image of a horse walking on cobblestone, pulling a carriage. But now it's in digital form and now it's a video game.
Alanna

…who had a donkey or two donkeys. She said, "you know what horse whispers do?" She said you stick your nose right next to the horse's nose and that's how they get to know you and they don't freak out. The donkeys were a bit skittish so she taught me how to actually do that. So that knowledge of what it feels like to put your nose to a horse's nose and that velvet feeling and the smell—the kind of chaffie, wheaty smell of their their mouths and their breath—the warmth of their breath. That evoked that sort of sensation, strangely to the point where my mouth watered slightly—which is a bit weird—because it's such a delicious and warm smell. There was the murmuring. I could hear a person's murmur in the recording as well, which I found curious. And the birds as these higher twisting—there was a twisting bird apart from the bird that was in the middle. It was like the horse was the base and then there was the twisting higher note and then a middle bit, some other more constant bird sound. And then the slight human voice in there. Because I could feel the horse moving directionally as well I was waiting to get to a trot. I was very excited about trotting.
Penelope

…but it comes up. It relates to the first one in a way, with the idea of travel. And there was a little bit of voice I could hear at the beginning of that as well. I think there were people talking. So again, quite pastoral sounding. I think you said it before, it's quite figurative, so it's hard to take it out of that obvious thing, other than that it signifies travelling and going from one place to another. I guess there's a little less room to dream in that one. It's quite a clear picture, whereas that first one was a little more interpretive.
Matt

So it's not in a city. So it's in the countryside somewhere and there are horses walking. They're not galloping, but they're walking on some sort of paved material, I felt could be bitumen. Or I guess it could be a hard compacted ground, but it wasn't grass. And you can hear them doing that—[snorts]—that sound that horses do. Is there no word for that? I've been thinking quite a lot about horses and Western classical music. So many of the rhythmic—I guess you'd call it an acoustemology—our expression in music, had to do with…I mean, the way the Blues in America had so much to do with train sounds and train movement, so much of Western classical music are those sort of riding rhythms that come out of horses.
Jim

And again my immediate thought—I want to start decoding what the sound is, and I kind of get disappointed in myself. I don't necessarily want to think of the image associated with the sound all the time, but that's where my mind went. At first I was like, “oh, it's ducks in water, and they're flapping about, that's cute”. And then “no, it's a pram, and someone's wheeling a pram, through a park. Oh no, it's a horse and its [that] satisfying clippy cloppy…”. Or the horse mouth sounds. I'm not really sure what it was in the end, but I really enjoyed it. It was a very satisfying textural sound again. It’s bubbly almost, even though I don't know if it had water in it.
Alexandra

I'm still not quite sure what that was. I certainly heard those high pitched bird sounds in the background there. It sounded like something, there was almost a rolling sensation of something moving across. And there's a roughness, something like a rough surface. A part of me kept on starting to think about a horse's hoof or something like that going across a rough, hard surface. There seemed to be a kind of a hollowness to the sound as well, which again made me think of a hoof. But then I realised I was actually trying to tease out what it was and [that] maybe that took me away from the listening process…I was having a bit of a battle with myself. Because it's a short clip and part of me wants to listen in, trying to find out what it is, and the other's like, just kind of step back and listen to it more as the sounds.
Jo

Maybe someone with a bucket filled with water and then tapping the side with a stick, and then as they’re moving it some water emerges. Or maybe someone with a straw—when you get to the end of a drink and you’re trying to get the last little bits. Also that [tapping the table]—something about that rhythm is kind of scraping away that last little bit of whatever it is. So that’s why I think of the straw and drink.
A.S.

Drains are fairly unpleasant things. That's where your excess—not the excess, not the rubbish…Drains are slimy and dark and your waste goes down drains. It just became an amusing bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop sound—that rhythmic…the hollow [sound] is like [makes popping noise with mouth]. That sort of thing. It's just an amusing popping sound.
Lizzy

…and someone’s used the sink and knocked a paintbrush down the drain. It’s just what immediately comes to mind because that’s what’s happened recently. But yeah, just water gurgling. I don’t find it as nice as horse hooves, but then again it’s just a sound that you kind of live with. It really does sound quite comical. Gurgling isn’t quite right I don’t think. That seems to be more sort of a gently bubbling brook whereas this is more of this [plodge, plodge plodge]. Sometimes I think there are words, but there are certain things you can’t ascribe a word to. I know that onomatopoeia is a thing—probably what I’d defer to really, is just using sound effect words as opposed to adjectives.
E.K

And it's like a slide, teeter-tottter thing. It’s hollow and it fills up with water and then once it gets too full, it tips over. That's kind of what it reminds me of. There's a toy that I saw once in a restaurant when I was a kid. It was a bird with these crazy feathers and two wooden balls. That's all it was made of, but it filled up with water and then at one point it would tip forward into [the glass], like it was drinking. I can't remember how it worked, but if it had had a sound that would have been the sound. It was really hypnotic. It was like a metronome, but it was this dumb bird.
Elle

But it’s also like tapping on a pipe with water and air in it, to get that sort of gurgling—glug, glug, glug sound [pitch descending]. At one stage I wondered if it was going to be associated with using a plunger but then it didn’t sound like that. I think it could be a really good basis for music. It’s quite a nice rounded kind of sound. It’s got a depth and a mellowness to it. Plus there’s a little bit of a random rhythm, and I know that random and rhythm are contradictory but…
C.

…it seemed like maybe it was the sound of someone doing something, rather than just water draining. It felt a little bit measured. It didn’t seem like a drain just draining for some reason. Maybe it just seemed musical.
MP

…that was doing something to the water like squelching it or pushing it out somehow. It was quite an insistent sound. But there were some parts to it—there was something that was releasing water and that was where the insistence was happening. But then there was sort of a reaction to where that water was going and that was echoing throughout the vessel.
Matte

…I could not identify exactly what that was, if that’s the water. And then there was some sort of the water coming out of the drain. Yes, that one was different from the others. I wouldn’t be able to say how orchestrated that was because it had this strong rhythm to it where I thought this was quite close to to a soundscape that is being created. I imagine that is something that you just recorded but the intervals of the rhythm and then this kind of [zrrrrooou - goes upwards in middle then down]. And then the starting of it again—it has devices, or strategies, like repetition and phrasing that are also associated with sound making.
Martin

There’s more music in it. I mean it sounds—it’s water or liquid of some description. You could have also told me that someone is plucking something or its some sort of percussive noise that you’ve applied filters too. It has a sense of rhythm even though its not regular. Because it was a more conventional stereo recording, it was easier to engage with.
D.

…and I like that physical…You can imagine what quantify of water [it is], and how its moving. It reminds me of diving under a wave a bit. Feeling bass through water is interesting.
Reuben

…or object that the water is moving through and it's gurgling with air and water being forced in some way from one area to the next. It could be some sort of pump. It reminds me of some of the underground water things you get out in the west. Bores. Reminds me of something like that, or something to do with irrigation systems.
Jim

Though something flashed into my mind at the end of it. But it was something soft tapping on maybe a harder surface—going into something hollow or coming out of something hollow. Definitely something aqueous. There seemed to be a liquid, liquid sounds coming up and a definite gurgle, almost plug-like. [A] liquid going down into something that was more enclosed from something that was more of an expanse and picking up more external sounds. It sounded like they were coming from outside the immediate thing we were listening to into that as well. I started to think [of] that as reminiscent of water glugging, or something glugging, out of a bottle or something like that by the end. But then the tapping at the beginning made me think, yeah, it sounded more like tapping.
Jo

There was obviously something that was gurgling or draining. And then there was something being tapped so the sound of the tapping happens sort of behind me. Like I was almost in a sink or something was happening around me [where] I wouldn't normally be located. So I was trying to figure out how it might've been constructed and also enjoying the fact that I was in a location that I wouldn’t naturally be. I was in the beautiful gurgling. And it was all a heady sound that sort of resonated from the head down the body, if that makes sense. It's the imagination and the curiosity, and then the physical nature of hearing something you wouldn't normally experience, trying to process that and orientate myself to that. I really enjoyed it. A musical blocked sink.
Susannah

…that it's going to start again, but I don't really know when. So it was quite—it was just too present. It was probably quite loud. It was just like an anxious, unpleasant, unnecessary sound. I didn't associate it with any object. It was just the physiological sensation of that sound.
Kim

…or whether you were scrunching up paper. I did go to plastic at one point. Because I read your [Sonolexic] iBook as well—there were a couple of references to fire in there—I was thinking is that real fire, is it fake fire like in an old radio program when they make noise. And then right near the end I thought maybe it’s like water hitting something in some particular way. At the beginning it sounded like you were going to unwrap a present or something.
A.

…which almost makes it sound wet after a while. It didn’t feel like paper crinkling, it was definitely a plastic wrapper of some sort, maybe like a chip packet. [ASMR tingles?] Not as much as the hooves clopping but I had it with just the tiny little details. The crinkling was super relaxing.
Thorsten

There was an interesting little sound near the beginning, like a sort of dull thud or something, or even like a really soft frog. It's like a frog spoke briefly and then stopped talking. Again, like the horse one, it was very emotionally warming. I even had a really subtle little bit of synaesthesia. I could very vividly imagine the smell because around here, some people have started their fires in their homes and there's been that really lovely smell. When I was out walking yesterday I was thinking about the difference between that and the bushfires smells. We've just had this massive fire experience, being just submerged in really bad air quality and really scary kind of smells. And it was interesting to be walking and smelling that smell, which is so wholesome, and loving it and thinking, it's so different to the bushfire smell. It's so distinctly different. And some of that kind of homey fire smell came to me as I was listening to that. It's very close to my nervous system that smell.
Helen

But it also reminds me of when it’s just beginning to rain, very gently, maybe perhaps on a footpath or even your rain jacket. It had that kind of quality to it like it was on a reflective material. I don’t think it was resounding enough to sound like it was on the roof. If that makes sense.
Gabriella

But then I thought of splattering fat out of a fry pan. When you put things in and its goes [tllloook]. Then perhaps something around a pond or a dam. Nothing clear though.
Mary

And I liked the panning. It’s really interesting because it’s one noise but taking up so much of the space.
Susie

Then I was trying to work out "oh, it's quite shiny". So you can hear the shininess in it. Maybe it's cardboard because you can get nice, crinkly [sounds] from stiffer paper. But [then] it was like, "no, it sounds shiny". It sounds like a plastic material, but not a soft plastic, maybe a kind of stiff plastic.
Alexandra

I don't know whether it's either, I couldn't quite tell. But it actually was really nice because it had that potential dichotomy. Whether it was the crackling of a fire or rain falling on either a ceiling or just on the side of the road, just on a piece of concrete or something like that. It had this nice—it was quite open to interpretation and mood inducing.
Matt

It sounds, sounds machinic. But like it could be wild life of some form. But it sounds more machinic. Something created by the wind. I’m not quite sure about this one. It’s got good depth.
Michael

Little sort of semi-circles that pop up—pop up and down, pop up and down, pop up and down with the crackling. And then I go practical. Is it fire? Is it plastic? Because it's not changing its shape that much, you know. The kind of thing where you try to figure out the sound, what it is—I quite like not trying to figure it out. To just to let it be its own thing. So I was interested in the duration and the consistency of the crackling. How it changed, but it didn't change radically. So I found that very interesting.
Penelope

Potato chip bags, fireplace. And I heard a little bit of wind going through the mic. So maybe it's a recording done at home, or near your home in your backyard, or something like this. So visually it's a highly contrived recording. It also makes me think of those sleep sounds that you get in meditation apps. I think this one also had a feeling of floating. I was normal sized in this one.
Alanna

And my cat likes playing with little scrunch wrappers so that’s the visual that I got. Just really high crackling. It wasn’t nice. [Laughs.] I guess, it reminded me of when you are in an enclosed space, in a picture theatre, and you’re trying to open your chips or something. It was sparking anxiety because of that. Because there's no background noise and you’re trying to open whatever packet it is without being noticed.
Meghan