Faceless Corridor & Space Without History:
An Airport Soundscape Study
Zine, Color Print, Hand Bound with string
2024 Spring
It is a warmer night in March. The sky is clear of clouds and the moon is up high.
I am far, far away from the city noises. No one is talking, laughing, walking, drinking or eating, making tickling noises, heels hitting the ground, swallowing or scratching the plate with utensils. Those are happening elsewhere, somewhere that I cannot reach and cannot reach me. I am unbothered and alone. The quietness of the world sinks into my body. Every sound happening here is blended together, nothing is unpredictable. It’s mild, gradual, quiet and peaceful.
The night makes the space seems vast and friendly. Only when the dark is kept in a small room, it is scary. When darkness are let out into an open space, it is harmonious like silk. It is draped over the sky and blocking all that is unwanted.
I can hear the sound that the road makes. It starts as a gentle humming, sizzling, like the air flow when someone whisper in your ear, hissing and warm, or like when cotton fabric rub against each other, it is dry, soft and fuzzy, ever so small but so familiar. Then it approaches, and it becomes textured, like when you are filming someone and they comes into the focus walking towards you, and you start to see the detail of their faces. The air is pushed into the thousands of tiny little holes of the asphalt road, making cracking noise like little pebbles, or when cookies is crumbled. Once in a while there will be a bigger stone in the road, maybe a twig, in contact with the rubber it makes this joyous sound as if a ripple in the pond.
The sound of the road goes right through me, approaching and leaving spontaneously, and as it leaves it makes this sound of low tide waves, with bubbling sea foam as it’s only proof of existence.
When I stare at the sky for long enough, there would be one or two stars that is moving. Then when it slowly approaches me, it shows green and red and it starts to blink. Then it appears to me that it’s an airplane, and as it slowly approach the sky above me, the giant wing of it cuts open the air and creates this loud, oval shaped sound traces behind it. It drags it across the sky and forms this invisible creature of sound that is much bigger than the airplane itself, howling, screaming at times, the texture of the sound is translucent, moving quiet and slowly in the background like a jellyfish, but also gigantic. The monster has a roaring heart, a shining core that’s unlike the surface of it’s body, pulling all the weight all at once.