What does travel sound like?

Just about everyone brings a camera when they travel, few bring microphones. Photographs are the lingua franca of travelers, and no doubt we all have a few photos that perfectly capture an experience abroad. But over the years I’ve noticed that what I remember most about my travels is not so much what I saw, as what I heard and smelled.

Rickshaw motors twisting through the streets of Cochin, wedding firecrackers exploding around Leon, the rhythmic clicking of train wheels, the hiss of Bangkok’s sky train and a million other sounds are an integral part of my memories.

However, it isn’t so much that I remember the sounds; it’s that similar sounds trigger memories of my travels better than any photograph I’ve seen.

Any time I hear the thin, tinny sound of a small car horn, I’m transported back to India; and the vapor-lock hiss of automatic doors will forever remind me of Thailand and the time the national anthem played in the sky train station and everyone in the station suddenly stopped moving and became perfectly silent.

Smell’s impact is even more powerful; I can’t smell creosote after a rain without conjuring the Arizona desert, nor can I eat tostones without returning for an instant to Nicaragua.

Sadly there is no smell-o-vision for recording scents just yet, though I suspect someone is working on it.

However, audio field recordings do offer a way to bring home the sounds of a place, and even the small microphone on modern digital cameras can capture sound reasonably well.

I was reminded of the power of sound earlier when I came across, Soundscapes, a little movie that mixes ambient sounds from Berlin, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles into musical compositions (hat tip to Erica Johansson).

Soundscapes isn’t exactly a true field recording since there’s quite a bit of mixing going on to create the harmonies, but the idea is similar and it inspired me to pull out my copy of Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1, a collection of field recordings from around Bulgaria.

The movie also made me curious to know how many of you have tried recording street sounds or other sonic landscapes in your travels. I’ve done it a few times, but I find the results aren’t nearly as enlightening as the act of recording itself — sitting down on a curb or park bench and just listening to a place has become one of my favorite thing to do on the road.

Even though I rarely listen to the things I’ve recorded, the process never fails to “show” me some little thing I would probably have missed otherwise.