Griffintown

I really enjoyed the Griffintown sound walk. It was interesting and informative and well formatted. It also surprised me in many ways. Since I did the walk in the late afternoon through to the early evening, I didn't think that I would be able to hear many isolated or ambient sounds. However, every time I stopped during the walk to listen, both when I was instructed to and of my own accord, I found my ears picking up a large range of noises. Of course there was noise from the cars and trucks going by, and the trains coming in and out of the station. But there were other softer noises that seemed to be crisper and clearer in the neighbourhood. The sound of the wind rustling the trees and going down the streets, the sound of my footsteps on the pavement, these sounds became suddenly more prominent.

I didn’t realize before how much noise other people make when you walk by them. You always hear snippets of their conversation, their breathing or the sounds their clothes and shoes make as they walk. I only encountered three other people on this walk, two elderly women and one man walking alone in the other direction. Their ‘people sounds’ caught me off guard since my ears had become accustom to hearing the noises made by the buildings. This might sound a bit odd, but I realized that buildings DO make noise; it’s just very subtle. I was able to pick out the creaking of the walls and the whistling of the wind around the doors, and that these sounds were more obvious in some buildings than others.

At certain points in the walk, I found myself getting so involved in the walk that there were times when I wasn’t able to distinguish what I was hearing in real life and what I was hearing from the recording. There were several points during the walk where I half-expected the people who were talking in the recording to show up and for the events to actually start happening. This occurred during two parts in particular: when the residents were describing the plane crash and when I was sitting the remains of the church. For the plane crash, the whole time I was staring at the courtyard behind the student residence building and imaging what it must have looked like when the plane actually crashed into the ground and burst into flames. I was saw something similar happen to a car that had rolled into a ditch and the image has stuck with me every since, so I kept reliving that accident while I listened to the narration.

During the story about St. Anne’s church, I began to feel very sad and a bit melancholy. I’ve never been a regular churchgoer, but I’ve always loved being in churches and admiring them. Although the neighbourhood had begun to collapse a decade before, it felt that it was really when the church was gone that Griffintown really became extinct. It made me sad to think of all the people who had lost all their cultural and historical memory because it had been attached to the church. It also made me realize the importance of those communal meeting places in my own neighbourhood and how vital a role they played in my upbringing. It was both sad and inspiring to see what has become and Griffintown and I really appreciated what Lisa has done with this soundwalk.