Creating the Old Well Soundscape
In Social Geography, everyone learned from each other. The students taught the Eclipse Cohort the geography practice of Emotional Mapping, and Caitlyn Swett introduced a series of sound-making practices to the group as a whole. Caitlyn led the class and the cohort through a series of exercises to foster close listening and taught everyone how to gather field recordings of central campus. She then used these recordings to create the soundscape that became an integral part of the Old Well Sound Walk.
ATTUNING TO SOUNDS AND THE BODY
Before diving into the business of capturing field recordings, the class learned how to somatically attune to the sounds around them. In conversation with Taylor, CPA’s Southern Futures Archivist, Caitlyn shared that supportive collaborators were a crucial part of her journey toward sound-making. She said those collaborators had showed her how accessible sound could be. She sought to pass these lessons on to the class and the Cohort at large. As part of this effort, she drew on composer Pauline Oliveros’ highly collaborative deep listening practice as a blueprint. “We all have access to sound making,” she said. “We all have a heartbeat. We all have breath. We all have a sense of rhythm, or a rhythm. We all have a sense of tone and access to toning.”
She began the attunement process by leading the class in a sound meditation wherein everyone could sensitize to the sounds they were hearing. With the class arranged in a circle in Gerrard Hall (the fourth-oldest building on campus), she instructed each person to silently choose one sound in the environment to listen to. Then, after a while, the participants opened their awareness to all sounds, or, as Caitlyn put it, “the whole symphony of what is going on.” Caitlyn instructed the class to notice the nature of the sounds: What was going on in the textures of sounds? Were they looping? Were they pulsing? Were they coming and going? Sitting quietly inside Gerrard, the students gained greater awareness of the many sounds present in various environments.
Once everyone had attuned to the sounds around them, Caitlyn helped the class turn inward. She instructed the students to listen and feel for their heartbeats, and to translate them into rhythm-making through foot-tapping, hand-clapping/patting, or some other body-made sound. The class then proceeded to practice vocalizing together, beginning with an attempt to make a similar tone at the same time. Caitlyn used these somatic sonic exercise to help students move into an embodied place where they could collectively produce sound. “When you’re making sound as a group, it’s a lot less scary in some ways. I think that practice in particular, the evolution of the circle, was an experiment in weaving our ability to make sound,” Caitlyn reflected.
Once aware of the sounds beyond and within them, the students transitioned to walking around Gerrard Hall at different speeds. They ended this portion of the practice by slowly walking around the inside of the building. They then brought the slow walk practice out onto central campus, progressing outside in a silent line. Moving at a pace that was radically different from that of a bustling campus, all while being hypersensitized to sounds, was a challenging, enlightening experience. Some passersby stopped to stare, while others hesitated, unsure if they were allowed to walk between participants. Together, the class created, in Caitlyn’s words, “a kind of small chaos by moving at a different pace.” This disruption to the normal pace of campus was a practice that the group would continue and expand upon with the final Old Well Sound Walk that occurred a few weeks later.
GATHERING FIELD RECORDINGS AND WEAVING THE SOUNDSCAPE
As a sound artist, Caitlyn uses sound meditations, deep listening, and field recordings to orient the work to place. In an intentional effort to make her practices more transparent and accessible, Caitlyn showed the group how to make field recordings of campus from their phones. After the slow walk, she explained that they would be making a series of three recordings. The first would be a field recording of sounds on central campus. The second would be a recording mimicking or recreating some of the sounds the group had heard. The third recording would be a voice-note reflection on the experience as a whole. The field recordings allowed the group to be in a place and become sensitized to sound, even while capturing particular experiences of that place. The second recording, wherein participants translated observed sounds, was a way of creating embodied sound. Participants hummed, whistled, and used found objects to mimic the sounds they’d witnessed. The final recording included stories, reflections, and impressions on the experience. Jasmine Powell made a beat, Cortland Gilliam recited an original poem, and student Evelyn Moses gave a powerful reflection on nature and consciousness. These reflections, in addition to the field recordings and recreated embodied sounds, were the raw materials that Caitlyn used to build the Old Well Soundscape.
Caitlyn took the recordings made by the group and listened to them on repeat. While listening, she created timestamps on the recordings to note moments that seemed like they could be incorporated into the soundscape. The first thing she noticed was the ringing of the bell from the Morehead-Patterson Belltower on campus; the group captured field recordings in the afternoon, and the 2 o’clock toll was captured in almost every recording. Caitlyn layered, slowed, distorted, and collaged the sounds created by the group to create a soundscape of central campus that would then be played in the very location where it had been captured. Caitlyn designed this first portion of the soundscape to invite those who listened to tune into their environment and the sounds that were collected around the Old Well. This primed listeners to hear the stories from the Black masons of Chapel Hill as documented in the Jackson Center oral histories—the base materials for the second portion of the soundscape.
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Danny Cowan recording on McCorkle Place. -
Leiha Edmonds sits on a bench to capture a field recording. -
Betsy Olson uses twigs to mimic sounds she heard during her field recording. -
CJ Cuitt documents the sounds of campus. -
Evelyn Moses records the sounds of campus. -
Annie Elledge mimics bird sounds with a whistle. -
Rachel Ciampoli mimics sounds she documented during her field recording.
LISTENING TO THE PAST: STORIES FROM BLACK CHAPEL HILL
The sounds of campus, combined with the insightful poetry and spoken words of Cortland and Evelyn, invited the listener to lean a little closer and pay closer attention to the stories of the Black masons that followed. “The idea was to kind of prime folks through sound to be open to listening to things that they didn’t know about or hadn’t considered,” Caitlyn shared.
The students had spent a bulk of the semester processing the oral histories of Black masons collected by the Marion Cheek Jackson Center. They had shared these recordings with Caitlyn, noting moments that felt particularly relevant to the work the group had been undertaking. Caitlyn then listened to the oral histories and noted sounding words like “spreading mortar, or mixing mortar, or laying brick, or laying stone.” Caitlyn incorporated these and other moments into the soundscape, discovering themes as she went along. “Something that struck me was someone speaking about the St. Joseph male chorus, that it was something that they started,” Caitlyn said. Caitlyn also recalled that Jackson Center Oral Historian Kathryn Wall had explained the importance of faith leadership in the Northside communities, and how the Center had plans to build a neighborhood gateway honoring the community’s Faith Leaders, just as it had honored the Freedom Fighters. In addition, Caitlyn recalled Cohort member Jasmine Powell placing her hands on Pearson Hall (originally built as the first chapel on campus by Philemon Hodges, a free African-American from Hillsborough), during an Emotional Mapping exercise, just as a chorus of voices rose in a hymn. In the oral history given by Marian Cheek Jackson herself (used in the soundscape), soft spirituals can be heard coming from the radio in the background. This undercurrent of faith, and its expression through voice and sound, was something that Caitlyn wanted to incorporate into the soundscape.
In this document, you can see the Jackson Center oral histories that the students selected for Caitlyn to use for the soundscape. Topics of note were indicated in the columns on the right:
While she couldn’t find any recordings of the St. Joseph male chorus, she did unearth a WUNC interview from 1978 in the archives of the University’s Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library. In this interview, the Badgett Sisters—a trio of singers from Yanceyville, NC—spoke about a jubilee gospel festival and sang in the Jubilee style (unaccompanied vocal harmonies). Since giving voice to the Black communities that built and still maintain the University was a central part of the work of Social Geography, Caitlyn felt the full potency of these striking, unaccompanied Black voices. She went to SoundCloud to find a recording from the Badgett Sisters to include in the soundscape. The sisters’ rendition of “Just a Little While to Stay Here” was particularly relevant. “I was drawn to [the music] initially because of the practices of slowing down we had been engaging with via the class,” Caitlyn said. “They also speak about labor. They speak about the end of that labor being death.”
After finding the song, she conducted some research to learn more about its context. She discovered it was written by Eugene Monroe Bartlett, a white gospel composer who founded the Hartford Music Institute. Caitlyn reflected on how the song spoke to labor, and how that message related to central campus, which was largely built by enslaved laborers, who probably worked until their deaths. Though this message may not precisely align with what Bartlett and the Badgett Sisters were attempting to communicate, it resonated perfectly with the Old Well Slow Walk and the ideas the class had grappled with all semester.
Sensing this resonance, Caitlyn slowed and reversed the Badgett Sisters’ voices. She then wove them into the soundscape (this can be found around the 26:40 mark). She paired the Badgett Sisters’ voices with the sound of water in a well, the textural sounds of clay tiles, and the sounds of digging and packing bricks on a quarry. In the soundscape, these tonal collages make way for excerpts from the Jackson Center oral histories collected from the descendants of Black stone and brick masons. The histories talk of the construction of the campus and relate stories of intergenerational skill and resilience. They give voice to a central part of the campus that too often remains unknown. Mrs. Marion Cheek Jackson talks about her ancestor Ruby Cheek, an enslaved man who built stone walls around the campus. Mr. William “Smitty” Smith muses on the skills needed to be a good mason. Other voices discuss family-owned mason companies, the artistry required to make sturdy, beautiful rock walls, and the pride held by generations of stonemasons in Chapel Hill. The voices from the Northside are supported by soft, tonal loops, inviting listeners to slow down and enter a meditative state as community members tell their own stories. The presence of the voices documented by the Jackson Center oral histories bring a focus to the communities, lineages, and individuals who were and remain integral to the creation and maintenance of some of the University’s most prized landscapes.
The soundscape, paired with the practice of slow walking around the Old Well, invited people to slow down and resist the quick pace of life at the University—a place complicit in the erasure of vital Black labor. In deliberately slowing down and listening closely, the students and Eclipse Cohort members created a space where people could sensitize to place and understand the stories held by the landscape.