Grandma’s Going Birdwatching

“Grandma’s Going Birdwatching” is a soundscape inspired by a conversation that I had with my grandma. My grandma moved to North Carolina with my aunt a few years ago, largely due to feeling like she couldn't really exist in the city due to city design and lack of accessible spaces outside of our apartment. She said she loved the hustle and bustle of the city when she was younger but as she got older the noise of the city began to feel overstimulating, and it became really difficult for her to navigate the city. With this soundscape, I wanted it to be an auditory narrative, describing a morning where my grandma has to take the train to go bird watching in a park. I chose to depict this through a soundscape for a few reasons. I felt like it was the perfect medium to capture the kind of noisiness that is innate in the city, sort of like an all-encompassing noise, and in that I wanted to make a point with the sounds of the wheelchair, of the children playing, of the bustle of people, that the city should be for everyone. Choosing to do a soundscape was also me trying to empathize with my grandma’s perspective, with focusing on a soundscape I had to take a lot of notice to the ambience of the city which was a bit overstimulating at times.

In the beginning of the soundscape, I imagine my grandma taking the train, only the hidden context being that with the MTA only having about 27% of their train stations ADA accessible, she’s limited in which stations she can get on and off at. Ableism manifested into the New York public transportation infrastructure is something that inconveniences the daily life of people with disabilities. Many folks end up having to spend extra time taking longer routes just to take trains with stations that are ADA compliant or taking buses.

 Throughout her journey to the park to watch the birds there is a series of city noises but merged into the noise of the city, is her wheelchair. The wheelchair noises merge with the city, when the wheelchair hits the park pavement with the sounds of kids playing, and in the final of the soundscape, the wheelchair sound stops as the soundscape concludes with the birds. The wheelchair sound merged into the city noise was a choice I made because I wanted it to demonstrate what a park, of what a city could sound like, with infrastructure that supported universal design.

Lastly, there are a few moments in the soundscape where the noise of the wheelchair is more prominent, which I did intentionally, to symbolize a sense of “otherness” and distance that disabled folk, like my grandmother, feel in a society with normalized ableism. While the merging of the wheelchair with the city noise is the ideal, the moments where the wheelchair is more prominent serve as an opposition to the ideal. With ableism, disabled folk are reduced to an afterthought and something to be “fixed” thus rendered broken and to be gawked at. In these moments, the wheelchair noise prominence is an auditorial demonstration of a disabled person feeling this peculiar spotlight they are put under, one where they are scrutinized, hyper-focused on and yet disregarded.