This is a “good-for-nothing” field recording project, capturing the soundscapes of eight weathered urban districts along the Yangtze, where local folks still dwell and speak their traditional dialects. What sort of sonic world did our old living environments hold? We can only piece together glimpses of ordinary people’s daily lives through slivers of soundscapes. Even at the tattered end of an era, these sonic traces reveal the grain of change, and so we have this “useless” collection. The sounds of streets, lanes, alleys, and quarters always set my heart racing, but the people living in them likely take it all with a quiet shrug. It’s me, hovering by the recorder, who stirs their puzzled glances. Even a little more poetic textual flourishes would only add a cloying excess to these ordinary folks’ soundscapes. The commonplace and the serene are the sound designer’s most crucial lessons. A curiosity for the rich diversity of regional cultures is the vital force that propels a sound creator.
