- Playing
- Chicago's Memory
- From
- Carolina Wheat
Found in this instructional sound experiment is an accurately portrayed history with eerie, macabre subject matter. The listener will visit 5 downtown Chicago locations within a square mile. The female voice guides her fellow walkers through a spiritualist tour as historical facts are recalled. She also mentions supposed paranormal activity that has taken place. Scenic and tragic, the background's sonic elements pinpoint the emotion on cue. The wind?s white noise sneaks into the Windy City foot trail and takes the participant to where X marks the spot. Complete with dates and addresses, this piece could be a handy audio accompaniment for the curious and historically minded.
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Piece Description
Found in this instructional sound experiment is an accurately portrayed history with eerie, macabre subject matter. The listener will visit 5 downtown Chicago locations within a square mile. The female voice guides her fellow walkers through a spiritualist tour as historical facts are recalled. She also mentions supposed paranormal activity that has taken place. Scenic and tragic, the background's sonic elements pinpoint the emotion on cue. The wind?s white noise sneaks into the Windy City foot trail and takes the participant to where X marks the spot. Complete with dates and addresses, this piece could be a handy audio accompaniment for the curious and historically minded.
Transcript
X Chicago?s Memory X
Walk with both palms facing forward, as if you are reaching for a wall in the dark. You will feel warmth, breeze, chills, tingles, vibrations, throbbing and other sensations; breathe with your hands. Spirits will surround you. In this tour, you will visit sights with a disastrous Chicago history; understand that you are not alone. Be aware of sensations intermingled with present day energies, sounds and structures. You will be standing where tragedy, death and fear is still alive, through memories and thought forms. You may choose to be a receiver for their horror, or you may quietly reflect, transmitting sympathetic curiosity.
X #1
Our tour begins at 24 W. Randolph at the now named Ford Center for Performing Arts, the marquee still reads Oriental theater. This structure has been built on the land where the Iroquois theater once stood before it...
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John Biewen
Posted on July 06, 2007 at 11:39 AM | Permalink
Review of Chicago's Memory
An interesting experiment that doesn't come off too well. We're taken on an audio walking tour of locations in Chicago where people died in historic disasters. There's music, traffic sound, and sound effects of screams and moans accompanying the descriptions of grisly deaths by fire, drowning and asphyxiation.
Carolina Wheat can write and has a very good voice, but her narrator's tone is hard to decipher. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to feel compassion for these unfortunate victims of mayhem, or whether her persona was meant to be ghoulish as in a deliberately tacky/campy piece for Halloween. The sound effects seem to support the second impression.
The other overwhelming problem is poor production values. There's lots of distortion and p-pops in the narration, and all of the other sound is just as bad. I wanted to give this experiment a chance, but it's just too hard to listen to.