http://ripeyams.com/springof1917

Working for the past three and a half months on the research and production of six historical vaudeville soundwalks has been an amazing process. While my project changed direction many times, my interest in the subject matter and the proposed product (some sort of audio tour through downtown Providence’s vaudeville landscape) remained consistent.

Initially I had thought it might be fruitful to create more abstract, less didactic soundscapes for a walk through downcity, but when I actually started tracing the routes, I realized that not only were the sounds of the street kind of generic, but that a more didactic approach might be the only way to make the historical record shine through as there are very few visual or aural traces of the many theatres that once crowded the city center. People simply don't have any idea of the history to start with.

With a more abstract or artistic approach I would have found it very difficult to fully integrate the research I was doing, or find a way to delimit its scope. I could see myself going off the deep end and losing track of the final product in an endless search for more archive material. Ultimately it became important for me to mark out a specific time frame for my archive of advertisements, the Spring of 1917, and this led me to root my sound walks around that date even though I knew I wanted to tell a broader story through the guided tour.

As I walked through downcity during my initial exploratory research, I realized that I had many strong memories rooted in the landscape, and that many of them related directly to the story I wanted to tell about the history of the buildings that have come and gone. Most of my memories of performance in downcity are actually memories of outdoor live music presented in parking lots. That these lots were in many cases former theatres gave these memories a specific spatial resonance that I wanted to bring to the fore with my soundwalks. I did this by integrating my own memories with a dryer historical record of openings, closings, and spatial data about theatres, as well as primary source material from actual vaudevillians, critics and managers in the vaudeville houses of the early 20^th century.

I decided to keep “soundwalks” as the name for these walking tours because they are largely shaped by specific music and moods that I felt while crafting them. The term may be technically imprecise, but it remains the right one.

In the coming weeks I will be soliciting friends and colleagues to pilot these soundwalks. I would like to see how they work, what they elicit and how I make my next endeavor even richer and more useful.