Aaron Ximm

As paredes têm Ouvidos

“I am a sound artist, my interest is in field recordings, which is recording the sounds I find instead of musicians or other arranged sounds. The sounds that I like are accidents, which are not made specifically to be recorded (like when a musician plays in a studio).

I got interested in listening to and recording this kind of sound when I started to travel outside of the United States. I was already a musician and had recorded myself, but only normal instruments.

Maybe because I was an amateur musician I paid more attention to what I heard in different places and I found out that world sounds very different in different places. I discovered that I could learn a lot about places by listening to what they sound like. You could learn about the land, the wild animals, the domestic animals, the pets, the kind of work people do, the kind of songs they sing, what the language sounds like (even when I cannot understand it) and how people to talk to one another… it is a window as big as through the eyes but usually we are so distracted looking we don’t pay attention to this window.

I think it can be easier to hear things that are unique to a place when you travel, this has become a reason for me to travel. When you live somewhere you get used to the sounds, they get familiar, and they start to tell you different things. This is good because you learn to understand the sound as if it were a language, but just like your own language, you don’t really hear how it sounds anymore, instead you think about what it means.

Just like I hear maybe more of how Portuguese sounds instead of what someone is saying or how they are saying it or where they are from.When I go some place new like Nodar I hear it differently from people who live there. I don’t think I hear it “better,” of course. I just hear it freshly for a little while, until it becomes familiar. I don’t know the significance of different sounds at first but I do pay a lot of attention to what I hear.”