Sound byte transcriptions from Flinders Lane
Flinders flow
Words by Rebecca Maxwell & sound design by Michael Kelly.
[Audible traffic light signal ticking over slowly, then switching to rapid ticking in 'Walk' mode. Ticking dissolves into an electronic sound wave with an abstract musical quality, out of which a woman's voice emerges …]
Rebecca reciting her poem:
Along narrow Flinders Lane
vehicles ooze westward between parked cars,
longing to leave the creeping glacier,
longing to thaw through Elizabeth Street,
to feel the freedom of its width southward,
but still the morass of traffic oozes –
slow, slow, slowly –
craving for smoother flow in Flinders Street,
and to move without cramping stops and idling.
But even Flinders Street coagulates.
On Friday afternoon, morass becomes freeze!
And every car wishes
To unFriday the week!
Thinking in braille
Sound design by Michael Kelly
Andrea [with echo]: It's really strange this braille business. When I think about braille I realise that I actually think in braille. Just talking now, I'm visualising … tactualising … is there such a word? … umm … what I'm saying, in braille, as spelled words. I don't know whether people with sight, think in print when they talk to one another.
[Click-clack of braillers and murmur of voices.]
Jodie: I could not live without braille … umm … it's … it's … it's the way I read basically so … umm … and sometimes that I communicate … umm … so it is extremely important.
[Sound of braillers - Perkins and Mountbatten - and background conversation]
Rebecca [with echo]: But anyway, it can be done. The sense of touch is such a real thing, yeah.
[Sound of background conversations, then fade out.]
Loving Louis
Sound design by Michael Kelly
Andrea: When I read braille … umm … because I've read braille for so long, I find it easier to remember things that I've read. When I listen to synthetic speech, I have to stop and note-take, as I'm going through. I can't read right to the end and then write a summary of a chapter. I have to do it as I go.
[Background hum of conversation]
Rebecca: It's still braille. Y'know, braille is about a six-dot system. Fantastic. I love Louis Braille.
Braille is not just about reading books. It's the nearest thing to the white stick and fifty times more important, to empower me despite blindness.
I love words but I'm also hurt by the misuse of words.
[Sound of braillers and conversation in background]
Food and jazz
[Sound of live jazz close by and the babble of outdoor crowd]
Deb: Ok, we've just walked back up from the river now and we're back in the sun and there's some jazz playing. We're in amongst the food and wine festival now and you can smell sausages being baked … cooked … ah … barbecued. And it's a … 3-piece band, is it?
Guide: Yes. One guy on the drums, one on a keyboard and one on a … I don't know … is it a bassoon or a cello? I don't know … one of those big tall things. A cello I think.
Deb: Probably …. I think maybe we should … maybe walk a bit more.
Guide: Ok. Now, let's take a big step to our left.
Deb: Yep … oops …
Guide: Alright, and go forward.
Deb: So it's quite a crowd of people now and there's some cooking on our left, is it … ?
Guide: Sorry?
Deb: Is there cooking on our left, is it? I can hear something …
Guide: Can you hear a barbeque hissing?
Deb: Yes, I can.
[Raspy voices on a two-way radio nearby. The jazz piece comes to an end. People clap.]
Guide: We're at a chicken stand now …
Deb: Oh, ok.
Guide: And pork.
Deb: Pork, is it?
Guide: I can smell something beautiful … ok, we're coming into a bit of a … it's a narrower part now and we've got a few prams coming and some steps on our right. So we'll need to … we might have to stop for a sec.
Deb: Now I can smell some onion somewhere, some more cooking.
Guide: Alrighty, we're about to come up to one of those speed hump sort of plastic things again
Deb: Ah yes …
Guide: So it's here - I'm on it now
Deb: Yep, got it …
Guide: Alrighty … and a drain I'm on …
Deb: Yep, got it …
Guide: Ok. Now we're back at umm … Swanston Street, I think it is.
Deb: I can hear the …
Guide: So, we're facing the Clocks Restaurant …
Deb: Which one?
Guide: Umm … The Clocks, at Flinders. Just across the road.
Deb: The Clocks. Ah yes.
The past in the present
Sound design by Anne Walton
Nikita (speaking slowly, carefully and with a strong Russian accent): There were people firstly riding … ah … ah … horses … and going in wagons, because otherwise … ahh … horses and wagons wouldn't be here, because they just remind about what happened to Melbourne a long time ago. Not exactly this object, but there were similar ones before.
[In the background, a mixture of sounds - the click-clacking of brailling machines, the rhythmic tick-tick of an audible traffic signal, a car accelerating past]
Rebecca: The sense of change for Melbourne that I was aware of was that once there were smells of fish and chips and pies in Swanston Street and Flinders Street and Flinders Lane and nothing much else in the way of food. Now the predominant smells are …
[Audible traffic signal in background switches to rapid ticking of 'walk' mode]
… in one area the smell of coffee and parmesan cheese …
[An electric tram moves off smoothly on its metal tracks]
… and in another, lovely Chinese food. So yeah, that was a development with people coming.
[Click-clacking of braillers, their carriage return bells and the rapid ticking of the audible traffic signal]
Jan: I was interested in the different textures under the feet in Federation Square, where there's sort of an attempt to recreate things that have been destroyed and so there's pretend tiles of a gibber plain or smooth desert areas and hills that have been created to replace what has gone.
[Regular clicking of audible traffic signal]
Lesley: Going through Chinatown, not being able to sort of visually see what's going on and you sort of get the feeling as you walk along through there that apart from sort of … you know the sort of things that people are selling these days … you can almost put yourself back in 1800 because it's still a very bustling sort of area and not being able to understand the language …
[Car with a noisy muffler accelerates past]
… you can almost cast your mind back to being in a marketing sort of area … umm … of that type … of the 1800's …
[Click-clacking of a brailler]
It hasn't changed… y'know it's still a very bustling sort of area … it's still … umm … lots of asian sort of influences going on in that area …
[Fades out]
