We were five-weeks embedded in Canaveral National Seashore, listening for pockets of quiet between bustles of commuter traffic overland, and overpopulated airspace above.
Our working methods combined a meticulous process of listening, recording, and acoustic analysis with off-hour conversations reflecting our intuitive response to place.
We drew inspiration from Mark Twain, John Muir, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and Doris “Doc” Leeper. If these fierce luminaries hadn't done their work, we couldn’t do ours.
Sometimes in tandem, and otherwise in sequence, we led sound walks and created soundscapes for blind youth and community members longing for quiet at Canaveral National Seashore.
Here, a pristine lagoon shares an edge with the Kennedy Space Center, but the explosive sounds of rocket launches know no boundaries. We listened. We learned. We opened our deep attention to the sounds, the stress, the silence.
Between the rockets, there were the planes. Two-hundred flight training schools in one-hundred square miles, they say. The untimely rhythm of engine stalls, steep turns, and touch-and-go practice peppers the sky above Doris Leeper’s true home, affectionately named “Capers Acres.”
The airspace is insufferably loud, and the dawn chorus fairly quiet. We wonder if there is some linkage between the two.
Do artists have a responsibility to defend the beauty that inspires their creative work? We quietly nod “yes.”
Beneath a canopy of cosmic awe, we were permeated by the natural grandeur, the abundance of time and space, and our exploration of this canvas, vast and wild. In the words of Doris “Doc” Leeper, “This is enough.”
