In selecting a field recording to study on the global soundmap website Radio Aporee, the first recording I happened upon at random turned out to be a significant and poignant one.
The recording was made at the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Prominent in the soundscape is the call to prayer, a distant musical underpinning of the human activities that are more foregrounded. Footsteps, indistinct talking in Arabic, and high birdsong feature throughout.
I was immediately struck by the poignancy of this soundscape of normalcy, prior to the recent outbreak of near-total war, and the escalation of violence between Palestine and Israel. In the dispassionate media landscape of today, it’s rare to glimpse or touch truly human moments, and hearing this recording, with its chatter, birdsong and sense of life, really helped remind me of the sanctity of ordinariness that we all so often take for granted. Rarely do we get to truly, honestly and empathetically embed ourselves in another’s life without a perspective, pollution, an authorial voice, a ‘take’ superseding it. Sound, especially field recording like this, has the potential for true empathy in this way. This is the rawest form perhaps of the documentation of human culture around the world, undivided in its attention to the random, uncontrolled events happening in that environment, on that day, in that minute.
I didn’t read the description until after I had listened to the recording multiple times, I think this greater aided my sense of immersion, having to piece together what was happening as an alien, forming my own emotional response. The description provided is as follows:
Milk Grotto St 25, Belem, Israel, Palestine. Nativity Church.
‘The chanting of the mosque is heard in the background and in the foreground a group of Palestinian policemen talking in Arabic. There is a mix of locals and tourists, mostly Christians visiting the Church of the Nativity in Belen, where Jesus Christ is said to have been born. It is a sunny and busy day and you can also hear the voices of the people in the streets and the birds.‘