What is Headed East?

On October 1, 2017, I left San Francisco to circumnavigate the world headed east. I did not use an airplane. After time on four continents and two oceans, I made it home on August 25, 2018..

While traveling, I collected sounds.

City sounds, linguistic sounds, musical sounds, travel sounds, environmental sounds, as many sounds as I could find. Sirens. Restaurants. Parks. Birds. Street music. Church bells. Construction clangs.

Upon returning home, I will make a 24 hour soundscape to bring you around the world in a day.

The route!

Here are some useful links for getting around this website.

How it all began...

I was a wee lad of 20 sitting in my dorm room on the outskirts of Osaka when the idea for this project began to form in my head. The sounds I had been exposed to every day for months on my semester abroad were familiar to me now - language and transportation come immediately to mind, but it was also the little things, like the dings at the store when ringing up groceries.

One of my most prominent memories of Japan is the chant of "Saireya Sairyo" that I heard at the Kurama fire festival. That chant only happens on one particular street in the entire world on one particular night every year. To me, that sound more than any picture defines the fire festival.

Over the next five years, I continued to realize how important sound was to place for me. I love to sit in silence and just listen to the world around me. When I close my eyes, I find that every voice, every train, every bird call, every dull hum or sharp crack is recognizable if I listen hard enough. I hope to share that experience with others. We don't only need sights to understand a place.

I also have a hypothesis that culture changes slowly over geography, and that that change can be shown with audio as deftly as with imagery.