I. SOUND

For the sound recording, I walked to a busy bridge over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. There were many passing cars and pedestrians walking on the bridge, which created a dynamic recording to take inspiration from. There was also a mom wheeling a stroller on the sidewalk, which created a crinkling sound that I would use in some of my pieces.

II. FIRST ITERATION

Using the sound recording, I created the first three studies. I mainly wanted to capture the sounds of the cars fading in and out while keeping elements that still related back to the fact that the sound was captured in a city. One of my friends once told me that if they closed their eyes by the highway, the cars sounded like ocean waves (so they jokingly called the highway by their school "the beach"). So, I using the idea of waves combined with some bulkier designs for the city element.

III. SECOND ITERATION

After a round of critiques, I went back to the drawing board to make these next three studies. I combined some elements that I liked from the previous elements, but I also added new designs with abstract lines that correlated to different types of movement: from the wind to the cars.

IV. FINAL PIECE

In my final piece, I took a lot of elements from previous pieces to capture everything I wanted to highlight from the sound recording. The spiral in the middle has a white and black element and can be seen as coming or going, which illustrates the feeling of the cars. The rectangles hone back to the city's buildings and also have matching inverted qualities. The dots on them relate to the crinkle of the stroller on the sidewalk and add an extra dimension of background noise. Finally, the lines on the bottom add more motion to the piece, which captures the nature of the sound recording being on a busy bridge in the city.