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sonic geographies


SP 2026 | Bay Area Creeks
  1. Catherine Arcaris
  2. Ethan Radley Bungay
  3. Gabriela Camacho
  4. Sarai Castañeda
  5. Aaron Chin
  6. Charlie Elison
  7. Alondra Garcia Sifuentes
  8. Armando Gutierrez
  9. Nadia Kuxhausen
  10. Arfa Momin
  11. Shunny Murase
  12. Connor Quinn
  13. Mahima Shyno
  14. Macy Wang

SP 2025 | Bay Area Creeks
  1. Jeannie Eom
  2. Zach Thorpe
  3. Kenza Habibi
  4. Laura Liu
  5. Soomin Cho
  6. Emma Kraus
  7. Stella Singer
  8. Jade Gao
  9. Johann Gatty
  10. Christina Jiang
Mark
Aaron Chin
GEOG126 Sonic Geographies (Spring 2026)
INSERT AUDIO FILE HERE:

Hello, my name is Aaron Chin and I was part of Spring 2026’s Sonic Geography class. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area for all my life, I’ve never fully registered the sounds around me as much as my other senses. Whenever I would travel around the bay, I would almost always have my earbuds in while listening to kpop on Spotify while staring endlessly out of the window. GEOG126 helped me learn more about the world of sound and explore the perception of different sounds in brand new ways. Walking along the creek routes throughout the semester introduced me to the creek itself, the mixture of both natural and artificial sounds could be hard to decipher at first, but after some relistening you begin to notice how peaceful things can get. Sound actually comes in many different layers. Upon hearing it at first these sounds jumbled together like monolithic background noise, and it could be difficult to sort out individual noises from each other. It's not until after you have professional equipment that you can differentiate individual sounds and clear out most of the white noise.
These sonic works I’ll be presenting to you expresses my journey exploring the Bay Area from an auditory perspective and connect the flow of unique environmental and cultural sounds. I wanted to recapture the lost sounds we ignore as they have cultural and historical meaning. While in cities you hear the rumble of public transportation, local music playing in stores or blasting out from speakers, and parts of daily conversations that were areas dedicated to a certain cultural identity. Additionally you can hear the changes in the several different environments we were in because of the sounds changing as we move through several locations.

We first start off with Hercules Creek running from the east bay hills and through San Paulo Ave. Vehicles mostly dominate the airspace where it is flat and suburban while in the Berkeley hills the sounds are more natural, yet gets overshadowed by vehicles moving by. Being one the first recording trips of the semester, I still felt a bit overwhelmed with all of the sounds overlapping with one another and it was originally a lot harder for me to properly record. I would move around and pay more attention to the scenery over the actual recordings. Later trips would have me more focused on the sounds around me.

The next audio mixtape you will hear is Sausal Creek. This creek is unique because I felt inspired by Medina’s first observations of the sounds because it was once home to Ohlone indigenous people who took care of not only Sausal Creek, but the other creeks throughout the East Bay. While not as large as it once was, Sausal creek is still a very important river for the native animals which still calls this place home.

Next up is going to be in Richmond, with the sounds of the BART and hills surrounding the edge of the bay. Similar to Hercules, this recording is in a very human populated-heavy area which makes it difficult to record any nature sounds from birds and the creek running.
Next up is Fremont/Niles, while I’ve been to Fremont several times, this is the first time I’ve been in or heard of Niles. Niles used to be farmland for the missionaries and before that a floodplain. Similar to Sausal creek, this river was used heavily by humans, building a dam that prevented spawning fish from traveling up and down (although there are small patches of spawning fish further up into the hills).

Following up the previous mixtape, this is Coyote Park, this audio recording has a ton of natural noises from the various birds, frogs and weather from the South Bay’s salt farms and marshlands. This area is one of the few spots where wetlands are still prominent in the Bay Area, everywhere else has been removed for apartment complexes. It’s important to preserve the wilderness of the bay, and to respect the wildlife here.

Finally here is the last recording in San Francisco and the Lobos Creek, wrapping up this presentation with the sounds of the city and ocean sounds. I hoped you enjoyed listening to these recordings with me.