Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris presents...The Sound Hunter

THE ART OF LISTENING

 By Contributing Editor Des Coulam. Recording the street sounds of Paris attempting to capture that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed

 

WHEN DID YOU last hear something indescribably beautiful? When did you last stop in the street and listen to the sounds around you?

 

 In real life, we tend to listen to beautiful sounds and we hear the street sounds around us.

Letter From Paris presents...The Sound Hunter

 

EAST AND WEST UNITED 

 

By Contributing Editor Des Coulam. Recording the street sounds of Paris attempting to capture that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed.

 

SOUND HUNTING IS often frustrating but throws up wonderful surprises, usually when you least expect them. Take the wedding I stumbled upon recently on a Saturday afternoon in the 15^th century Eglise Saint-Médard at the bottom of the rue Mouffetard in Paris--a wedding, but a wedding with a difference!

 

 And what made this wedding different was that it united East and West - a Russian bride, Anastasia, married a French groom, Mickael.

 

Letter From Paris presents...The Sound Hunter

THE ART OF THE MANIFESTATION 

 by Contributing Editor Des Coulam. Recording the street sounds of Paris attempting to capture that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed

 

I am not by nature a protestor. But I am delighted to live in a country that not only allows free demonstrations in the streets but has also turned protesting into an art form. In France, the street protest or the “manifestation” is a way of life.

The French do it all the time.  They protest anything and everything.

Letter From Paris presents...The Sound Hunter

Image via Wikipedia

A GOLDEN MOMENT 

By Des Coulam. Recording the street sounds of Paris attempting to capture that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed.

Some people take photographs; I record sound. There is a French expression that describes best what I do. I am a chasseur de son – a sound hunter. Like the great twentieth-century street photographers from whom I take my inspiration I am a promeneur, endlessly walking the streets of Paris searching for what Henri Cartier-Bresson described as the decisive moment. Robert Doisneau, in my book the greatest of the French street photographers, referred to it as capturing that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed. Anyone familiar with my work will recognise that phrase because I use it at every opportunity simply because it best describes the arena in which I work. And what an arena – the streets of Paris from the Bois de Boulogne in the west to the Bois de Vincennes in the east, from Saint-Ouen in the north to Montrouge in the south. None of the recordings I make are staged or rehearsed, they are what they are - the sounds of the city I love.