Enhancing qualitative inquiry by hearing lived experiences

Abstract

As a young adult I often journeyed back ‘‘home’’ from New York City (NYC) to visit my parents and siblings, travelling on an inexpensive commercial bus known as Greyhound. The bus would rumble out of one of the large, busy, central transportation hubs in NYC and begin its halting 4 or 5 hour trek (depending on the number of stops), toward my hometown of Ithaca, New York. Ithaca is situated at the tip of Cayuga Lake, the largest of 11 long, slender bodies of water known collectively as the Finger Lakes. Ithaca’s business district is nestled snuggly at the southern base of the lake surrounded on three sides by steep hills. If requested, the Greyhound driver would discharge a passenger at an intersection on the West Hill, before descending downtown. I often got off here, making the rest of the way on foot to my parents’ house. Stepping off the bus, I always entered a liminal space, requiring recalibration of my senses. NYC never sleeps, even if its residents do. Cacophony is the city’s sound track, varied and layered. Sometimes it is discordant, other times harmonic, but there is a perpetual baseline of noise. For example, vehicles respond to traffic lights, ordering them to stop, warning them to slow down, or releasing them from idling. On command, brigades of cars, buses, and trucks, screech, squeal, grunt, hiss, and rumble in response to these signals in metered rhythms. Layered atop the traffic track, are brassy sounds—proximal or distant—as horns toot or blare, depending on the frustration level of the driver. A police car might blast its siren, in rapid staccato, to nudge aside a car, or a fire engine’s might wail with impatient urgency, parting rivers of vehicles. Overhead you may hear the rhythmic whirling of a traffic helicopter, hovering in place, or the roar of an ascending airplane, a sound which quickly dissipates only to be replaced, minutes later, by another plane. In short, sounds come from above and below, near and far, but they play on in the continuous loop of the urban soundtrack. Qualitative Social Work 2015, Vol. 14(4) 447–452 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1473325015588856 qsw.sagepub.com