Location: Cardio Room at the Rains Center, Pomona College. Rains Center is located on the East side of Pomona College’s campus between Smiley Dorm and Big Bridges. The Rains center houses club, intramural, and varsity sports and is also a center for recreational physical activity. The cardio room overlooks 6th street and contains a number of treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, and rowing machines.

Recording Setup. For this recording, the microphone was placed on the tiled floor separating the treadmills from the rest of the cardio room equipment. The recording device was TASCAM DR-40 Linear PCM Recorder and was placed on the tri-pod stand and oriented towards the entrance/exit for the duration of the recording.

About the soundscape. This recording was taken at approximately 4:15pm on a Monday afternoon so there was a decent amount of traffic flowing through the gym including sports teams and recreational gym goers. The cardio room had about 4 people on the ellipticals and 1 person on the treadmill, however, the monotony of the treadmill seems to overpower the sounds originating from the ellipticals (which would be to the right of the recording device). The cardio room of Rains is fairly open with windows comprising two entire walls. the entrance/exit of the cardio room leads to the hallway which continues to an exit, or the rest of the Rains Center gym. Although the majority of the cardio room is carpeted, there is a strip of main walkway that is tiled.

Unlike other rooms of the gym, there is not really much talking going on in this space. There is also a lack of audible music that consumes the space, which means the vast majority of the sounds stem from the use of machinery. This allows for the beat-like hum of a student’s feet hitting the treadmill to be the keynote of the space. If you listen closely, there is a slower, lower volumed ticking that is occurring in the background which comes from students on the ellipticals. One could argue that the sound of the treadmills could also be a soundmark of this space, but I find the sound to be very similar to that of a slow moving train. Therefore, I do not find the cardio room to possess any audible soundmarks.

Of course, with the use of the equipment comes the pressing of buttons which happens sporadically throughout the recording.  I posit that the pressing of buttons coupled with the sound of the exercise equipment would be an archetype sound of gyms or cardio rooms (to be more specific).