7 a.m. Mar. 25, 2020 field recording

The microphone is a Sennheiser mono shotgun mic, positioned in the window of a third floor attic of a house in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Peterborough is a small city located between Toronto and Ottawa with a long history of working class manufacturing jobs, and more recently the city has been strongly influenced by two post-secondary institutions. The neighbourhood where the microphone is positioned is just adjacent to downtown Peterborough and is known as The Avenues. It was initially built as a suburb to house the workers employed at the General Electric manufacturing facility. The facility is now a nuclear processing plant, and the neighbourhood has evolved to house a mix of tenants and homeowners – from students renting homes to the middle and working classes. This microphone picks up lots of sounds of residential life – the sounds of heating exhaust from houses, cars and trucks coming and going, and people going about their day. The area is not densely populated and the neighbourhood enjoys many trees, filled with birds and wildlife.