I knew to begin with that Narragansett’s soundscape would be one largely defined by its strong, near-constant human presence. As South County’s indisputably most heralded beach, it enjoys a robust tourist influx every year as well as consistent, year-round use as a gathering place or walking strand by locals. 

 

Narragansett plays host to many different kinds of beach activities, including surfing, metal detecting, frisbee, dog walking, hiking, outdoor concerts, contests for lifeguard teams, movies after dark, yoga, and, occasionally, primal scream sessions. Throughout my adolescence, my friends and I always gravitated towards Narragansett as a meeting place, largely because there was almost nowhere to go at night in South County - and yet now, a few years on, I wonder whether our gathering there reflected the natural gravitation of human beings to the ocean. Among native Rhode Islanders, the commonly held joke is that everyone always returns here, no matter how adamantly they insist they’ll live elsewhere - we always boomerang back. I don’t know how much of that has to do with the ocean, but I feel like it does play some kind of primordial role in the inexplicable hold our state often has over people, especially when they’re from here.

 

As a teenager, I wasn’t sonically engaged with this area, and yet now it’s almost all I can think about. Until I embarked on this project, I naively assumed that all beaches sound the same:  while the ocean is in many ways the same everywhere, it’s the communities around each beach - both ecologically and culturally speaking - that lend each one its unique sonic identity. 

 

Narragansett’s acoustic identity, then, is one inextricable from human engagement. In the off-season, when I was recording, this engagement was widespread and not weather-dependent, as it was just as busy in March in the freezing cold as it was on a seventy-degree April day. 

 

In my mind, Narragansett is the symbolic leader of all of Rhode Island’s other beaches - the most profiled in tourist and national publications, embedded in a populated area that once served as the site of an historic casino (now burned down), and the most visibly affected by climate change over time. During Hurricane Sandy, for example, the iconic seawall was ripped from the ground and literally twisted in half, with the entire adjacent parking lot destroyed. As I walk Narragansett throughout the seasons and across the years, I notice how the coastline is receding; how in the summer more sand has to be brought in so that tourists pay to visit, their commerce fuelling much of the local economy. Those annual sand dumps keep visitors oblivious to the beach’s slow destruction.