We’ve become more than accustomed, as time has passed and as social networks have increasingly emphasized digital photography, to be entertained/informed by passing glances at other people’s daily existence — not just the milestones, like birthdays and weddings and vacations, but the small ones, the passing ones: chance shadows on the sidewalk, a glass of water on a table, a pair of shoes in a closet. Instagram, for one, is a deep repository of metaphorical driftwood. There is much talk of SoundCloud being the “YouTube of sound,” but some of the more interesting estuaries make a case that it is also the “Instagram of sound,” a place where everydayness is given emotional and cultural meaning through framing and context. As SoundCloud continues to grow, if you follow certain user accounts, you get the sonic equivalent of Instagram’s quotidian documentation, brief sonic snapshots of other people’s lives. Here are two choice recent entries, which popped up in quick succession, field recordings of a passing train, and of the beach at night, both under two minutes:
Tracks originally posted at [soundcloud.com/charlie_grant](https://soundcloud.com/charlie_grant/field-recording-freight-train) and [soundcloud.com/craghead](https://soundcloud.com/craghead/sound-of-40th-st-virginia).
The undervaluing of sound on Vine.co is in part due to what is, admittedly, a necessary UX decision: by default, the sound is off when a Vine is triggered. You need to click a little speaker symbol with a red X, turning it into two little green signifiers of volume. (The traffic metaphor only goes so far — there is no yellow warning phase.) As a result, Vines are experienced silently at first, the audio perhaps kicking in midway through, after the user takes action and clicks the sound icon, and only experienced in full when the second run of the loop begins. (That is, depending on the circumstance. For example, in the Chrome browser on an iPad, the videos don’t autoplay. Instead, you have to hit play, and in this case sound seems to be on by default.)
The majority of Vines appear to be everyday field recordings and low-key stop-motion sequences. Some ignore sound, resulting in chance noise, while others embrace it. The decision-making, or lack thereof, is especially interesting to observe in the case of those videos that break the six seconds of allotted time into shorter stop-and-start segments. Most non-Vine filmmakers would use a single score to lend continuity to the fragments, but that isn’t an option in Vine, which allows for no post-production. 
