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Sound and Image Pages Contents
SOUTH ASIAN SOUNDSCAPE
PROJECT
AMBIENCE, MUSIC, INDUSTRY,
NATURE
Introduction
This Internet
webpage presents recordings of some sound environments from
South Asia. Unlike other pages that focus solely on studio
recordings of filmi and classical music, here you may hear
the sounds of everyday life in India and Nepal. Here are
field recordings of chant, folk and devotional music, as
well as of environmental, nature, ambient, and industrial
sounds.
These sounds files are representations of components of the
soundscapes of South Asia. A soundscape is something like a
landscape - it is everything you can hear at a particular
geographic, cultural, and historical location. A soundscape
is what surrounds you aurally.
A recording of a soundscape is a valuable means of
understanding culture. We often use texts, films, or still
photography to learn, but recordings of non-musical,
everyday sounds can also inform us about the expressive and
material culture of a people and place.
Here you will find sounds in segments of five seconds to two
minutes, small clips that limit downloading time. The files
were created from recordings made in India and Nepal between
September 1994 and May 1995 by the author of this page.
To hear the sounds, you'll need an MP3 player.
You'll also find images on this webpage, many of which
correspond to the sounds. These are JPEG files scanned from
photographs taken by the author.
The files are here as a resource, for those interested in
learning something about life in South Asia.
What's
here
How to
get around this webpage
First, you may
want to read about either the purpose
of this site or the
theoretical problems
and methodologies
addressed by the site. Or one could go straight into the
sound and image files.
At any point in your exploration, click on What's
here to return to
this starting section and the contents.
To get to the files, choose either:
Sounds
and Images - Regional
organization to
access the files according to geographic and cultural region
of origin, or
Sounds
and Images - Aesthetic organization
to accss the files
according to aesthetic quality.
The sound and
image files are organized in two schemes, regional and
aesthetic. Because divisions of religion and caste have
created so much unrest in South Asia, both historically and
recently, I wish to avoid an emphasis on such divisions.
Therefore I have not created file groups based on religious,
caste (varna and jati), gender, or other identities. However
as such groups certainly exist and are of crucial importance
to understanding South Asian culture I have indicated this
information where appropriate.
First, Sounds
and Images - Geographic
organization lists
the files according to the regional location of those
elements in the recording or picture. Thus, files from
material gathered in Bihar state are grouped together. Such
groups reflect important linguistic and cultural differences
within South Asian society.
Second, to explore the aesthetic qualities of the sounds an
additional path through the material emphasizes
relationships between sounds. The
Sounds
and Images - Aesthetic
organization section
groups files according to the nature of the sound itself.
This group is arranged according to the characteristics of
the sound source: it begins with sounds of nature, moves to
sounds of humans, to sounds of humans and technological
devices, and finally to sounds generated by machines. Thus
this moves from a soundscape with humans absent, to their
presence, and finally to humanity's machines dominating the
scene. Such groups reflect ethnographic considerations, as
social conditions create the aesthetic differences in these
sounds.
What's
here
Purpose
of this webpage
Several goals
prompted the creation of this webpage. I have an abiding
interest in teaching tools that introduce South Asian
culture to students in North America. This page utilizes
ambient environmental as well as specifically musical sound
recordings I created while studying and traveling in India
and Nepal. And finally, I want others to explore the
aesthetic nature of the sounds assembled.
Before first traveling to India in 1990 I did not have a
clear conception of the nature of the material culture I
would encounter. Prior to then I had studied aspects of
South Asian religions and music that can be taught through
texts, commercial recordings, and scholarly publications.
For gaining an understanding and appreciation of life in
India, I believe I could have benefited from more exposure
to ethnographic materials that conveyed information about
average life: the sights and sounds of the streets, cities,
villages, and so on. As others could likewise find such an
orientation helpful I present in this site audio clips and
accompanying visual images of South Asian culture.
Through examining such sonic and visual details of
contemporary life one can begin to make connections to
broader social and political events. For example, what does
it mean to hear (and record on a Walkman) a sixteenth
century religious chant, brought from Bengal to North
America and back to Tamil Nadu, sung over a megaphone on a
street in a city of 10 million that was founded by British
colonialists in 1639? And what does it mean to hear that
sound a year later, digitized, transmitted over phone lines,
and reproduced in the speaker of your computer? Have a
listen to and think it over for yourself.
These sounds of India and Nepal are here grouped by
ethnographic categories, such as industrial or rural.
Categorization of the sounds is not my primary goal however;
it is means of getting the files to you in a way that is
educational and interesting. I would like the
viewer/listener to experience some engaging and possibly
enlightening things at this page, and to simply enjoy the
content of the files themselves.
What's
here
Technical
information
These sounds were
recorded on a Sony WM-D6C Walkman Professional, using Dolby
C and Maxell XL-II 90 minute cassettes. A Sony 737 stereo
condensor microphone was used, either hand-held or mounted
on a small tripod. All sounds are field or environmental in
nature, in that no studio settings were used for
recording.
Sound Hack was used to create .aiff sound files, initially
with a 16 bit, 44 Mhz sampling rate. These were then
manipulated with Sound Edit. To save downloading time for
the visitor, these were converted (in January 2002) to .mp3
files. The sounds are further altered only in terms of
amplitude: some levels were adjusted, and beginnings and
endings of files were faded.
Some of this work
was performed on Jimmy Smith's Macintosh, as I don't have
enough peripherals yet. These pages were initiated as a
project for Professor Ron Kuivila's Problems and Methods in
Musicology, a graduate course at Wesleyan University's World
Music Program.
The images were taken on my aging Fujica STX-1 35mm camera,
with most 4x6'' prints produced at a Konica studio on
Nungambakam High Road in Madras, India. The prints (sorry,
not the negatives) were scanned with Adobe Photoshop and
were not altered aside from some cropping. The sound and
image files and the html files were all created on the
Macintosh.
What's
here
Sound and Image
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