The loss of sound in our noisy lives

But on my annual trips back to India from the US, I realised the sound of India was also changing. On each trip home, just as there were missing loved ones, there were also missing sounds. When I was boy, almost every day I would hear the sing-song voices of women crying “stainless steel". They carried stainless steel pots and pans on their head, looking to exchange them for old saris. Now they had largely vanished. The quilt flutters, with their tell-tale twangs were still around but the wandering locksmiths with their jangling keys and the knife-sharpening-wallas were fewer.

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Much of it was about modernity. Every morning at 9, the siren would sound and my parents would wind all the watches in the house. Now the watches don’t need winding and the siren no longer sounds either. When the handpump in front of our house was dismantled, its distinctive squeak as neighbours filled their pots disappeared from our sound map as well. The man who went around re-surfacing the grinding board had become rare as had his cry of sil-kataaao. The bikriwallas were still around pounding the streets looking for purana gramophones and typewriters. But in a sign of the times, they had added “purana computer" to their call.

A couple of years ago University College London and Durham University organised an interactive exhibition of the sounds and smells of Kolkata. They showcased 48 sounds of the city from trams to fish markets to the cries of hawkers in the ladies compartment of trains. It was a wonderful idea. We preserve architecture as “heritage", we have “heritage food festivals" but sound slips away almost unnoticed.

My friend Supriya Newar, a Kolkata native, noticed that during the covid lockdown. The peddlers suddenly vanished from the roads. Their voices no longer punctured siesta-heavy summer afternoons. The streets “sounded" odd without them. She wrote a poem about them and listed their cries.

Maach tatka maach. (Fish, fresh fish). Bag, chain juto shelayi. (Bag chain, shoe repair). Purano khata boi kaagoj (Old books and papers).

For me first sign of normalcy returning to the pandemic stricken city came not from tracking covid numbers or vaccinations lines or reopening offices. It was the sound of the return of the street peddler, the pheriwala. They sang the soundtrack of normalcy.

The sounds we tape and preserve are the sounds we think have historical significance—Rabindranath Tagore singing his own songs for example. Or perhaps the voices we do not want to forget. When my great-grandmother was over 90, my sister and I taped her reciting the Saraswati mantra prayers on an old cassette recorder. After she died, we would play that tape every year and it was as if she was there, her raspy voice guiding us through the rituals. Eventually the tape warped and the voice was lost. Now when I think of my great-grandmother I am unsure about how well I can really summon up her voice. Sound memory fades faster than visual memory. That’s why it’s more imperative to be proactive about preserving the soundscape of our lives.

Preserving the sounds of the world around us is a different project than archiving the voices of people around us. It is about seeing sound as a key part of our cultural makeup. It is a reminder that there is such a thing called acoustic memory though we do not think about it as much as we think about our visual memory or even a taste memory.

Some sounds disappear because the thing that produced them is not there anymore. An elderly man told me about how everyday he would hear the sounds of the corporation workers hosing down the streets. That stopped as did the sound. Other sounds morph—plastic might replace glass as container and with it the sound changes. When I got tea in a paper cup I remember feeling a pang as I missed the crunch of a little clay cup being crushed underfoot.

In a world as rapidly changing as ours, a museum of endangered sounds makes sense. Especially because the fast pace of progress means even “modern" sounds unknown to our parents and grandparents have been rendered archaic by advances in technology. The lifespan of sounds is radically different today than it was in our grandparents’ time.

Today such a museum would include not just the sounds of old gramophones or tramcars or pheriwalas. It could also include the whine and whirr of old dial-up modems connecting to the internet or a skipping CD or the musical notes of a Windows 95 machine coming to life. That actually was composed by English musician and visual artist Brian Eno and it was regarded as a huge sound-step forward from the old ta-da sound of a Windows machine starting up. Eno said in an interview that he was told the sound had to be “inspirational, sexy, driving, provocative… there were about a 150 adjectives and then at the bottom it said not more than 3.8 seconds long." What was revolutionary then feels nostalgic now.

Unlike a museum that tries to preserve objects from the past, a museum of disappearing sounds can be entirely online. We do not need to visit it physically to experience it. The Slow Radio podcast from Radio 3 of the BBC is devoted to these sound stories recognising that the “wonders of our world in sound are as fragile as the planet itself". An online museum called Conserve the Sound preserves sounds that children today will never know—a typewriter or a Nintendo Entertainment system. The website Cities and Memory claims to be the world’s archive of “obsolete sounds" recomposed and reimagined by artists: a Phillips coffee grinder, a Braun Mikron electric shaver, an Olivetti calculating machine. But interspersed with the vanishing sounds of outdated technology is the noise of a shepherd singing to his sheep as if to remind us they are ultimately all part of the same sensory experience. Stuart Fowkes, the British creator of Cities And Memory says in an interview: “We have ‘blue plaques’ to preserve famous buildings and famous sights here in the UK— why is there not a blue plaque for sound?"

That would teach us to listen to the world more carefully because sound reminds us where we came from. All those sounds, all of which we took for granted, helped shape us. In a world that’s already cacophonous with noise, these sound memories can feel lost, as if they have disappeared into white noise like the snowfall static on our TV screens when transmission stopped for the day.

Remember that sound? Yet another one that’s disappeared from our noisy lives.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr on X