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Part 2

The possibilities of modern production tools have allowed artists to realize ever more refined or extreme sounds. Is there a sound you would personally like to create but haven't been able to yet?

I have lately developed an interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. AI for me is not merely a tool, but an approach to understand autonomy and agency in the sonic worlds. I would like to explore the field of AI further to comprehend how to build autonomous and self-regulating sound works.

For example, my projects Dhvāni (2020 - 2022) and Planchette Bot (2021 - 2023) explore the potential of deep learning and AI in relation to autonomous sounding and machine-induced post-human listening. Dhvāni is a series of self-regulating and responsive sound sculpture that incorporates ritual and traditional sounds, such as temple bells, wind chimes and Gongs, into a playful environment driven by AI to explore the notions of network, codependence, and interconnectivity. Planchette Bot resurrects historical voices in generated text and audio using neural networks trained with datasets curated through archival research.

Many artists have related that certain sounds trigger compositional ideas in them or are even a compositional element in their own right. Provided this is the case for you – what, exactly, is about certain sounds that triggers such ideas in you?

For me, a fertile auditory situation is already, always an alive and contingent composition. Being in this situation corporeally as a listener, I speculate on the various compositional developments, and their possibilities - often they are in a flux, uncertain and unfinished. Anything can happen in an alive auditory situation, the sonic dynamics can change in any rapturous moment.

I am not interested in mediating situated sounds in a fixed rendering or giving a compositional structure to these alive situations; rather I would like to take the artistic position of a listening interlocutor, who can trace such sonic developments for other co-listeners, but not intend to produce a reductive composition for human consumption. Whatever I record is incomplete but some of it can chronicle a trace of ephemeral experiences.

How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

I have been working on multichannel sound performances, in which the movement of sound in space is facilitated to place the listener within a sonic field. I am not so much oriented towards producing a composition constructed with a multilayered methodology to organise sounds as a linear product; rather I would like to freeing sound in space. For me, a more fluid and malleable composition emerges from manifold movement of sound in space in a post-immersive practice (Chattopadhyay, B. 2020. “Post-immersion: Towards a Discursive Situation in Sound Art”, RUUKKU Studies in Artistic Research 13), in which sound and spatial practices are in dynamic relationships.

Most of my Ambisonics works, such as Decomposing Landscape (2015) and Exile and other Syndromes (2020) are developed from this perspective on chance composition. Chance is at the core of South Asian improvisational practices with sound. In each of my performances, sounds change being contingent to the site-specificity of the venue, the audience responses, and the emotive mood of the performance.

Humans are often characterized as "visual beings". In your opinion, what role does our sense of hearing play in our understanding of the world? How do sounds affect you, compared to other senses like sight or smell?

Visual modalities of perceiving the world and making sense are not in any way in direct conflict with the aural modality of human perception and cognition, rather they are complimentary, convergent, and mutually enriching. However, these modalities are different in their ways of gathering and processing information from the lived environment.

While visual experience is more evidence-based and foregrounded, sound is often backgrounded and works more powerfully on the subconscious levels. Some persons are more aurally sensitive and sensitized than others. It is just the nature of a person given how the various modalities of sense-making and the perceptual faculties and edifices developed for this entity.

Personally, I think my body is more sensitized for sound than visual perception. Hence, I react to the world more oriented towards the sound environment and the sound sources I continuously encounter. Sound affects me on a deeper level while I try to make sense of this world and how I navigate it. This ‘sonic wiring’ in my mind-body continuum is geared towards uncovering personal entanglements between lived experience and memory.  

The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?  

While humans occupy, control, dominate and abuse natural resources, they also devour their sounds for entertainment and consumption, for example in music albums, films, theme parks etc ... and in this process undermine the balance, dynamics, presence, and codependence of environmental sound layers. R. Murray Schafer compared this inherent codependence of environmental sounds to a “give and take” between species - a characteristic feature of natural soundscapes, one that he termed “hi-fi” for its recognizably discrete layers of sound. This sense of equilibrium and sonic coexisting was at the core of what Murray Schafer and his team at the Simon Fraser University termed ‘Acoustic Ecology’ in the 1970s. Humans electro-acoustically (and after 2000s digital revolution, digital-acoustically) recorded, modulated, and rendered natural environmental sounds in film and other audiovisual media.

As I have shown in my book The Auditory Setting (2021), the inherent balance of the situated acoustic ecology is often disturbed and modified by humans to form new electro-acoustic ecologies. These synthetic ecologies are not as discreet and nuanced as the ambient sources and locations they are recorded from. Human ears are quite insensitive to environmental sounds as their range of hearing is quite limited, 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The natural environment is far more detailed and layered beyond this anthropogenic limit. Human ears and the technologically enhanced electro-acoustic ears they build in the form of microphones and hearing aids, often cannot tap into these vivid natural sonic worlds. Even with hydrophones, contact microphones, and other transducers, the acoustic ecology of earth remains elusive to human ears.

The question of how much we humans are affected by the sound surrounding us is then a very human-centric question. We must ask, how environmental sounds are ingrained in the livelihoods of non-humans and plants, and whether humans are being invasive in this codependency for making profit for humans only.

We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

Music has a loaded history related to how humans appropriated natural sounds into a compositional structure, consisting of, mostly humanly affordable sounds, for example, drones and rhythms related to the body's capacity and limits to sonic perception. Even though field recording today emerged as a much practiced form of so-called ‘sound art’ in the West, very few people yet appreciate field recording as a musical practice, and the people who do, they usually have trained ears conditioned with a particular western-dominated culture of listening in which natural sounds can be objectified as human-mediated compositions.

Music is a direct example of how nature folds into culture for human consumption and anthropogenic aesthetic experience. Field recording - the practice of recording sounds from the environment in a linear musical formulation, on the other hand, pretends to go back to pre-cultural mediation states as it takes the natural sounds as a ‘purer’ content and mode of (re-)presentation. From this broader perspective, music and field recording don’t have major differences except in texture and tone. Field recordings may unpack the environmental decay of certain locations on the earth, but most often it ceases to mobilize environmental or climate action as the aesthetic consumption of "field recording compositions" for listening pleasure most often overpowers its socio-political potential as an artivism. There are exceptions, however.

For example, Cities and Memories released a series of works based on field recordings of political street demonstrations. After the blast in Beirut, a compilation of sound works was dedicated to the victim of the tragedy. There are many instances of musical forms, such as protest songs, having socially galvanizing impacts. Field recordings have a relatively smaller impact.  

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

Sound travels from one body to another, and on its path it makes connections. An utterance connects a voice to its listener, and thus knowledge is shared in a society. To me this social capacity of sound is significant. Before I think of sound as a universal foundational element, I think of sound in terms of a personal cognitive world-building, in which collective memories coalesce with the immediately lived experiences of situated listening for navigating the everyday and enhancing capacity to survive and endure.

When it comes to non-European notions like Nada Brahma, in the West it is understood as a spiritual unification of sound from an Orientalist ear, but one must acknowledge the profound injustices and inequalities that are concealed under this exotic ontological perspective of spiritual unification. From sound-based curatorial practices to sonic research, non-White artists and scholars have often been denied dignified entry to these fields. The dominant discourses are often Eurocentric, and such Eurocentrism is often celebrated rather than questioned. I, as an artist of colour didn’t have much affordance of an easy access to modern technologies, as well as to knowledge and its canonization. That privileged space is often saved for white male artists and scholars. I must say that it is still an unequal struggle for me to continue work in the field of sound, e.g. in job selection and funding, in finding commissions and invitations. One must acknowledge that there is a question of affordability - lack of support and funding curtails many of the aspirations in worlds outside Europe, e.g. the Global South, and after entering Europe such voices face a new kind of structural inequality.

Therefore, before we romanticize on exotic terms like Nada Brahma through European ears, we need to understand the context in which such terms developed and engage with that contextual framework from an interest of critical engagement rather than seeing them as exotic. We need to be aware that contemporary rendition of these contexts and knowledge systems are necessary to unpack in an equitable field of sound.


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