As someone who works in the field of audio, Gaurav’s days are spent trying to tame and bend sound. The attempt to do so doesn’t end when he leaves his studio. The piece runs like a flashback, a loop that gradually spirals in on the sounds that hold special meaning for him and are presented as he hears them. An audience to the ever-present soundtrack of the city of Delhi, India, in this audio piece, he reflects on what it means to not be able to tune out of audio but to focus on what one chooses to listen to.

Extended Transcript

I remember the shift that happened when the cellphone took over as the curator of our memories. Of course, we didn’t notice it back then. Standing on the glacier as it is moving, it takes a bit of time before you can gauge the distance covered. That cellphone camera took moments from our lives and gave us the power to elevate the mundane to the sublime. Made every day important. Made every moment count.

Exhausted by the weight of the catalog, indexed only by date, you begin the process of classification. The album. Outsourcing the creation of the inventory of our lives.

Frank Zappa once said, «The most important thing in art is the frame… because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where the art stops and the real world begins». So I decided to take another route. A not-so-obvious-anymore option – of trying to be present. So I put the camera away and turned on my recorder. The soundtrack was much more interesting. The art never stops and the real world merges into the art, and even though a lot of it might be shit, for me, it became easy to put a frame on those moments that really mattered. With audio, I didn’t need to step away from the moment anymore to capture it. I was in it all the time. Steeped. Marinating. Almost like life is playing out as a series of Morse code-like dots and dashes telling you what to listen to. The gurgle of my daughter over the sounds of the dishwasher, the heartbeat of my son over the buzz of the ultrasound machine, the sound of us walking in the chaos of the city. Every moment, no matter how mundane, is sublime – but only if you live it.

This is probably my favorite sound, walking in a park with my kids, aimlessly wandering, chatting without purpose. But no matter how much you try, the dots and dashes are going to take over.

Let me explain.

The Lorenz system – this was one of the aces that the Germans had up their sleeve during the Second World War. They used this to have their pilots fly between two parallel radio beams. Stray to the left and the continuous tone would change into dots. Move to the right and it would change to dashes. They didn’t need clear skies anymore; as long as the pilot could fly down this parallel path of tones, they could get to any target they wanted.

So this guy, Reginald Victor Jones, an Oxford graduate, figured this out and managed to get Churchill’s ear. Instead of letting the Germans know that the Brits were onto them, he figured that they could broadcast the same tone and trick the Germans into flying to a different target.

Just one problem. He got the note wrong.

That’s what life feels like, doesn’t it? Well, at least to me.

I’m marinated in audio. Steeped in it and I am aware of it. Pushed and pulled by it all the time. Now, most of this is intentional. Very wabi-sabi, if you will – with all of its imperfections and a lot of it beyond my control, you embrace all of it with its transience.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out but it’s everywhere, and we can’t shut it off. You can shut your eyes off and choose not to see.

Audio just doesn’t leave you.

The imperfection in this balance is what the city brings. Abundant and bursting. A city that provokes you into feeling that you belong here. It is like a set of continuous but imperfect tones pulling you to its dots and dashes.

I really wonder what makes one call a city home. What and where is that fader which when unmuted, flicks one’s own experience of restlessness or dissatisfaction at not having lived enough to the humbling realization of having absorbed enough of your life.

The city has shaped and made up the landscape of my thoughts and given them meaning. It is like a fading photograph, meaningless without the weight that’s imagined by me. A spool of tape suffering through time and generation loss.

About ten years ago, I was going through some old photographs. Memories that the software was asking me to relive. It was playing back this slide show, our modern-day carousel, of a day that wasn’t that relevant to me. Well, it doesn’t feel relevant to me right now, but maybe it was back then, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken photos from that day.

But I felt… nothing. As if I had been pulled away from that continuous tone that my life was supposed to have tracked and I was looking for it, now, in those dots and dashes. Maybe I was chasing the wrong note.

So in the madness of modeling itself as a city, I have started to look for my own sounds. In a city that provokes you with its dots and dashes, I have decided to look past it.

I have decided to shut my eyes and keep my ears open.