The City at Dawn

Sound Piece

As a part of a longitudinal inquiry into soundscape ecologies, Pale Blue Dotter (Surbhi) and beatnyk (Padmanabhan) set out to record dawn choruses in different parts of Delhi, weaving the soundscapes into a composition that reveals a city of contradictions just as it wakes up.

Delhi is a city of contrasts – on the one hand, the city is getting denser with highrises that touch the sky, and on the other people are being evicted from their homes in a major demolition drive in preparation for the G20 summit. The river flows through the city, cutting it into two halves; however, water still remains a scarce commodity in many of the residential parts. In some neighborhoods, overhead tanks are overflowing with water, whereas in others, the residents are compelled to trek for kilometers to fetch water for basic needs.

Gradual urbanization of Delhi’s landscape over the last 30 years, giving us a glimpse of the sounds that remain and those that are lost (credits: beatnyk, Google Earth).

Fascinated by the ever-increasing anthropocentric demands and contradictory narratives that exist in the city, we (Pale Blue Dotter and beatnyk) wanted to embark on a journey to shed light on these contrasts with our trusty field recorders. Even in the face of the noise pollution that has been taking over the city, the birds have found a way to continue singing, thus showcasing one of the most stark contrasts of the city – the coexistence of anthropogenic and biophonic sounds.

The dawn chorus is the outbreak of birdsong at the start of a new day. We began our exploration by listening to the dawn and this coexistence that comes to life every day. Through visiting a range of sites that included areas under urban development, as well as the few remaining natural landscapes within the city, various perspectives began to appear around the way the city sounds at dawn at each location. After several listening sessions, we set out to record dawn choruses at every location and identify patterns that materialized as the soundscape that was eventually stitched together.

«City at Dawn» soundscape mapped and timestamped over the landscape of New Delhi (credits: beatnyk, Google Earth).

During the course of listening to and creating the soundscape, we noticed the myriad ways of coexistence that inform the daily lives of human and more-than-human species. From the birds that score the dawn, to the river that keeps time and the technology that defies it, all forms of existence begin the cycle together and sustain peacefully. There seems to be magic in the symphony of life that awakens the city every day and the dawn chorus zeroes in on this sphere of existence that accounts for all living forms, not just humans.

Voice-Over Credits

01:04. The Indian Express: «Delhi MCD Elections: Taps Of Posh Vasant Kunj Area Run Dry» (YouTube)

07:32. Phone recording of excerpts from «All India Radio Morning News, June 10, 2023» (YouTube)

13:58. Al Jazeera English: «Devotion suffocates India’s sacred Yamuna river» (YouTube)

18:40. Nirantar Trust X The Third Eye: «Paani Ki Katar» (YouTube)

This sound piece is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

Pale Blue Dotter thrives at the intersection of music and art. Interweaving melody, spoken word, and field recordings with movement-based listening, she interprets philosophical concepts as sound pieces, live performances, and installations. Follow her on Instagram, Spotify, SoundCloud, or on her Website.

Biography

beatnyk is an inert engineer, sporadic musician, and electronic sound artist residing in Delhi, whose work and interest lie in exploring the natural interplay of non-human sound and human noise in a landscape through generative patches and coded algorithms. Follow him on Instagram, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or Linktree.

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Delhi Sensate

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This is a collection of songs bringing together myriad voices from the city of Delhi, where multiple realities collide and co-exist.

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Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on February 21, 2024

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Norient City Sounds: Delhi

When the Sound Listens Back

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Evesdropping

Sound Recording

by Mallika Taneja

What you are listening to is the sound of a walk in and around the Mandi House area in Central Delhi. Mallika Taneja, the instigator of Women Walk at Midnight, invites us to listen to the entire duration of the midnight walk she recorded on May 20, 2023. This is an invitation to journey alongside the participants who are sensing their way through a night in the city. The author shares the impulses and imagination behind the practice of Women Walk at Midnight, and its auditory chapter, «evesdropping», in the note below.

Women Walk at Midnight is a practice of walking at night, and past midnight, around different areas and neighborhoods of a city. This is a non-funded, volunteer-based practice initiated by theater artist Mallika Taneja in late 2016, in New Delhi, India. We seek no permissions and no formal securities to walk on the street at night. We walk because the streets and the night belong to us as much as to any other citizen. We take on what the night brings with it and we face it together.

For the past seven years, we have gone from a walk every few months to one walk every month in a different part of the city. The practice has expanded and has tried to stretch its definition of midnight, walking, as well as what constitutes «women». Women have walked in several cities over the years – Bangalore, Guwahati, Rishikesh, to name a few in India, and São Paulo and Brussels overseas. Over the past year, Cape Town in South Africa has developed its own chapter of Women Walk at Midnight.

Over the years, we have seen increased participation from queer, non-binary, trans, and other folx who do not adhere to normative understanding of «man» and «woman». We try, and don’t always succeed, to reach out to people who usually would not be found on such walks. We try to keep this space open to anyone who requires a space such as this to take a walk at night.

Each walk is led by a woman from the very neighborhood that we walk in that month. Cities welcome different people differently. For women, cities all over the world are known to be harsh. In New Delhi, the streets ogle at women, and don’t make much space for them. The gaze of the city pierces through – it threatens us, violates us, and the air echoes with ways and means to «be careful», shifting the onus of safety onto the shoulders of women, shirking its responsibility to treat us like equal citizens of this world.

By walking repeatedly, without permissions and in groups, we notice how, slowly but surely, it shifts how women feel and experience safety and pleasure in the city at night. Over time, cities must also learn to look at, respect, and make space for the «after hours» presence of women on the streets, and, for that matter, their every presence.

A lot happens on every walk and yet it may seem like… nothing happened at all.

We walk from point A to point B, we stroll, we listen to music, look at the sky and its few stars, we talk. At times we encounter the police – we deal with them… we eat ice-cream, befriend street dogs and sometimes get chased by them. We sing songs of the night, read poems, take pit stops at the bus stops (because our cities woefully lack public benches). We talk about the weather, and sometimes about politics. We get tired, we get excited, make friends, and become a community, albeit an ephemeral one. We walk in silence, we walk and walk and walk.

I started to make audio recordings of these walks sometime in 2022. While walking in the city over the years, I keenly noticed how the sounds of the city change as the hour changes and how within a span of two hours, we could be occupying such different sounding spaces. Cities are usually noisy, chaotic – to stumble upon quiet in them all of the sudden was precious… and to have a passing horn pierce through that quiet – a bringing back to reality of sorts. Conversations with the walkers were always rich… there was so much fun, laughter, song… and I often heard women echo each other on issues like safety, pleasure, solidarity… walk after walk, month after month. It felt almost necessary to document these occurrences. The people joining the walks come from different backgrounds and realities, so audio as a form also aided anonymity, when required.

What you are listening to is an audio recording of our walk on May 20, 2023, in and around the Mandi House area of New Delhi. The walk was led by Ujwala, a journalist originally from Bangalore, who lived in the area for about a year. It stretched slightly over two hours. The zoom recorder that captured it all stayed with me, Mallika, the entire duration of the walk.

This unedited recording, from when we start to when we stop, is an invitation for you to journey with us for the entire duration of the walk. Resisting the temptation to edit or make more «accessible» by shortening or putting together only the «relevant» parts, here you can listen to «everything» that my recorder caught that night. Over the two hours, you will hear a lot of chatter, volumes of silence, traffic, dogs, footsteps, some humming, a quietening down of the night, and us walking. Time passes as we walk, the sounds and sights of the city shift and we shift with them. As we tire over the two hours, our voices shift. For me, all of it is relevant and significant to the ways in which we sense the city and the city hears us. There is no shortcut to get an insight into Women Walk at Midnight – its texture, fatigue, sometimes boredom, its ethos and sheer necessity. And so, I ask you to give it the time it requires to get acquainted with the practice. As you let the two hours unfold, you will notice – sometimes gradually and at other times, suddenly – the shifts in the night, of the street, and in those walking. Perhaps even in you.

You can listen to this like a radio show or podcast in the background while doing house chores, while on the metro, while on your own walk… you can listen to it in bits and parts or skip forward. At many points you may ask yourself – why am I listening to this? What is going on? I ask that you keep listening. At the end of the two hours, you will have taken a journey with us and felt our fatigue, desires and fears – and perhaps, yours as well? In the midst of it all, you may hear sounds from the streets of Delhi, late into the night – for many of us, an inaccessible space, a taboo, a nervous state, an impossibility.

Perhaps this listening in – almost everdropping – is slightly demanding. But cities are demanding, the nights are demanding, and walking repeatedly over years and years is incredibly demanding. There is no real way to soften the blow. And then I also ask – why should it?

I think of the walking as riyaaz (practice/rehearsal)… the more you do it, the better you get at it…the easier you roll over the bumps and the more you own the form.

Join us for this walk, wherever you are.

This sound recording is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

Mallika Taneja lives and works out of New Delhi, India. Through performances, installations, and curatorial work, she explores questions of gender, solidarity, pleasure, rest, and remembering. She is particularly interested in exploring political possibilities of performative ensembles and the role songs have to play in leaving and gathering traces of people, places, and things. Follow her on Instagram, and Facebook.

Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on March 27, 2024

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Norient City Sounds: Delhi

When the Sound Listens Back

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A Huge Reservoir of Life

Audio Essay

by Philipp Rhensius,

Juan José López

Ludwig Berger

The first form of communication was not language but vibration. Listen to an audio essay featuring the biologist Juan José López and sound artist Ludwig Berger who sonify species that soon threaten to become completely extinct – if we don’t listen.

Even with insects –
some can sing,
some can’t.
(Issa 1994)

List of References

Issa, Kobayashi. 1994. «[even with insects]». In The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass. Translated by Robert Hass. New York: Ecco Press.

This audio essay was created by the musician, writer, and Norient editor Philipp Rhensius aka Alienationist in autumn 2023 at Klang Moor Schopfe 2023. Each piece features conversations with (and sounds by) the artists and their installations, merged with Rhensius’ own compositions, field recordings, and poetry. To open a speculative realm, each piece is assigned to a poem.

Biography

Philipp Rhensius is an editor for Norient, writer, musician, sound artist, sociologist & musicologist, and curator from Berlin. His work investigates the connections between the micro- and macro-political and is driven by the idea that «feeling the chains» is the moment when emancipation begins. His music and sound art projects (Kl.ne, aphtc, Alienationst) merge sonic fiction with sardonic poetry and visceral sound. His texts are published in i.e. Taz, Spex, FAZ, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, WOZ and several book volumes. He runs the music label Arcane Patterns and hosts a monthly podcast on Noods Radio. Follow him on Instagram, his Website, or LinkedIn.

Biography

Juan José López (*1992) is researching how insects communicate through mechanical waves at the National Institute of Biology in Ljubljana. Among other things, biotremology investigates the extent to which the communication of arthropods allows conclusions to be drawn about the ecological context. The method can complement the study of different habitats and make a hidden world audible and tangible.

Biography

Ludwig Berger (1986), Zurich-based composer, artist and natural sound researcher, creates electro-acoustic compositions. In his works, landscapes become audible, be they cities, Japanese gardens, glaciers or a bee colony. Follow him on his Website.

Published on August 24, 2023

Last updated on April 02, 2024

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Alienation

Listening

Nature

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Sonic Natureculture

When the Sound Listens Back

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