Listen! An article on sounds that are fading away from our memory

During a recent visit to a wooded area deep in the Eastern Ghats I was awoken early one morning by a strange sound. It was still dark outside. I sat up sleepily. Again that clear sound cut through the early morning fog. I was wide awake! “Oh my God, I have heard that sound before” I thought. But I get ahead of my story.

The sounds of the sea

As a child my family lived in a house by the sea in old Vizag. So close to the sea in fact, that as the waves crashed on the beach in stormy weather, the salty spray went through our living room like spray from a giant salty cologne bottle. Twenty four hours a day we heard that sound. The ascending roar of waves rushing in; an extended crash as it broke upon the beach and a long fizzy sizzle made by billions of little bubbles bursting  as it withdrew back into the sea again. The funny thing is that when we hear a sound for so long we tend to not listen to them anymore. It goes deep into the temporal cortex of our brains and embeds itself there. When away from the sea we would realize that something was missing. It was that perpetual sound of the sea.

Our neighborhood sounds

As villages and small towns become urbanized the sounds that permeated our early consciousness has faded into the past. We do not hear the “twang … twang…twang” of the cotton man who used to come around offering to refresh our cotton mattresses. As high tech stainless steel kitchen knives made their way into our kitchens, the knife sharpeners with their pedal driven grinding wheels have less work. We miss the shrill “kreeeee” sound the grinding wheel as they sharpened our old knives at our doorstep. The street vendors who announced their wares in special tones are almost gone. We could not make out what they were calling out but we know exactly what they were selling. We don’t hear the excited shouts of children playing marbles, tops or gilli danda in grounds around our homes. The squeaks of squirrels in the banyan trees around us are gone. The day long “cheep, cheep, cheep” of the sparrow is gone as is the raucous chorus of birds every evening as they settled down to roost for the night.

The whisper of the wind

Before buildings covered every open space we heard the sounds of nature clearly. When the breeze blew over the land we could not only feel it but also hear it. Old Vizag’s sea breeze came in like an invisible wave rustling the leaves of the casuarina on the beach, swaying the coconut fronds near the coast, passing through the mango gardens and whispering to tamarind tree in the front yard before passing through our homes and left for destinations far away. They whispered romantic tales of the lands they have been to in our ears and we listened. The thunder is still clearly heard in our cities as they echo off our buildings but the soft hypnotic sound of rain as they fell on red soil around our bungalows sometimes gentle and sometimes noisy is heard less. If we close your eyes we can recollect sounds that were common in our childhood but have fallen silent since.

Where the sounds are stored

Sounds, like smells, have a way of lingering in our subliminal memory for ever. Early memories of a rickshaw rides, the haunting whistle of a distant train and the clack-clack-clack of its wheels on the track, the squeak of our bicycle as we pedalled to school, the mellow voice of our favourite history teacher, mother’s gentle reprimanding call to lunch and dad’s chuckle as he threw us up and held us close.  It is especially uncanny how we can remember a song by hearing just a second of it, our ability to tell the name of a movie by hearing just a snatch of its dialogue. Scientists credit our ability to assimilate and store memories to the phenomenal capacity of the human brain, which holds a billion plus neurons, making a trillion connections, and a storage capacity of 2.5 petabytes of data. If you have to know, 1 Petabyte (PB) is 1,000,000 Gigabytes (GB).

Rustic to riotous

Leading up to the investment meet in January and to IFR in Feb we were assailed by the constant wailing of sirens as VVIPs rushed hither and thither. It was a reminder of how Vizag’s ambient sounds have changed over the years from rustic to riotous. Our streets are home to the cacophony of impatient horns, the sound of diesel auto rickshaws which go thud – thud – thud as they idle on streets jockeying to pick up passengers or as they pass through our colony streets blasting out the latest disco numbers in the firm belief that it is their dharma to entertain the entire neighbourhood. In apartment homes the sound of TV reverberate down the corridors starting with suprabatham early in the morning and ending with that crazy angry man shouting on Times Now TV. One of the most annoying sounds is that of cars backing up and cursed are those staying near a parking space on a function day. Even when we think we are far from the maddening crowd, we are surrounded by caller tunes and big made men, in transparent white shirts, discussing real estate prices in the loudest of voices.

Listen

There is a desire in all of us to take a break from the cacophony of the city and escape to a quiet place by the sea, or walk a forests path, or lie atop a breezy hill. There is nothing quite like sitting with our feet in the beach sand hearing the waves come in and go out as they have done for thousands of years. Who can resist the joy of resting by a stream and hear the gurgle of water as it flows over pebbles and rocks? Or the calming sound of a soft breeze as it flows through the trees rustling the leaves above? Or the ecstatic singing of birds as they flit from tree to tree? We city folks need to reconnect with the natural sounds of our planet and even a short break to immerse ourselves in the elemental sounds of our past is greatly refreshing.

About that strange morning sound

And oh, that sound that woke me up early that morning in the hills of the Eastern Ghats was a sound that I was so familiar with in my childhood but hadn’t heard for several years in our noisy urban environment, the pure joyful call of a rooster welcoming another beautiful dawn. Cock-a-doodle-doo! Cock-a-doodle-doo! Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck.