On Listening in Nature: Sound-mapping in Thol
Photo by Saurabh Solanki on Unsplash
Living during the anthropocene, in total awareness of it, generates a unique set of values. How do we, as humans, observe and account for the fact that the rest of the planet is possibly transforming and transmuting itself in surviving through the anthropocene? How do we treasure what still exists as the “natural” within the paradigm of being “human-made”? Do we seek significance in the ostensibly mundane and transport it to the realm of the divine? Do we analyse the cacophony to read into its melodies; no matter how elegiac they may be?
As I walked around the Thol lake area with a microphone (A Zoom H4N portable handy mic – contains a unidirectional condenser capsule to produce an X-Y stereo imagery of the surroundings.), I kept encountering these questions in the act of attempting to record sounds that nature makes and the sounds it hears. The lake’s 7 km radius and its surrounding area were declared as a bird sanctuary in 1988 and host a wide variety of wetland species- both local residents and annually migratory, including certain rare birds such as the Sarus Crane and the Dalmatian Pelican. My initial interest in this area came from having frequented the sanctuary as a child for birding trips and seeing it slowly mutate as well as get popularised into becoming a tourist attraction. My primary occupation of engaging with music as a composer and sound engineer prompted me to delve into the possibilities of combining my love for birds and my obsession with sounds. This gave rise to experimental sound-mapping projects which set out to sonically capture temporally suspended life in a space. Sound-mapping can help ecologists analyse flight patterns, population densities and behavioural traits based on calls and songs and in-depth audio analysis of the source data. This project itself is solely a presentation of the primary
data collected for the purposes of mapping as well as a creative extrapolation of attempting music out of documenting nature.
While the activities of life in nature are typically understood in terms of diachrony, the scope of this project was limited to the synchrony captured through slices of particular spots in the area through the course of one particular morning (15th December, 2021) and based on observations of prior visits. This note accompanies the recordings of that morning, with 18 short audio captures made at 15 points spread across the periphery of the lake and the adjoining farmlands. The areas open to public access are only on the south-western front of the lake therefore the recordings must not be taken as an adequate representation of the entire area, only those open to public access as demarcated by the Gujarat State Forest Department.
As I reflected through listening back to these recordings, it struck upon me that what we know as the “natural” is in fact deeply intertwined with the human. Nils Bubandt brilliantly points out that the anthropocene comes with an unsettling feature, “the impossibility of distinguishing human from nonhuman forces, the Anthropos from the Geos” (Bubandt 2017), we live in times where we cannot essentially separate the two, the process of sonic mapping hopes to contribute in how we understand the complications of this binary. The site of Thol is fascinating in this regard as it is an artificially created water reservoir built in 1912 for storage and irrigation purposes. With migratory birds flocking to the lake and its surrounding wetlands, the area got declared as a sanctuary much later. After the development of the Narmada canal irrigation project in the 2000’s, this reservoir started being flooded with diverted water from the canals resulting in the islets of the lake drowning and the water depth being too high for birds to inhabit most areas of the lake. However, as the reputation of flamboyant birds in the area grew with the burgeoning expansion of Ahmedabad, so did the influx of myriad property development projects on the highway leading towards the sanctuary – sold as corporatized nature resorts or opulent weekend homes, these developments brought in an abundance of pollutants into the environment of the locality. The increasing popularity
of the sanctuary led to tourists flocking to the area for leisure and increasingly colonizing previously marked spaces for wildlife.
Tracking and presenting all of the historical and socio-cultural complexities about the birds and the people they encounter at Thol in vivid detail is perhaps beyond the scope of this singular project. However, the site acts as an important anchoring point for me to locate and reflect upon the interaction between ecology and society and I aspire to follow through with deeper studies into it.
Guide for Audio: This note is attached with two pieces of audio one titled ‘Birds-Grooving Birds’ is a track based on sampling and overlaying of a rhythm on the field recordings and the other titled ‘Raw Audio Mastered’ is a compilation of all the raw audio gathered from the field visit. The following list links timestamps on the latter audio file with number locations on the map seen in figure 4. When heard in order, the sounds in the audio portray the narrative of birds in the early morning leaving from their nests in vast flocks to fly overhead the observer and disperse in search for food; what nature creates. Beneath this large narrative are interspersed occurrences of anthropogenic sounds- talking, shouting, cars, tractors, sirens, wedding bands; what nature hears.
Track 1 Birds - Grooving - Birds:
Track 2 Raw Audio Mastered:
Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Chaitri Sengar for photographing and providing field assistance.
References
Bubandt, Nils. 2017. "Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene." In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, by Anna Tsing, 121-143. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
