For soundscape, I attempted to recreate the sounds I hear each day when I'm home in New Delhi,
from the moment I wake up to the early afternoon.
It starts with birds chirping on my window, the milkman ringing
the doorbell to deliver the morning full-cream and my mother stirring tea for
my father in the kitchen as a dozen cats encircle her feet. It would be an understatement to say I enjoyed myself while
working with GarageBand. In fact, I was so mesmerized by the creative process,
I got carried away, creating a piece that was twice and a half as long as I
initially intended for it to be.
As I worked on this project, a sense of nostalgia came upon me. The fact that these sounds were fragments I put together from a variety of sources - voice recordings my mother sent me, voicemails from my friends, found sound effects on the internet - started to fade away and this piece as a whole, began to perfectly replicate my personal reality. That put me in two very different states of mind. One, where I was proud to have succeeded in what I set out to do, the other, where I craved to re-live my childhood, wondering how often, if at all, I would be able to experience these sounds again. The feeling was both beautiful and sad, all at once.
At home, in the morning, from within my sheets, there is no escaping from these sounds. As Marshall McLuhan puts it, "We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us" (McLuhan, 11). I grew up wanting desperately to dismiss them, to shut them out, but today, as I sit and listen to this piece over and over again, I long for my ears to be filled with these sounds again, to be home, just perhaps, for one more morning.
