| pubs.notes | Rice undertook 2 weeks of location sound recording and interviewing in order to document the soundscape of the Govindpuri slums and to explore how local residents interpret and respond to it. He worked closely with Dr Tripta Chandola, an urban researcher based in Delhi (now a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements). Chandola had previously studied the sound environment of the slum (2012, 2013), but the research for the programme was original and created large quantities of new data, including over 20 hours of ambient recordings and interviews. The programme illustrates and develops important ideas relevant to the anthropology of sound and the wider interdisciplinary field of sound studies, showing how sound expresses numerous aspects of the slum: its physical architecture and materiality, the density and ethnic/linguistic diversity of its population, the scarcity of resources (especially water, but also less obvious ones such a privacy and quiet), and the presence and pervasiveness of social tensions around religion, class/caste and gender. It also shows the fruitfulness of making comparisons between dramatically different soundscapes by using the example of the rainforest of Papua New Guinea (Feld 1990, 1996). The complexity of the forest soundscape produced by insects, birds and other animals is shown to have a similar density and spatiality to the interweaving human, mechanical and technological sounds heard in the slum. At the same time, the programme situates the sounds of Govindpuri within the wider context of Delhi and illustrates the auditory conventions found there, especially those relating to commerce and consumption, transport, performance and musicality. Importantly, the programme also explores the meanings and implications of quiet and silence in an otherwise bustling global city. This research output aimed to illustrate how an ethnographic context can be illustrated or described using sound recording and editing techniques, challenging dominant (visualist) modes of academic knowledge production (Makagon and Neumann 2009). It was a successful effort to produce a piece of what Feld and Brenneis (2004) call ‘anthropology in sound’, where sound is not only the focus of a piece of ethnographic research but also becomes the means of representation. References: ‘BBC’s global audience rises to 372m’. BBC Media Centre. Consulted 7th November 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/global-audience-measure. Chandola, T. 2013. ‘Listening in to water routes: Soundscapes as cultural systems’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(1): 55-69. Chandola, T. 2012. ‘Listening into others: Moralising the soundscapes in Delhi’. International Development Planning Review 34(4): 391-408. Feld, S. 1990. Sound and Sentiment: birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Feld, Steven. 1996. ‘Waterfalls of Song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’. In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 91-135. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Feld, S. and D. Brenneis. 2004. ‘Doing Anthropology in Sound’. American Ethnologist 31(4): 461-74. Makagon, D. and M. Neumann. 2009. Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage. | en_GB |
