HYDERABAD: Imagine a world, or even a film, without sound. What a sad place it would be! Sound makes everything more real and relatable, believes independent filmmaker Gautam Pemmaraju. While speaking at a virtual talk called Sonic Legacies, organised by Foundation for Art and Culture Education (FACE), the filmmaker said: “Sounds of babbling brooks, rain and waterfalls create white noise to induce sleep. Some like the sound of a ceiling fan; sometimes without which they cannot sleep.”
“Sound is iconic in linguistic features. All of us grew up listening to the sounds dishumm and dishkaw — of Indian cinema,” the filmmaker recalled. Taking the example of a beating heart, he said, “In Telugu, we say lab-dad, in Hindi it’s dhak-dhak, and in German it’s bum-bum — whatever the language, we relate to instantly.”
He added that sounds offer great insight into whatever happens around us. “Understanding sounds of any kind helps us understand their origin and nature. Even the words like idhar, which means here, originated from the word hither.”
“Birds not only make sounds with their syrinx (throat) but also with their beaks, wings, and feather tweaks, for a variety of signals. And everything in nature has shaped human speech,” the filmmaker observed.
Gautam realised the material quality of sound when he was a ‘lab rat’ for an audiology research project in the early ‘90s. “For hours, researchers made me listen to white noise which had a faint pulse. I use to wait for the faint pulse immediately after the sound of it fainted,” he said.
English musician, David Toop, who also joined the virtual conference said, “We live within these ecologies of sound. If we open ourselves up by listening, they overlap with each other. I am conscious of all of the sounds - the complex network of overlapping ecologies - the only key to understanding it is by listening. The material quality of sound becomes the basis of music.”
The ongoing event will go on throughout the month of December, where speakers such as Behavioral Ecology expert Dr Manjari Jain, musician Tharun Sekar, filmmaker Debashree Mukharjee, sound artiste Unashankar Manthravadi and audio engineer Javi Alexander will share insights about the world of sound.