“What’s your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?
I straddled 2 worlds in a very real way, growing up in the small city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, pre-internet. There was the world of my neighbourhood friends, but also the world of South Asian immigrants (primarily Indian) that was growing in the city. When my father moved there, there were literally 3 or 4 men from the Indian subcontinent in the whole city, that was all. I grew up knowing every brown person in Winnipeg.
I think my seeking of “secret” or hidden sounds came directly from inhabiting 2 very different cultural (sound) worlds as I grew up. The sounds of these worlds were completely separate – there was 0 crosstalk between them, they were totally hermetic, which sounds impossible now. Apart from that, my father was an academic, so we spent significant amounts of time during my childhood living in India and Nigeria while he did development work.
So in essence I encoded over time a lived experience that embodied a knowledge of “more” as it pertained to sound (and culture in general) – maybe my being knew that the sounds I heard at any one time were only a small part of what existed in the world. Perhaps that is what drove and drives my desire to look for or uncover sounds and stories that are not immediately apparent in the archive or text.
Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?
As an autodidact, I have always hesitated to consider myself as part of a tradition or lineage, because in Bengali and Indian culture “tradition” is a very powerful word. It has very particular meanings when applying to artistic practices as old as the ones you find in India and the area, and my own practice has never adhered to the historically and traditionally very strict boundaries that would result in defining oneself as a member of a lineage or tradition there.
I’ve had a difficult time navigating how to connect the way I worked with sounds and the materials I have been drawn to with my own cultural heritage. That relationship has resolved, or I suppose continues in the process of resolving – I know now that what I do with sound is inexorably part of my own experience of my heritage, and that experience and expression operates intersectionally with my interests and skills.
There are traditions of attention and artmaking from India that are encoded in my gestures, but do not limit or define them, and I think there are many artmakers from different cultures in the diaspora that are exploring in the same way. I build and claim my culture as I work, and a large community of artists are building and claiming with me. ”
I found this interview incredibly interesting – with vast similarities in his spacial sound work as mine in relation to identity and space with him facing a very similar diasporic perspective of “straddling 2 worlds”. his perspective of having a difficult time navigating how to connect the way he worked and his cultural heritage displays parallels in my work in relation to tradition, appropriation and the split between his identity and his technical work. All of this interview especially in relation to his identity and what it brings to his practise seems to answer questions of bringing traditional aspects into modern spatial settings – for a person of diaspora, there is always a split, the projections of ones own artistic expression usually results in an unusual mix of blind confidence in “taking” without always knowing and “producing” without perspective.
“To me, there is a huge social disconnect in the traditional acoustic ecology between the utopian deification of “high fi” (natural) sounds (whose nature? Who consumes it, and how?) and “low fi” soundscapes (which define the soundscape of the vast majority of the population of the world) that the WSP assumed and expressed at its core (despite later attempts to expand their notions in practice). If you’re poor, if you’re brown, if you’re stuck in the city with no means to travel or even access to “nature” (or if access has been stolen from you from a government continuing to practice institutional racism), does your soundscape hold no value or meaning?
There are other theorists and thinkers who have delved into this question more deeply than I (see above), but suffice it to say that from my perspective, I distrust the term “acoustic ecology” deeply. I personally find very profound undercurrents and meaning in sound environments that have often been classified and written off as harmful by traditional acoustic ecology adherents. There’s no doubt that, e.g. loud urban spaces have a detrimental effect on health and social interactions, but I think that those issues, while necessary to address, do not negate the rich and complex relationships that humans have with their urban sound environments, and to neglect that relationship in favour of an exclusionary, utopian (and yes, racist) consumption of nature is deeply flawed.“
reservations about the phrase “acoustic ecology” seem to reflect a broader distrust of frameworks that fail to account for the various ways in which sound is heard and experienced in different socio-cultural instances. By rejecting an exclusionary and utopian conception of nature-centric soundscapes, Sinha promotes a more inclusive approach that acknowledges the intrinsic importance and diversity of urban sound environments and the people within it. This reframe challenges long-held preconceptions and pushes us to reconsider our understanding of sound, identity, and belonging in space.
In summary, the passage emphasises the need for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to acoustic ecology—one that recognises the diversity of aural experiences while centering the perspectives and experiences of marginalised bodies.