India’s rich tapestry of everyday sound is getting lost in the modern din of smart cities and streaming culture, lend an ear to understand what we lose when we stop listening
In cities across India today, a new kind of silence is settling in. It’s not the absence of noise, far from it, but the absence of familiarity. The metallic chime of temple bells is drowned out by car horns, the rhythmic cries of street vendors replaced by WhatsApp pings, and cassette-era lullabies muffled by algorithm-curated playlists. As India urbanises and digitises at breakneck speed, the textures of its everyday soundscape are being erased; sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once.
Sound & Memories
For artist and researcher Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, the relationship with sound began in childhood. Growing up in the Santal Parganas, a plateau region between West Bengal and Jharkhand, he was immersed in the natural environment. “Living in that environment was very helpful to attune myself with environmental sounds,” he recalls.
Over the decades, he has witnessed how India's sonic environment has been reshaped by waves of technological intervention. From early radio broadcasts and cinema to the rise of the internet and global digital platforms. “Technological transmission has impacted very much on the ways of listening and ways of sounding,” he says. “When you record yourself or hear yourself being played back, it changes how you sound and how you think about sound.”
Indian Soundscapes
Crucially, Chattopadhyay resists the temptation to frame the change as a clean break from the past. Instead, he describes a “suspension of time,” where sonic pasts and presents co-exist. “Contemporary is a mixture or a blending of pre-modern and modern and post-modern… Times past, times present, times future all merge in one kind of complex sonic environment. There is a continuous interplay between them.” In his view, the Indian soundscape holds layered temporalities, with cane juice carts and temple bells coexisting alongside ringtone symphonies and streaming services.
Still, he cautions against complacency. Amidst this sonic blending, the art of listening itself is under threat. “To be ethical in listening is to suspend your judgemental attitude,” he says. “Most people listen only to make immediate sense of something and then they stop listening.”
Listen Up
Ankur Malhotra, music producer and co-founder of Amarrass Records and Aural Grooves, has also spent years working to preserve India’s fading sound traditions. A longtime field recordist, and technologist, Malhotra’s journey into folk and oral traditions began with a love of blues and machine sounds. “India, with its rich musical history, wasn’t really showing up on global stages, so I thought, let’s go find that music.”
But fieldwork has shown him how hard that task has become. “More people are consuming more music, even folk, but it’s a kind of homogenous consumption,” he says. “You’ll see a Rajasthani folk song hit 20 million views, but people may only know five such songs. Meanwhile, there are thousands of others getting forgotten.”
AI Distortion
Even more troubling is the effect of algorithm-driven listening platforms. “AI-driven models like Spotify are basically killing a lot of these traditions,” Malhotra says. “Most of this music doesn’t exist on those platforms. And even if it does, there’s no real incentive, you need a million streams just to cover the cost of putting the music out.”
For him, preserving sound means capturing the total experience, not just the music, but the space it emerges from. “In some of my recordings, you can hear the sound of the bird going around on the back street of the village… birds chirping or singing in sync sometimes. So there is always beauty… capturing the sound of that music in the space where it gets created, that becomes interesting by itself.”
He also highlights the risk of losing digital material itself; a new kind of ephemerality. “This is all also what I call like digital ephemera and 20 years from now if someone wanted to listen to music of some of the elders it wouldn't exist, maybe it exists as a two-minute snippet on some Insta reel… if that exists then.”
One recording remains etched in his memory. “Sakar Khan, a master Kamaicha player, was performing a train song in the desert. In the distance, you could hear an old diesel train whistle. That train sound has changed now. The artist is gone. The context is gone. It was a singular moment; one that won’t happen again.”
For Malhotra, what’s at stake is much bigger than aesthetics. “You lose a sense of identity, a sense of history. These sounds are the masala, the flavour that makes a space what it is.”
Sonic Environment
Dr. Aneesh Pradhan, a tabla exponent, musicologist, and co-founder of Underscore Records, agrees — though he draws a line between music and broader soundscapes. “Your questions discuss the sonic environment in totality and are not focusing on music alone. However, my answers pertain more to music. I feel the two cannot be clubbed together, as the issues concerning both may be different, and may therefore, require separate discussions.”
Still, Pradhan acknowledges the shifting landscape of India’s sonic experience. Changes in the sonic environment are inevitable. However, the rapidity and radicalness of this change in the Indian context over the past few decades stares us in the face due to the shrill and deafening quality that it has brought to the fore.
Oral traditions, he says, carry complex histories that cannot be replaced. “They carry several messages and stories about society, culture, polity, economy, and are therefore, more layered than what textual traditions carry… Sadly, these traditions and sounds are on the decline.”
While not a formal archivist, Pradhan and Shubha Mudgal’s Underscore Records has helped make rare recordings accessible. “We produced three albums of 78 rpm recordings… under a series called Living Music from the Past… We also included extensive notes and archival photographs to give listeners a sense of the period in which these were recorded.”
But preservation, he says, must also address context. “Certain musical forms are intrinsically connected with specific performance contexts and spaces. If the music is retained, but the contexts and spaces have changed, we need to recognise this rather than claim that we are saving the music and promoting it in its original form.”
And while technology may help us approximate lost sounds, it can’t restore what was once lived. “The transience of sound is what makes it irreplaceable… the quality of the original is lost.”
As India modernises, it risks forgetting the very frequencies that once defined its identity. A lullaby not sung is more than a lost tune; it’s the fading of memory. A vendor’s call silenced by urban noise is the vanishing of a cultural rhythm. If we want to preserve what’s left, we need more than storage devices; we need a society that still listens.
