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The virtual sound garden

On NaaD Media Collective’s website, you can add to the bank of ambiences plucked from multiple space-times to be accessed anytime, anywhere.

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The disastrous flood in Kolkata in 2000 submerged every lane and every house.  Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s ancestral home was one of them.

After the water receded, a large part of his audio collection lay damaged, with no backup to rebuild it. It was then that the 32-year-old audio media practitioner decided to put together an audio archive that “would save all sounds for the future”. And so was born the NaaD Media Collective, six months ago.

NaaD Media Collective is an online society formed with the intention to preserve environmental, ethnographic and locative heritage in the domain of sound and related audiovisual media. This is achieved through collaborative projects and workshops conducted by Chattopadhyay and his team.

Coming from a media background, Chattopadhyay was already familiar with the technicalities of sound recording. 

Chattopadhyay propagated the idea of online sound archiving to cinematographer — and college friend — Ratheesh Ravindran, a NaaD collaborator. “I really liked the idea, and the fact that it would be easily accessible to anyone in India or the world,” says Ravindran. 

Though location recording is popular among media professionals, little importance is given to it. This is why NaaD Media came about collecting sounds from nature. In the age of high-end cell phones, anyone can capture sounds, wherever they are.

These can then be sent to NaaD Media; the ones that interest Chattopadhyay are uploaded on the website www.naadmedia.org, and the rest, saved on the server.

Chattopadhyay conducts workshops in the Kolkata colleges that offer film studies as a course. Chandan Konar, 26, a student of Jadavpur University, attended one of the workshops and even worked with Chattopadhyay on environmental sound recording and preservation.

“In that session, we recorded various kinds of sounds:  hawkers calling, people conversing, tea glasses clinking, and so on. The onlookers were curious and often asked me why I was recording the sounds,” says Konar.

He adds that it was during this session that he was consciously making an effort to listen.

Filmmaker and NaaD collaborator Nilanjan Bhattacharya says, “There has been no workshop that focuses only on sound. This particular media is not yet explored. So, when you have such a workshop, children are happy and excited to attend.”

All of them unanimously agree that Indians are not ready to accept sound as art yet, whereas, abroad, people are conscious about preserving it.

Here the notion of sound does not go beyond music. “We don’t know whether five years down the line, we will get to hear the sounds we hear today. With growing urbanisation, we may not hear the cry of a vegetable vendor in the years to come. We need a medium to preserve these interesting sounds,” says Ravindran.

What may be background noise for some is nothing less than music for the sound preservation enthusiast. “If you hear carefully, you notice a pattern,” says Ravindran.

Take for instance Chattopadhyay, who in a trip to Jharkhand, captured the sound of a blast in the industrial belt that reduced boulders to small chips. “Many people cover their ears when they hear such a loud thunder. But I just enjoyed listening to it,” says Chattopadhyay.

You can listen to a snake breathe, a pig sniff and many more interesting sounds on www.naadmedia.org.

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