Sounds and the city
Artists put Asia's changing urban identity on tape
When composer Ng Chor Guan started commuting by bicycle in car-obsessed Malaysia a decade ago, he was struck by how quickly his city was changing and the sounds he would not have heard if he had been driving.
It led him to start recording the everyday sounds of Malaysian cities, one of a growing number of artists in Asia from India to Hong Kong who are seeking to preserve audible heritage in the region's fast-changing urban hubs.
“Sound has many powerful hidden messages. It's not only about recording a certain event, but also the evolution of a place,” said Chor Guan, 39, who records urban soundscapes from pockets of jungle to communal areas threatened by redevelopment.
Today the award-winning composer combines sound preservation with contemporary art, taking his performances to audiences across Asia and Europe.
“I realized some sounds are disappearing or changing,” said Chor Guan, citing multicultural Malaysia's `rojak' pidgin. Blending several local languages and named after a mixed fruit salad, the pidgin can often be heard in places like street markets.
“From one city to another, these sounds each have their own identity and uniqueness. I'm hoping more people can hear them and rediscover their cities,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Asia-pacific has one of the world's fastest urbanization rates, according to the United Nations, with half of its population — or some 2.3 billion people — living in cities for the first time in 2019.
As the region becomes more developed, urban soundscape studies have often focused on noise pollution, while efforts to preserve the identity of cities have concentrated on heritage buildings or through visual works, conservation experts said.
“There are certainly not enough efforts to record `historic sounds' related to places and activities,” said Jeff Cody at the California-based Getty Conservation Institute, which seeks to preserve cultural heritage.
“This is very lamentable, not only for nostalgic reasons, but also because often these sounds relate to the social significance of the historic places where they're present,” said Cody, an architectural historian whose work focuses on Asia.
Fei Chen, an architecture expert from Britain's University of Liverpool, said sounds are an “important carrier” of the memory and identity of a place as they represent the social dynamics that once existed there.
“Nevertheless, with the change of the social dynamics over time, place identity is evolving. Some sounds would inevitably disappear, and new sounds will emerge,” said Chen, who has studied preserving cultural identity in Chinese cities.
“The pity here is the disappearance of the original community along with the demolishing of the physical spaces, this makes the artists' work particularly relevant for conservation.”
Cody from the Getty Conservation Institute called on local communities to create a “sonic database” to document significant sounds before the city changes.
“Local activists might be able to use the sound-recording as a catalyst for galvanizing others to protect the places associated with the sounds before they are destroyed forever,” he said.