In the front porch of my childhood home there was a wind chime hanging off the roof, just underneath a young mango tree. At first there was just noise, an incoherent babble of everything that means and evokes nothing. But for some unknown reason i stopped, and i listened. And at that moment, noise turned into sound. And sound turned into feelings, prehistoric markers that told stories through genetic code — the sound of rain evokes a sense of which meaning is lost when we try to translate it into language, as with our feet against grass, of water flowing, of thunder, of everything that makes sound.
And then, language turned sound into meaning. A word that means something, a sentence, an utterance, a prayer. In this sense, the crystallization of language happened first not in the domain of our vision, but within the domain of hearing — of sound. We understand and shape our world in the abstraction layer that is language, firstly through sound. A man once stood upon a river and conjured a sound that correlates to that. We argue, love, kill, and reproduce based on the sounds that we make.
I am shaped by the sounds around me, and through sound i shape my surroundings. Being brought up in a family that does not bother with lower levels of abstraction, sound is background thing, a thing that’s invisible, and of no regard. Only in its absence that sound is considered in my family. I set out to differ, and i started collecting music in my early teens. Starting from radio pop, and branching off to classic rock, and more experimental forms of music, absorbing info from my peers and from the internet, i shaped my taste. I know what i like now. But, sound on its own, separated from music, wasn’t on my radar yet. I had considered music, but not sound.
Sound on its own started to germinate in my understanding when i was studying in film school. I had not set out to be a sound engineer, rather, a director, or a scriptwriter. Something more lofty, something that lived in the higher plane, with dreams and musings and images that come to be on their whims. I wanted to play God. But God did not create the world from a grand, overarching theory of what things should be. On the first day, there was light. Only from the most basic building blocks can the grandest of architectural marvels can be built. Only from the tiniest of sound, can a world be heard.