Sound of a Place
Do photographs have sound? If they do, what would they be like. Curious as I was, I sent a photograph of an informal neighborhood I was working on to the Global Sound Map project by Cities and Memory. It is run by a Stuart Fowkes, a sound artist and musician based in Oxford UK. Sound Photography project invited photographers from across the world to submit photographs which the artists chose to compose sound for. An investigation into the relationship between places and the unique sound it creates, and thus immerses in. The interactive project maps sounds from diverse locations - imagined, and real, shifting focus to the sense of hearing in a visually dominated culture.
An interactive gallery of photos and their sounds can be accessed at https://citiesandmemory.com/mappoints/photofull
A brief reading and inspiration of the photograph from the artist : Daniel Prieto
... and the asphalt prevailed -
In the image of the 'India Hyderabad - Aghapura Housing' you can see some sort of metamorphosis from left to right, from the barely settled green in the background of the image and different stages of urban development, from what it seems to be the most informal –with hopeful columns waiting to support another story– to the more formal buildings, made with homogeneous prefabricated materials, and a paved road. All of these development stages imply a change in the environment as well as in the social interactions, that start with finding of a piece of land for building a shelter, the construction of a community, the competition for resources, and the political tensions that arise by from the struggle for overcoming precarious living conditions. Finally, the struggling voices are silenced by the alienation, the urban life in the big city and the omnipresent internal combustion engine. I tried to express the process described above quite literally throughout the work, with successive kinds of 'silence' and contrasting sound signals belonging to different stages of change, that every time include more human activity –physical and social– shaping the soundscape.