Sounds of a vanishing silence

‘If We Vanish,’ an upcoming immersive art installation in Bengaluru captures the sounds of silence in Nature

When ‘Sound of Silence’ was released in 1964, little would Simon & Garfunkel have realised their song would be a portent of things to come. Now, half a century later, with vast swathes of the Earth’s quiet places having been reduced to a few pockets scattered around the planet, the danger of natural silence vanishing is very real.

“Sound is changing dramatically every day and going by our research, natural silence may not exist for much longer; we’ve got a few more decades at best,” says Nikhil Nagaraj, a Bengaluru-based sound artist. Together with fellow sound artist Felix Deufel from Leipzig, Germany and their team, the duo captured the beauty, mysticism and astounding clarity of the quiet as experienced in the mountain forests of India’s Western Ghats and the high-altitude cold deserts of the Himalayas.

During a 40-day expedition to map the soundscape — a measure of the biodiversity of a region’s flora and fauna — Nikhil and Felix, accompanied by photographer Phil Jungschlaeger and videographer Xenia Gorodnia, used different 3D audio formats to capture the quiet of some of the few pristine places in India before they disappeared. The upcoming exhibition, ‘If We Vanish,’ embodies that research.

“I met Felix in 2017 during a workshop at The Indian Sonic Research Organisation in Bengaluru where he was an artist-in-residence. The following year I was an artist-in-residence in Germany. We soon became friends and by 2019, we started developing ideas that we could work on together,” says Nikhil.

While ‘surround sound’ might be one way a layman would describe their work, sound artists operate in a different league altogether, taking into consideration factors such as elevation and range, using specific speakers and production tools to enhance the hearing experience. “We create sound installations and abstract compositions for events and exhibitions, working with 3D audio which simulates our natural hearing,” says Felix.

In November 2021, the team presented their research titled ‘If We Vanish,’ as a performance, encapsulating the different interpretations of silence. “There were performances by Ronita Mookerji from Bangalore and visual artist Tobias Feldmeir from Berlin which was presented at ZiMMT, the Centre for Immersive media, arts, music and technology in Leipzig, following which it came to Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru in December 2021,” says Felix.

Talking about the upcoming exhibition, Nikhil says, “We don’t see this as another edition of ‘If We Vanish’ — it is an ongoing topic and is spread over multiple projects. While our first was a performance based on different types of silence, this one is an exhibition focused on natural silence.”