Sonic Heritage for World Heritage Day 2025
I’ve composed a short sound piece for Cities and Memory’s Sonic Heritage event, which launches April 18th 2025. Take a listen when it premieres!
Project Description:
The world is not this world when heard through the auditory spectrum of a snake. It follows, then, that history itself might also shift if perceived outside the limits of human hearing. Naja Nostalgia is a sound work that employs field recordings, geophone recordings, analog synthesizers, and an improvised Viridu performance to recreate the experience of walking through Sri Lanka’s Galle World Heritage Site—but imagined through the auditory perspective of a cobra. With a limited hearing range of approximately 50–1000 Hz, the snake’s acoustic world offers a radically different filter for understanding space, time, and memory.
What became clear during the compositional process was the surprising resonance between the snake’s frequency spectrum and the emotional texture of human nostalgia. The emphasis on low frequencies—vibrations, sub-bass tones, speaker resonance, and analog hiss—echoed the affective registers of longing and melancholia. In this narrowed spectrum, faint auditory artifacts emerged with heightened poignancy: whispered Portuguese and Dutch fragments, brief bursts of laughter, and fleeting exchanges between tourists and snake charmers. These sonic residues surfaced as spectral memories, suspended in the soundscape like half-remembered dreams.
By deliberately using the speaker’s voice to cut the 50-1000hz frequency range, the soundscape sways been human and snake hearing and resemble an analog past—one evoking the tactile, time-worn quality of cassette tapes, LPs, and perhaps even earlier recording technologies. This sonic filtering became a metaphor for how nostalgia operates: not as a complete recollection, but as a selective and often distorted echo of what once was.
This approach to listening brought me back to the idea that tourism itself is a complicated engagement with the past. It can often be a reductive encounter in which one culture experiences another through a narrow, mediated spectrum—visually, aurally, emotionally. My improvised Viridu performance sought to engage with this complexity not only through sound, but through the act of listening itself: as both an intervention and an act of attentiveness.
Like nostalgia, the auditory world of the snake distorts, condenses, and reorients. It is a form of hearing that vibrates through the body, bypassing the ear and settling somewhere deeper. It does not seek to reconstruct a full historical narrative, but instead evokes fragments—sensorial, partial, and affectively charged.
