Echoes of Forgotten India - An Archive of Everyday Sounds

Echoes of Forgotten India - An Archive of Everyday Sounds

What Is This Talk About?

This talk explores data through something we rarely archive but constantly experience: everyday sounds. As data visualisation grows more sophisticated, we’ve unlocked inventive ways to represent complexity without losing accuracy. We spend time understanding layered information, refining methods, and ensuring nothing gets lost in translation. Amid this, there is a quieter question it asks us to notice: every passing moment in our life is also a data point. Undocumented, often overlooked, yet deeply meaningful.

Insights:

Growing up in a small town in India, sound was never background noise. It was information. Morning school autorickshaws, temple bells, radios leaking into the street, these sounds shaped memory, rhythm, and identity. There were peculiar markers of time. The knife grinding on metal. The 'Chakku Dhaar Karnewale' uncle arriving and reminding us that months had passed, that seasons had shifted. Years later, coming back home after quite some time, one afternoon the same call returns - the uncle older now, white whiskers, more talkative, wiser, riding a new machine on a different cycle. It made me look back at the sounds that shaped my childhood. This project became an archive of those sounds; some evolved, some forgotten, some still loud as ever. A sugarcane seller’s call moved from trinkets tied to a cart to a pre-recorded speaker. The sound remained, but its form changed. The work sits at the intersection of data visualisation, memory, and lived experience. It treats data not as objective truth, but as a trace of time and attention.

Intention:

This talk is a breather. A pause that asks us to acknowledge the gravity of data that never gets collected, yet shapes our lives daily. It invites us to treat data not only as something to optimise, but something to honour. By reframing everyday sound as data, the talk encourages a kinder, more attentive relationship with information, without compromising rigour.

Next Phase of the Project:

Passing moments gain weight when visually archived. That gravity deepens further when data becomes tactile. Through stitches - each puncture of fabric forming a waveform, data makes its place in existence. The next phase translates this work into a textile form: a scarf documenting the evolution of sound over ten years. It becomes a reminder that attention itself is a rigorous act. Data can be emotional, incomplete, subjective, and still meaningful.

Who Is This Talk For?

Anyone curious about how noticing the present moment can change the way we collect, interpret, and respect information.

Takeaways:

• A new way to think about everyday experiences as meaningful data
• Insight into how subjective and incomplete data can still hold value
• Understanding how physical and tactile forms deepen data perception

Flow of the Talk:

The talk unfolds in three parts within a 15-minute, storytelling-led format combining visuals, sound, and personal narrative. It begins with context on how shared memories travel across time through sound. What starts as a personal archive often becomes relatable through others’ own memories. It then moves into the nuances of the data itself, inviting the audience to recall their own peculiar sound memories. The final part explores the tactile experience of data, and how information speaks differently when given a physical form. The talk concludes with a short interactive moment, where the audience is invited to guess familiar everyday sounds played live on a harmonica by a music-enthusiast friend, reinforcing how deeply sound is embedded in memory. Fun!