Here at Lahore it is about nine oclock in the evening, and the city is breathing off the day heat of what has been of fabulous magnitude. This air is live and thick and it brings what most people would describe as noise with it. It is a noisy sea of sound that is chaotic, overwhelming, the sound of a city that never really sleeps. Sounds of constant traffic in main road reach my ears through the window, endless flow of engines, horns, and characteristic rattle of Qingqi rickshaws. It is the sound that has never stopped so much that is a kind of silence, the fundamental drone against which we mark out the rhythm of urban life. I, similar to most of urban residents, had treated this sound landscape as an attack, a certain evil that needs to be withheld, an energy that can be fought with closed windows and headphones during years. We are socialized, to find music in the sterile, sensually deprived lecture halls, in selected Spotify playlists, in pitiful undulating lonelinesses of the natural landscape. But something very deep within you changes when you learn how not to hear a city as a form of noise anymore, but to actually tune into it as a piece of music, a multifeatured, unorchestrated symphony constantly being performed in real-time. The busiest cities in the world are not cacophony; they are orchestra and to learn to listen to the music they comprise is a step into the deepest belonging.
The initial process, then, in this hearing awakening is to break down the wall of sound, and to distinguish between passive rather than active performance of hearing and an active rather than a passive performance of listening. It is a biological activity in which we cannot make choices; listening is a centered activity. It starts by pin pointing the rhythm section which is the initial pulse that propels the city through. Beauty exists around you, but you should learn to hear behind the audible sounds. Below all this is cleared a deep droning sound. It is the subliminal roar of the one million air conditioners struggling against the heat to keep things cool, the incessant bass of the generators when they finally come to life in a black out, the sound of the electrical grid of the city, every yard away, vibrating so slightly that you might not even realize. That is the bass note of the city. Over this is a second layer, the more apparent rhythm of traffic, a banging and quite regular beat. It is more than anarchy. It is acceleration and deceleration, the rhythmic pause and start in the intersection, the gradual roll over a clear road that is the real heartbeat of the city.
Knowing where the rhythm is, you can then start on the accents, the staccato crash and crunch of the city, the percussion section. These are the sounds, which make the drone texturized and have personality. In Lahore it is the clang of the steel shutter being drawn down by a shopkeeper as he closes the shop at night, the sharp metallic sound which reverberates through the alleys, and ends the business part of the day. It is the rapping, hard noise of a cricket bat against some temporary pitch at a local park, and the excited shouts that follow it. It is the monotonous, almost hypnotic press of a baker striding along in his kitchen socks a forehead of dough, or the sharp, shrilly carillon of a bicycle bell picking its way through a traffic jam in a bazaar. Every sound tells a story, a very small self-contained event. The thing is that when you listen to them, they become deliberate interruptions. They are an orchestra of the city, the cymbals, the snare hits, and woodblocks, all giving a different addition to the complexity and meaning of the total composition.
The most complex and most wonderful part of such an orchestra is the human part. The rhythm and the sound relationships of the city come on the human voices waves. In the Anarkali Bazaar, the crowd roar, however, is not a roar of the generics. With concentration you can untangle it back to its constituent threads. You may hear the singing, ascending voice of a vendor shouting his wares, a song which has been sung so many times as to be already a kind of folk tune. One can distinguish the staccato rhythm of a hot exchange between a vendor and a buyer, a give and take word-play. there is the background sound of people in a hint of legato murmur as they walk and the children laughing fall like perfect notes of harmony or rather comes as a welcoming surprise. The languages their very selves approach are musical. The lyrical, melodic, rousing cadence of the Punjabi earthy, expressive language, and smooth, flowing lilt of Urdu make a deep and diverse tapestry of the voice. The cries of these people contain the beating heart of the city, the heart spilled out into the open air to find its voice.
At some point, a pure musical element intrudes the city soundscape, a formal solo between the hustle and bustle of a free improvisation. In Lahore the deepest illustration is the Azan, the call to prayer. On five occasions every day, the energetic craziness within the city is briefly put on hold as one melodic voice comes through the minarets throughout the sky-line. The sound, full of the microtonal subtleties of Maqam, outstrips the traffic and the commerce, creating the moment of serene, and structured beauty. These couple of minutes carry the whole city into one common space of listening where excepted rhythms of this city turn subordinate to some extent in favour of this primordial music full of sacrament. At a more secular level, other soloists can be met: the plaintive, reedy reed of a solitary flute player arching under a bridge, his music going through the clatter of the cars over him; the sharp, insistent wail of an ambulance siren, a harrowing solo that clears the way through the honking traffic; or the unaffected, gladdening ring of a single child laugh, so pure as to temporarily confront all others. Such solitary actions act as a reminder that, despite the anonymity of the huge community, the life of a single person is always taking place in the city.
In the silence there is just as much music as in the notes, just as it is with any good music piece. That is the music of the hidden city: negative space, the silences in which one hears the sounds, which lend them meaning and strength. In locating this you must meander off the larger arteries. Go into a little house space of the old city, and the clatter of the principal street will be immediately left behind, and that sweet, personal silence only is left in its place. The sounds here are less, more finely delicate, those of the open kitchen window of plates, of pigeons cooing on a windowsill, of the whisper of the wind in a leafy courtyard. Or find the silence of the depths of someplace such as the Wazir Khan Mosque and listen to the silence late at night. The complex mosaics appear to swallow and dissolve all the sound leaving behind a well-throated solace. Here, you can hear the sound of your own steps on the cold rock as it is a Then a part of the composition. Only in such moments of repose, such stills in the urban performance, are you able to get real sense of how thick the sounds you have abandoned have become. The music of the city is pictured on the silence.
After all, by allowing yourself to interact with the city in this fashion, what you are doing is make the transition between listener and composer. You are the maestro to symphony of your urban life. By selecting where to give your attention you are changing the mix. The next minute the bass can be raised at your fingertips by dwelling on the low, machine, dullness of the infrastructure of the city. The second, you can isolate the “vocals”, by listening to people passing you by and getting to hear what they are saying. You can trace an individual sound, such as the bell of a kulfi vendor as he goes round and see through which direction that one sound is taking you on an aural tour through your own neighbourhood. It is a powerful meditation. It roots you on ground and makes you connect with your surroundings in a meaningful manner. The packed bus on the way to work is now something that can be used to make the commute experience even better, that is, to listen to a rich tapestry of stories around you. Visiting a known street is transformed to an adventure of creating.
The busiest cities in the world are never simply noisy, they are tirelessly, intricately musical, whose composition shifts hour by hour, season by season and according to always-shifting human life. How to learn to hear this music invisible is to open a new stratum to the reality, to discover a source of beauty and order where we have learned to find only stress and chaos. It takes a patient wandering ear, the ear ready to pay attention to more then what the noise presents on the surface, the ear willing to plum beyond the disjointed and arbitrary rhythms, melodies, and harmonies that the noise presents on the surface. One of the ways of falling in love with a place is because of the sounds it makes. Also, now sitting in my chair with the noise of my city pouring around me, I do not hear noise anymore. I hear the heavy, steady pulse of existence, difficult percussion of vast numbers of single narratives, special, vivid and gorgeous music of Lahore by night.
There are also more complex movements of this symphony but once got learned about the basic structure, this symphony will also unveil. A listener who listens in the same fashion is a sonic archaeologist who digs in the time and meaning strata hidden in the city soundscape. The acoustic memory lies within the stuff of a location. The noise of a motorcycle riding through a narrow street of the Walled City and the noise of the same motorcycle riding on a broad and asphalt avenue of a modern suburb is not exactly the same here in Lahore. It is a more rewarding, rich and organic interaction of sound, than the cold monotony of the glass and concrete echo. The old dense Mughal-era, brick of the gates and havelis of Delhi absorbs and reacts with sound, and this reaction is warmer, more personal and sophisticated than the brittle sterility of glass and concrete. The acoustics in themselves complain of age. You can shut your eyes and you can, almost, experience the heft of those centuries in the resonance of the sound, soundcaster, ectoplasmic, the sound, in a way, of centuries, stilled and held in stasis in the present.
Alive artifacts, pieces of music that people know only through the generations, a long history lost but the present connection to the past still prominent, are discovered in this sonic archaeology also. The particular, tuneful cry of long-established street peddler, the kulfi-wallah with his ringing bell or the channa-wallah with his chanting rhythm, did not originate in an advertising agency board room. It is folk music, it is a functional song meant to pass through the din of the street, practised and perfected by dads and dads and gramps who trode these very streets. To listen to that call is to listen to a clear uninterrupted oral tradition. It is a song which has been proclaiming the presence of some refreshing treat on a hot summer night over a period of decades, nay, possibly, a hundred years. It constitutes a part of Lahore cultural heritage just as the monuments do but this time it is a heritage that can be enjoyed only by listening.
Missing sounds also narrate the history of a place. The moment a deep listener starts to pick up the silences as not only a pause in the music, but as an indication of change and loss. Standing on The Mall road, one can fancy he can hear the dead sounds: the soft clip-clop of horses, drawing their tongas, which has been to a great extent replaced by the roar of the internal combustion engine. It is possible to hear the ghosts of the pre-conceived city sound pattern and think of the other tongues, the other religious calls, the other festival music that used to lie together and mix in these same streets. The silence of these sounds is a mark of a tragic history of transition, of the lost people, of the lost lifestyles. Listening in this fashion assumes the quality of a remembrance something through which to honor the complexity and the sometimes tragic past that has informed the present-day composition of the city.
Even a caring ear starts hearing the music of power and social constructions. The city sound is not a democratic chanting: it is a signal of hierarchies, inequalities and unwritten laws. It is possible to trace the economic divisions of the city with the use of ears only. Go to a posh and secure neighbourhood in Defence, and the symphony turns into a minimalist and ambient one. The prevalent noises are the low, steady buzz of mighty generators that will maintain continuous power flow, the low rum of luxury vehicles, the distant water splash of a luxury pool, and the song of birds in a luxuriant landscape. The city mayhem is held at distance due to tall walls. Compare that to soundscape of a high density location within the inner city region. In this case, the music is noisy, multilayered, and polyrhythmic in character. It is the noise of life squeezed in a very close place: the metal squeal of small scale industrial shops working out of the landings, the bursts of multiple TV sets in open windows, the continuous flow of literally dozens of families, the roar of motor cycles in the alleyways that are too narrow to be possible. The texture of the sound itself shows the economical gap of the city.
Power also sounds in its own way. The brash and commanding sound to Lahore symphony is the honking, multi-toned siren of a VIP motorcade. It is the sound of ultimate power, sonic wave that tears through the current piece and makes all other instruments silence by definition. The traffic, the commerce, the conversations,–all are at a halt. The whole city has to stop and recognize the movement of a single, strong personality. It is like a solid reminder of the political scale of the city, a display of the solo performance which proves its superiority over the ensemble orchestra. Listening to such moments, you start to comprehend how the invisible forces rule the city, how the power presents itself not only through the visual show but also the acoustic one.
One can even hear the relationship the city has with gender. Once you travel to various neighbourhoods at varying hours, you are able to question yourself: by whose voice this space of commons is ruled? Female voices may be very rare in the noisy machismo arenas of the principal bazaars or truck stops. You may hear the harmonies of the families, the voices of the male, voices of the female and the voices of children who are melodically blending in the more residential parks in the evening. The sound also can give away the invisible lines that determine where women can feel safe and comfortable to have a place in the city and their voices will come and go according to the social geography.
The symphony of the city is also in continuous conversation with nature and its rhythms and tones are driven by weather and the seasons. Things could not prove all this more graphically than in the month of July when the monsoon sets in. The action starts with an overture of ascending wind, a noise that waving the leaves of the old trees in the city and blowing the dust in the streets. This is followed by the central percussive sound, i.e. the roar of the downpour, which by its sheer size can overcome nearly all of other sounds. It is like the beat of drums upon tin roofs, an over-weighted pounding on asphalt, and a still other, gentler one on the sod of a park. The rain comes with the gurgling bass sounds of the drainage systems in the city trying to take the load. And then, once the storm has cleared out, another motion starts. An acoustic clarity of beautiful periods. The air is cleaned of the dust, and sounds flow with new, sharp accuracy. You can hear the steady, syncopating drip of water off a balcony, the revivifying hollers of birds and the slash of a bicycle tire through a new puddle. The whole city has been washed in terms of music, the music written by nature.
At the end of it you find that you are no mere spectator to such a piece of extravagant acting; you are an actor too. You are one of the instruments of the orchestra. The beat of your walking adds into the percussive piece. The hurried anxious walk constitutes a tense and a fast beat. There is an easy adagio element given by a contemplative walk. When you speak, you create the note that becomes an addition to the melody of the city. There is the responsibility of realizing this. Does your note add to the harmonizing sweetness of the composition, or does it add to the temper-tantrum discord! The street music also reacts with your own inner soundtrack, the thoughts and feeling that are influx in your head. A disoriented mind will grow to feel overloaded with the sound of the city where all they can hear is sound. However, a peaceful, balanced mind can be consistent with the external world grasping beauty and order in the complexity. Listening becomes an act of meditation, getting inside the same rhythm with the one that is pulsating around you.
Learning to listen to a city is learning the most honest and in depth language of that city. It is a language that speaks about its past, its social divisions, its understanding of nature as well as the common soul of its people in a richer way than books and instruction manual. This aural ethnographic practice makes the urban life one in which the sense of alienation and the over saturation of senses is replaced by the sense of intimacy and belonging. You are no longer a visitor rocked by the noise, you are now an initiated part of the orchestra and are capable of understanding the intricacy of the piece. Each city is a musical key, which even has its signature composition. It takes little to understand what it feels like being home, to seek it out, and to actually hear it.
