The balcony to the world
Jul 15, 06:27 PM
Between 1997-2000, me aged 7-10, my mother and I used to live at my grandparents house. For a few years now, this house had been abandoned, with no one living there and the house falling into disrepair. More recently, this house has been sold and slated to be demolished for a new property to be developed there. Before the handing over of the house to the new owners, I got to visit the place a few times and documented some of the environments one could listen to. This particular piece of recording is from the balcony on the first floor, which looks out to the street. Very close to it is a banyan tree. You can listen to the sounds of the crows, and other birds, some traffic and the general hum of people going about their business.
To be entirely honest, my memories from my childhood don't include a lot of aural material. While more than 20 years have passed since I lived here, I believe my childhood would've sounded similar to what you hear in the recording, at least from this part of the house. In those last 20+ years, I have moved across cities and lived across various apartments. With this visit, I was able to revisit at least one part of my past and preserve some audio from the environment. Going forward, I might never be able to listen to the world from this spot ever again and there will be a new building standing in its place and the day spent doing some of these recordings gave me a way to revisit my childhood.
Recorded by Sourya Sen.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
To be entirely honest, my memories from my childhood don't include a lot of aural material. While more than 20 years have passed since I lived here, I believe my childhood would've sounded similar to what you hear in the recording, at least from this part of the house. In those last 20+ years, I have moved across cities and lived across various apartments. With this visit, I was able to revisit at least one part of my past and preserve some audio from the environment. Going forward, I might never be able to listen to the world from this spot ever again and there will be a new building standing in its place and the day spent doing some of these recordings gave me a way to revisit my childhood.
Recorded by Sourya Sen.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration