Fall 2023

Sonic Weathers

Sensory Ecologies of the Changing Himalayas

In Collaboration with Shariq Shah and Manaswi Mishra

Future of Opera at MIT Medial Lab

Exhibition at Kirkland Gallery

Graduate School of Design

Harvard University

The proposed installation and sonic performance seeks to interpolate and visualize the rapidly changing ecology of the Trans-Himalayan region. Its landscape, traversing present-day Nepal, India, Pakistan, has simultaneously been considered as a patchwork of spiritual beacons, ancient civilizations, military occupations, and hydrological sites. It is laced with, at once, a cacophony of both dissonant and harmonious changes. 

Its makeup has thus historically betrayed static definitions, transforming just as quickly as it is documented. Colonial maps and geographic surveys seek to capture one moment of the Himalaya, yet are rendered immobile in interpreting its change. 

This change, we argue, has been registered at the scale of the sensory. Witnessing species extinction, glacial melt, avalanches, and infrastructure installation, the body has become the Himalayan site of sensorial precarity. 

SONIC WEATHERS, then, forms a dialogue between a precarious sonic ecology and an imagined visual atmosphere. Composing four musicians from various parts of the Himalaya, we propose a live performance that improvises its sonic changes through instruments and lighting artifacts. This change is registered through constructed frequencies of wind patterns, bird calls, and river flows. Such frequencies, both acoustic and electronic, are then visually orchestrated across the material artifacts composed within the installation.

We thus locate SONIC WEATHERS as an anti-globalized and more-than-human sensation of the Trans-Himalaya’s rapid transformations. They betray prediction, forecast, and dictation, crafting an atmosphere of unpredictability. As musicians improvise using acoustic and electronic instruments, their frequencies are translated to a matrix of material artifacts. Lit with changing hues of blue, this matrix forms a field that the musicians both inhabit and converse with through sound. This visual dialogue seeks to establish reciprocity between the analog and digital, sonic and atmospheric, and planetary and the personal.