Sounds of India, a digital discovery project was conceived to help travellers and Indophiles discover the subcontinent through its authentic tunes and music. The idea was to use sound as a mode of discovery of places, communities and cultures.
when you find your music, you find your place.
It started with a simple idea. Would it not be wonderful to navigate with music?
An India, incredible and lush with sounds and music, made for a fascinating opportunity. India offered the best opportunity because of its sheer diversity and artistic capital.
Could local music, tunes of the land and folk sounds of India, help travellers navigate through India and its endless stories? Digitally.
A version of the Sound Map was deployed in 2017 on an innovative travel & social discovery platform called Gulliver's India.
Gulliver's India was built with an extremely interesting socialised API architecture and various social technology tools like the Travel Equaliser to discover India, simply and beautifully.
Deep research into the country's musical traditions and folk tunes and their inextricable links to fantastic stories and legends led us to believe that sounds could be a powerful navigation tool. which led to the first comprehensive Digital Sound Map of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Kutch to Arunachal Pradesh.
Enter Sunoh, partners of an equal music.
Sounds of India, needed us to work and collaborate with domain experts who were both students and masters of their discipline - sound and music.
And we found them with Sunoh, a boutique sound consulting and production firm (and members in the venture design collective of NYUCT Design Labs). It is helmed by founders with solid credentials, long respected careers in the industry and most importantly, possessing a nuanced understanding of music. They, we rightly felt could could make the project sing.
Discussions, ideas, lab sessions and plenty of research helped percolate and distil what Sounds of India was to be.
Creating, curating a musical India.
The team and studios worked diligently, creating, ferreting, curating and collaborating with local musicians and creators from across the country, putting together an encyclopedia of local sounds, local music and local instruments.
Every state is a world of distinctive tunes.
From the sublime hills of Nagaland to the vastness of Kutch and from the lofty climes of Jammu and Kashmir to the depths of the Kanyakumari, a compendium of authentic Indian music and sounds was built. The first of its kind, we suspect across the globe.
Sound and Content Mapping
Research helped in creating and curating local tales, places, stories and trivia that were then carefully mapped to their own universe of sounds and tunes.
This was all about how technology, content, design and user experience can join ranks to build something purposeful. Something that could be larger than the sum of its parts.
Here you were led by the ears in a way :) through a larger story of India.
Sample a few fantastic sound tales.
The western violin is believed to be a descendant of the Ravanahatha
Fantastic stories were unearthed. That the Ravanahatha, found in Rajasthan and Sri Lanka, in fact dates back in mythology to the epic Ramayana.
In Indian and Sri Lankan tradition, the Ravanahatha is believed to have originated among the Hela people of Lanka during the time of the king Ravana, after whom the instrument is supposedly named. According to legend, Ravana used the Ravanahatha in his devotions to Lord Shiva. In the Ramayana epic, after the war, Hanuman returned to North India with the Ravanahatha. It is particularly popular among street musicians in Rajasthan, North India. Sources claim that between the seventh and tenth centuries AD, Arab traders brought the "Ravanastron" from India to the Near East, where it provided the basic model for the Arab Rebab, and other early ancestors of the violin family.
In Rajasthan and Gujarat, it was the first musical instrument to be learned by princes.
Tradition of temple dance and a revivalist initiative in Mylapore, Chennai
The project took us to Mylapore, one of the oldest precincts of Chennai, to see the tradition of temple dancing revived so richly by a cultural trust and its guardian's singular vision. Meeting such communities and keepers of culture was extremely gratifying. Every adventure is a school in its own way, with its many lessons and teachers.
Sounds are audio compasses.
Sounds of India is not an end in itself. Rather it opens up a world of opportunities in the realm of music and sound through inventive applications of design and technology.
The mapping of authentic content allowed the body of sounds to serve like audio compasses, gently goading travellers to discover a new story, a new region, a folktale, a tribe or a chapter from mythology.
There are amazing possibilities for the Indian Railways, Airline brands, Google maps and other navigation majors with the Sound Map of India.
Sound Maps of India is an innovation initiative of NYUCT Design Labs in collaboration with Sunoh.