Koyembedu is a pretty important part of town for locals and visitors alike. The two most important things located there are the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus [CMBT, the main bus hub in the city], and nearby, the Koyembedu flower, fruit, and vegetable markets. The markets get about 100,000 visitors per day, and supply foodstuffs for a great deal of the smaller markets, restaurants, and households of Chennai. They are typically insanely busy and crowded. The smells and sounds can be overwhelming for someone who isn't used to Indian public spaces. To state the obvious: there is nothing like it in the US.
Koyembedu
Flowermarket / 14.3.15 / 7:35a [10:16]
My steps up to the entrance
There is a lot of music here.
Music here [as everywhere] defines a space, marks a
territory.
Can I hear when I stop to let others pass?
Can I hear when I turn?
These people know each other. A market is different than a
“supermarket” in this way. It’s more conversational. Less private. There is so
much more sound.
The sound of crickets…
The sound – the incredibly nostalgic timbre – of old Tamil
film music
The sounds of walking over dry grass
People want to talk to me or ask me what I’m doing, but
there is a language barrier. They are used to people walking around with
cameras, never buying anything.
Next time I need to remember to buy something.
Colorful flowers in mounds, baskets, and bags. Organized by
kind.
Most of the people selling are men, most of the people
buying are women.
I suppose that’s not surprising.
Whistling.
Hey! Hello!
Birds.
Coughing.
A nun.
People approach me to ask what I’m doing:
“Hello”
“Saar!”
“What?”
“Mic-ah?”
“Yeah-yeah. Say
Hello…”
“Personal Recorder, um-ahhh.”
“Uh…yeah”
[I can't decipher]
“Yeah…records sounds.”
“Sounds saar…”
“Sounds saar, sounds
ah.”
[I can't decipher]
“Loudspeaker,
loudspeaker…”
“Uh…It’s recording
now. Ok…uh…”
I stop to show them.
Koyembedu fruitmarket
/ 14.3.15 / 8:00a [14:55]
“So they wanted to
listen. And I can’t…uh…record and play at the same time here. So I had to take
a break.”
The people at the market have thin, high voices. They speak
generally much more quickly than I do. Some of them almost sound like
chipmunks.
The sound of spoken Tamil to me seems very fluid, rhythmic, really
loose.
“…back inside”
The sound of birds and conversation crossing the way. They
articulate a silent path in the middle.
There are animals inside the market. Birds and dogs mostly.
Later on I recall seeing a cow.
The sounds from the outside often invade the inside, as does
the animal life of the street. No one tries to shoo the dogs away. Nor do they
try to steal fruit from anyone’s stall, almost as if by agreement.
The space of the outside and the inside mingle and cross.
The soundaries [1]
[ugh…I know…] are permeable because the physical spaces themselves are permeated
one by another.
“Now I’m outside. The
flower market here is…usually less hectic than the food market, which is right
next door. Um…Let’s see if that’s true today. In the mornings – it’s about 7:30
right now, a.m. – In the morning it is…it can be really intense, but the
markets here in India start hopping at about 6am with lorries….and…uh
merchants, housewives, all kinds of people. And of course, assholes like me
coming to make recordings and take pictures.”
I cross through a stream of trucks that are carrying
goods from the market into restaurants and other, smaller, markets in the city
and surrounding area. I cross the street and encounter a sweeper who points me
in the right direction [the way into the fruit market].
You can definitely hear where the building begins…its sounds
wrap around to contain me.
More shouting across the path. I can’t be sure if they are
talking to me. Everytime I hear “Hey” or “Hello” – which is often – I crane
around to see if someone is addressing me. Sometimes they are, curious to see
what I’m doing, or wanting to sell something to me.
“Things seem calmer
than they usually are here.”
I usually don’t respond except to nod a hello and smile at
them. I feel awkward a bit. I don’t know what I’m doing either. Later, I
resolve that the next time I come to a space like this, I will try indulgently
responding to every beck and call. Maybe I will be able to talk to some of
these guys?
“People moving through with…um…big carts and on foot,
holding boxes on their heads. Bananas. Everywhere.”
It occurs to me now that I have ceased doing “sound
research” – whatever that means – and begun doing something like amateur ethnography
or sound tourism, or something…
There is a background that sounds like crowd chatter, and a
middle ground, which sounds like events happening at some distance, but marked.
I attend to them. Someone drops a bowl, or bumps into a cart. The foreground is
populated almost entirely by things that are near me, most of all, human
voices. I hear them pass by me. I hear them as they mark out the space I
inhabit. I use them to locate myself. As far as I can tell, I don’t really hear
or attend to anything behind me.
“Dust in the air.
Smashed fruit on the ground.”
“No music here.”
“Hello…saar…” [I
smile and keep walking]
Someone horks to spit…probably my least favorite sound in
the world.
“Anna [i.e., ~
“older brother”]…150 [2]!”
“And that’s the fruit
market.”
Koyembedu vegmarket /
14.3.15 / 8:00a [23:31]
“And now we’re going
to move to the vegetable market for about 15 minutes. We’re outside now.”
The space between each market is separated by a loading area
where trucks, cars, and motorcycles carry goods away. Each recording begins
with a moment of transit moving through these spaces.
I have to walk a ways to get past huge trucks full of
potatoes and onions to get into the market building itself.
There is music in this market. Speaking is sparse at the
beginning, but when it does happen, it is often more energetic. Some of the
vendors argue with one another.
My favorite sounds are the sweeping sounds, and the sounds
of our feet walking over the beds of vegetable matter and straw strewn all over
the ground. I like their crispness.
“Hello saar.”
I’m not very interested in the crowd noise. Other noises are
losing their meaning to me as well. What I called the “middleground” [the
falling pots, the incidental sounds] – subconsciously depending on “Schenkerian”
terminology – lose a lot of their interest for me as well. I hear no connection
there. I simply hear sounds.
This is what John Cage was interested in convincing composers to do
[let sounds be themselves]. Non-intentionality.
But I like intention. I need it in a way to understand what
a piece [or in this case, a space] is communicating to me. Of course, the
people who drop the pots and bump into the carts have intentions. And the
sounds are a result of those intentions playing out. However, they are not
intentions to me. Or they are not intentions addressed to me. So they lose
meaning. I hear them only as arbitrary things happening, though in reality they
are all moments flowing out from some achieved thing [however banal].
These sounds are the sound effects of a local economy.
“We’re outside now. I
can smell mint. They are selling it and, uh…drying it out here on the curb.”
There is an argument between two vendors between 15:10 and 15:33.
“…photo…!”
“…uh…not a camera…”
“…not camera?”
“uh…no. What is your
good name?”
“Veerapandi, my name’s.”
“Veerapandi.
Veerapandi [3]? ”
“Veerapandi.
Veerapandi. Ha ha ha ha.”
[can't decipher]
“My name…Jimmy.”
“Jimmy?”
“Jimmy. Nice to meet
you.”
Why am I talking to these people as if they were cavemen?
“It’s
interesting…everyone assumes that this weird contraption in my hand is a
camera. And so about 5 or 6 people have asked me to take pictures of them.
So…obviously it’s not a thing to walk into these markets and just record the
sound. Here’s a giant cow.”
“And that was the veg
market.”
[1]
[boundaries of sound…]
[2] A
vendor offers to sell me a guava fruit for 150 INR, which is an insane price.
[3]
It’s a common name of parts of Tamil cities around Coimbatore, Salem, and
Theni. I also ask because it’s a song that my boss A.R. Rahman wrote for a 1993
Collywood “comic thriller” called Thiruda
Thiruda.
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