The loss of sound in our noisy lives

Sound memory fades faster than visual memory. In a world as rapidly changing as ours, a museum of endangered sounds makes sense

- Sandip Roy

A few months ago while watching the re-mastered version of Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar (The Big City) in a movie theatre, I noticed something I'd always taken for granted. It was the sound of the city as captured by Ray. The clattering of trams trundling down the street. The sound of All India Radio leaking in from the neighbour's home. The clickety-clack of typewriters in an office.

The first time I had seen the film at a retrospective in the 1990s, none of that had seemed exceptional. Now they felt like throwbacks to a lost age. When we think about how the world has changed, we tend to think visually. It's only natural. We are a visual culture. Black and white films change to technicolour. Indo-Saracenic architecture gives way to Art Deco and modernist. The black clunky rotary telephone is replaced by sleek mobiles that fit into our pockets. An air-conditioned mall comes up where an old market used to be.

But on my annual trips back to India from the US, I realised the sound of India was also changing. On each trip home, just as there were missing loved ones, there were also missing sounds. When I was a boy, almost every day I would hear the sing-song voices of women crying "stainless steel". They carried stainless steel pots and pans on their heads, looking to exchange them for old saris. Now they had largely vanished. The quilt-makers, with their tell-tale twangs were still around but the wandering locksmiths with their jangling keys and the knife-sharpening wallas were fewer.