Special Issue: ‘Sounding South Asia: From Silence to Noise’
For Don Ihde, as long as humans find themselves living in and breathing through air, sound becomes, for them, an existential singularity. In fact, this air itself, Ihde continues, is ‘not neutral or lifeless’ but finds animation in and with ‘sound and voice’. It is, finally, this vibrant tract of air (for what else is sound?) which relates and marks the human in its existential prospects by not only producing an ambience of the world but also, simultaneously, being subjected to reciprocal manipulation by humans who invariably seek constructive teleologies.