Signal Traces: Bengaluru

Signal Traces: Bengaluru is an exhibition by artist Thomas Lea Clarke, developed over two months spent listening to Bengaluru and discussing sound, music and memory with people whose lives and work engage with sound in different ways. Through interviews with musicians, artists, technicians, residents, instrument builders, a sound archaeologist and a neuroscientist, Clarke explores how sound lives on in recordings, voices, bodies, spaces and objects, and how different forms of listening can affect the experience of our environments.

Saturday, October 31, 6:30 pm
Indian Music Experience Museum
Entry free. All are welcome.

The exhibition takes the form of a four-channel sound installation, a photographic series and a publication. In the sound installation, fragments of recorded conversations move through the space alongside field recordings and musical elements, forming a shifting listening environment in which personal recollection, everyday sound, musical practice and the material cultures of listening intersect. The photographic series focuses on the people, objects and spaces encountered during the project, tracing the physical environments and material forms through which sound is made, stored, repaired, transmitted and remembered. The publication presents the interviews in longer form, allowing conversations heard only fragmentarily within the installation to retain their individual context and complexity.

At the centre of the work is an interest in how sound and music are heard, remembered, shared and passed between people. The project considers not only what is heard, but the spaces, technologies, habits and relationships through which listening takes place. Sound can persist through recordings and objects, but also through bodies and voices, learned gestures, repeated songs and oral histories. The learned swaras of a raga, a flashback to a dancefloor twenty years ago, an enduring friendship forged over radio waves, and the pitch remembered in the hands of a veena craftsman as he sets its frets in beeswax are all examples encountered here of how sounds can remain in the body long after they are heard. In this sense, the project considers sound as both transmission and trace: something that travels between people, technologies, places and periods of time, acquiring new meanings as it moves.

Rather than attempting to construct a comprehensive sonic history of Bengaluru, the work approaches the city through partial and situated experiences of listening: music encountered in homes and public spaces, songs passed between generations, records and cassettes collected and replayed, machines and instruments repaired and maintained, and sounds embedded in everyday life. These accounts do not resolve into a single narrative or fixed chronology, but remain distinct, sometimes converging and sometimes contradicting one another.

Thomas Lea Clarke is a Berlin-based sound artist and electronic musician. His work brings together installation, composition, field recordings, interviews, archival material and recorded music, examining how sound shapes and is shaped by our environments, and how it is stored, transmitted, replayed and remembered. Signal Traces: Bengaluru was developed during his bangaloREsidency at Indian Music Experience Museum, organised through the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore.