Echoes of Extraction

I found myself in a landscape postcard-perfect to the eye,
Yet what I heard was silence—not peace, but absence.

Born of immersive fieldwork and original recordings in the socially turbulent terrain of Valparai , this piece traces the soundscapes of three environments: untouched wilderness, human-altered terrain, and landscapes in the slow act of healing. Each carries its own acoustic fingerprint, charting presence, loss, and the fragile thresholds  between them.

The recordings are accompanied by spectrographic displays—visual forms drawn directly from the audio. Here, sound becomes image, and each voice—bird, insect, water, wind—etches its place in the spectrum. As the human progresses, the space between these voices—the room to hear each distinctly—begins to collapse. What remains is a muddling of the spectrum, where distinctions blur, boundaries collapse, and the “voice” of one is drowned out by the other.

Influenced by Bernie Krause’s pioneering bioacoustic research and the Acoustic Niche hypothesis,  the exhibition reflects on the soundscape as an ecological barometer. Listening back to these  recordings revealed how environments that seemed whole were fractured, and how those that looked still carried hidden abundance. 

This is an invitation to reimagine conservation. Beyond visual beauty lies the acoustic identity of  landscapes—their balance, their memory, their voice. To listen is to strip away the illusion of stillness and to encounter the deeper truths of place.

Special thanks to Pratyay Raha, Gayatri Manu, Dr. David Picherit, Dr. Sarah Benabou, Dr. Doris Barboni,  Ashank Chandapillai