Audio Worlds
As a child, I woke up to the sound of the FM radio that emanated from the kitchen. My mom played the same program every morning, which made me aware that it must be around 6:15 AM. Time moves slowly in the morning. I'd sit at the dining table drifting in and out of incomplete dreams and then be jolted awake by a loud thud outside the front door - the newspaper guy had just dropped the day's papers, which meant it was 6:45 AM. I'd pick up the papers - there were three of them every day - an English daily, a regional language daily that was the paper of record (when such a thing existed), and a left-wing newspaper that my father subscribed out of courtesy to his friends. I took the English daily to my room and flipped straight to the sports page - the only page other than the front page to have color photos. I believe this is why I started following sports when I was 8. My mom made tea for my father, who sat at the dining table reading the regional daily. I knew tea had been delivered by the loud slurp that my father made when he drank it. It sounded like the wind howling through the deck of a pirate ship caught at sea. The slurp meant it was 7:15 AM - time for me to shower and get ready to walk to school.
I knew I had not lost track of time in the shower if the end of it coincided with a small air horn. This was the fish vendor who passed by the house every morning on his moped. The air horn was to the fish vendor what the jingle was to the ice cream truck. It alerted all the women folk in the neighborhood to day's catch passing by. Sometimes, I'd go out with my mom to stare at the fish, which was iced and housed in a large choir basket tied down to the back of the moped. It was 8:05 AM when this happened. I set off to school after that.
Once I got to school, the mechanical clocks took over. Time was not mine to track anymore. The natural cues that guided my morning were replaced by artificial ones that striated time - the morning school assembly, the bell that rang between classes every 45 minutes, etc. I spent a lot of time staring at my Casio watch - imagining that the act of looking at it was propelling time forward. This gave a false sense of agency over time. Every pupil reacts to this new imposition of time differently. Conscientious kids get good at being in rhythm with striated time. The hyperactive ones flail and rebel against it. There was always one kid in every class who could not sit still, who had to rage against this intrusion on his agency.
Me, I just froze. I could sit still for hours staring at a wall or out a window, aware of everything except the present. I forgot things. My mom complained that I lost at least two umbrellas every monsoon. My teachers caught me daydreaming often. Days blend together, but I could have probably told you the number of leaves on the branch of the mango tree right outside my window.
At some point in my adult life, I started taking Adderall with the hope that I'd be able to manage time better. But instead, it seemed that every time I took Adderall, I gave away time management to some daemon inside me. My own little Green Goblin that would get pulled into the slightest stimulations. I began forgetting what I did between the time I took Adderall and the time it wore off. I'm sure I generated a lot of shareholder value. I wrote a short story called DeLimerence based on the time I was on Adderall.
I listen to a lot of ambient music1 now. Particularly ambient music that has an architectural quality to it. It keeps you grounded in mechanical time and its rhythms. I often listen to the soundtrack of the Christopher Nolan movie Dunkirk when I work - which is the most egregious example of the mechanical nature of ambient music. Every soundtrack in Dunkirk contains the tick-tok of a watch, apparently recorded from Nolan's pocket watch. The score is also known for its use of Shepard tone, a sonic illusion where the tone seems to ascend or descend in pitch continuously but never actually does. This creates an illusion of urgency, which in the right dozes is precisely what I need to unfreeze and send emails or write this essay.
Ambient music, at least in its current form, has its origins in 1970s USA and Brian Eno. It makes sense that the most industrialized place in the world at that time would invent Ambient music. If you live in an air-conditioned house in the suburbs, there is very little in the way of natural cues to make you aware of time. Simple things such as listening to the same radio program cease to work, so you must design ways to exert agency over time. Maybe this explains why a large section of Americans are obsessed with making coffee in their preferred neurotic way in the morning - a feeble attempt at striating time on their terms.
I listen to a different type of ambient music sometimes when I read. Usually, the works of Laraaji or Miles Davis - are more freeform and surprising in their tempo and rhythm changes. I usually lay on my couch or the red Morrocan rug on the living room floor. I've noticed that I can only listen to this in small amounts because soon, I'll be overcome with a sense of being lost, unaware of time passing by. A strange sense of guilt descends, and a twinge in my gut tells me to come back, to be more aware of the tick-tok. So, I return reluctantly.
Using a generous definition of ambient music to be music that does not use vocals, and is not classical music