The Spiti Sound Archive

During the last two years, the researcher’s work in the Spiti valley has concentrated on recording the songs, music and other sounds of the area. 15 years of documentary work Spiti have enabled the researcher to establish a relationship with the local community, who have nominated sounds they identify as “traditional and threatened”. At the same time, the researcher has been recording sounds of change and modernity within the community and environment.

A dimension of this project would be appropriately described as community-based. While the researcher remains the catalyst and director of the “Spiti Sound Archive”, he has involved members of different strata of the local community in the process of identifying and recording singers and musicians, songs, performances and music. An important part of the ethnographic process involves ensuring that the recordings are available and accessible in Spiti itself.

The project is supported by the British Library (World and Traditional Music section) who are archiving the sound recordings in their permanent collection of acoustic material and making these available for scholarly research. The extensive field-work undertaken by the researcher was partially funded through an AHRC grant ‘Spiti Sound Archive: creating and preserving a sonic legacy of a Himalayan Buddhist community’.

In 2004, the acoustic ecologist, Peter Cusack conducted an hour-long interview with the researcher about the Spiti Sound Archive, for the radio station ResonanceFM, illustrating the discussion with samples of relevant field-recordings.

The Spiti Sound Archive has been the subject of academic papers by the researcher at the international Sound and Anthropology: Body, Environment and Human Sound-Making conference at the University of St. Andrews in 2006 and at the International Association for Ladakh Studies colloquium in Rome (September 2007).