Soundscape, Indonesia

There is a constant rolling wave of sound in Jogjakarta that is like nothing I have ever heard.

It is not the hum of machines, that varying Bb of refrigerators and idling cars. It is not the vague or imagined buzz of wifi hotspots and cell phones and data shooting through the air. It isn’t even the uniform honking of city traffic or background music or people talking, laughing, living.

There is a baseline that isn’t sound at all, but the thickness of equatorial air and the wingsounds of insects. To breathe is to walk in water even without rain, and the this slight heaviness touches your lungs, your heartbeat, the sound and mass of the liquid moving through your ears to keep you steady.

Above this is a rolling, non-percussive overlay of a singing language, motorbikes that have never imagined mufflers, middle-ringing rickshaw bells and the echo of all of this through unimaginable mazes of walled residential roads between main two-lane thoroughfares.

The first night I spent in here was the first night I spent in Indonesia. After over 26+ hours of travel and the crossing of multiple time zones, I didn’t sleep deeply. I drifted in and out, in the heat, with the insects and my confused body. I finally woke up for good at 4:30, when a few buildings away in the inner sanctum of the neighborhood of my guesthouse, men were being called to prayer.

While I had heard Muslim call to prayer before, it had never been so pervasive. In the week I spent in Indonesia I would become almost used to it, and I imagine it becomes like a reminder of passage of time, but lying in my bed beneath a single cool sheet, the room entirely dark, and the waves of amplified and acoustic call and organic response transported me from my hazy no-place state to right where I was. Prayer continues for quite some time, and I lay and listened to it coming from nearby and then farther away, mixed in with the sounds of roosters crowing and of water falling somewhere, before the motorbikes started to carry people away.

Every city, every country and culture, has a soundscape. Indonesia and Jogja’s are natural, effortless, in my experience singularly unaffected by extra-developed sound of background music and advertisement. The music I heard in the country was acoustic, the call to sale in the market like the call to prayer. No absence of sound, but rather a unified roll of it, held together by warmth and patient air.