Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye

This paper will examine the poetics of sound archiving as a means of documenting and evaluating Singapore’s cultural and political economy. It is twofold in consideration: an inquiry into sound’s significance for/in Singapore and the media/tion of archiving sound. This first concern involves an investigation of selected sound events and their relation to the cultural and political life-worlds (Lebenswelt) of Singapore/ans. The second section argues for an importance of archiving sounds in/of Singapore given the absence of any authoritative sound library or sound map. Many iconic, culturally defining sounds are now lost to time; this loss further underscores the importance of archiving for past sounds and the perception of these sounds by historical actors inform us about the changing character and identity of cities, people and cultural practices. Technology today provides the means to capture and contain sound, as ephemeral phenomena, in high fidelity and this paper will include a discussion of an ongoing research project in collaboration with the National Archives of Singapore (SoundscapeSG) which involves a web-based platform that contains Singapore soundscapes in ambisonic formats.

On 8 December 2013, the monotonous placidity of Singapore’s streets was disrupted by anti-social violence in a district called Little India. Such acts of mass aggression were unheard of in a country whose policies of multiculturalism have been hailed as exemplary for developed nations. This article examines the conditions and consequences of the riot in Singapore and posits that the event signified a rupture in the politics of multicultural practice. It analyses media representations, official state narratives and vitriolic public responses to consider how the voices of the rioters have been violently silenced. Framed by what Georges Bataille terms the dialectic of civilised speech versus silent violence, where silence is regarded as dispossession and objectification, and vocality as empowerment and subjectivity, this article will consider the performativities of silence and violence and the ways the riot is an event of dissensus, a politics of interruption that fractures hegemonic state-prescribed narratives of multiculturalism.