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.