The city is losing its soundtrack

A common solution is to plug in your earphones and drown it out. But at the risk of sounding Fortean, I would posit that this is where the attention economy gets us exactly where it wants us to be—dependent on it either way. Scroll through the commute, and you insulate yourself from the person who seems intent on making the entire coach privy to snippets from their feed. However, someone else’s engagement with the attention economy now leads us to engage with it as well. The alternative, which is to tolerate this new soundscape, still leaves one partaking in the attention economy, albeit indirectly. It is akin to listening to a modern remix of a familiar tune—such sonic interruptions mingling with the sound of a city one grows familiar to—and both are occurrences no one asks for, and almost everyone hates.

This is also indicative of an unwelcome metamorphosis—within ourselves. In a span of about a decade, it has become common to see people scrolling almost industriously on their phones in any pocket of “dead time” they get during the day, from commutes to meals to bathroom breaks. The different distractions—books or the ear of a commute companion, the television, and the newspaper respectively for these particular examples—have all been replaced by the smartphone. The attention economy produces its outputs with the propensity of a fire hose, and its consumers are picking up what it is putting down almost as readily. Not only does it change our brains on a fundamental level, it also alters the way we perceive our surroundings, however little that might be in the digital era.

It is thus fascinating to note how this new urban soundscape has evolved, and how our response to it has fundamentally changed the way we interact with our environment. For example, even as close to a decade ago, a typical commute via the Delhi metro would have featured the characteristic hum of its engine, the pings that preceded the iconic announcements in English and Hindi, the mechanical whirring as the doors opened and shut, and the triple-pings that alerted passengers of this occurring. This would be interspersed with the passengers’ conversations that amounted to a hum in the background, and the occasional colourful characters that provided the texture within this symphony. However, if one asks the average commuter now, most would be at a loss for words—simply because they have the option to shut out the sound of the metro and be immersed in a soundscape of their choice. Meanwhile, the metro announcements themselves now request passengers to not play music aloud and use headphones—the universal tuning out of these polite interjections is the only aspect that has remained intact throughout.

At some point within the explosive rise of the smartphone and the attention economy, our perception of the world got more monotonous. Ironically, it also highlights something inherently human—be it the Delhi metro, the London tube, or the New York subway, annoyed commuters will return to the same solution to deal with their less courteous co-passengers. However, it also means that these specific soundscapes have been imbued with similar sonic additions, and have become similar too—the general city dweller chooses to tune all of them out.

What, then, would the urban experience feel like a decade from now? Would it lose its texture altogether for the average denizen? Would our immersion in the urban environment be fundamentally altered? Would the sounds that characterise a city be lost in the ever-evolving din?

And, would we even notice that they are gone?