Sound in Sensory Memory

While reading Last Project Standing, I was struck by the strength of the argument about the faulty heating’s ability to train the bodies that grew up living with it. Fennell mentioned in passing other aspects of environmental training as well, including a preoccupation with how to tell the difference between the sounds of a gunshot and a car backfiring. That got me thinking, predictably, about the kinds of training that occur in Indonesian neighborhoods, particularly the way sound trains bodies in Malang, Indonesia. One obvious example is the sound of the call to prayer, which penetrates and shapes everyday life. A quick internet search for “noise” “neighborhood” and “Indonesia” yielded an article from July of 2015 reporting that Vice President Jusuf Kalla had created a team to monitor the volume of the call to prayer, especially the call before dawn. Using the term “noise pollution” to refer to excessively loud calls to prayer, he argues the sound is disruptive to neighbors and unnecessary, since Indonesia houses around 80,000 mosques and in Jakarta there is a mosque about every 500 feet. People do not need three mosques blasting the call to prayer in order to pray on time.

 Kalla also uses a humorous argument to attack the “noise” by appealing to Islamic law and disparaging the use of tapes and CDs to play the call to prayer:

Kalla has also taken a shot at the custom that mosques nowadays play taped messages and CDs through loudspeakers in calling the faithful to prayer.

During a recent meeting of the mosque association, Kalla reportedly poked fun at the fact that mosques use foreign-made electronic devices to air the daily calls.

“People who recite the Koran get a divine reward, but if a cassette does it, who gets the reward? If there should be a reward, it is the Japanese because they (mosques) must be using Sony,” Kalla was quoted as saying.

Regardless of volume, the ubiquitous presence of the call to prayer trains bodies within earshot. The training occurs regardless of religion; while I observed others responding to the call to prayer, I also responded myself, as the aural training is caught up in sociality. During Ramadan, the power of the call to prayer is particularly poignant (and usually particularly loud) as it is the call to prayer which gives those fasting the queue to pray, if they so chose, and to eat. For example, during Ramadan, I knew that, if I was on campus in the late afternoon, I needed to begin walking home when I heard the call to prayer or I would miss dinner and be roundly scolded by my host mother. If I didn’t put my earplugs in overnight, I knew I’d be awoken early, around three during Ramadan or around five otherwise. As I walked home to dinner, on the occasions I left before the call to prayer, I would pass groups of young adults clumped together in the park, sitting on concrete or motorcycles, surrounded by twinkling lights, their Styrofoam containers of food stacked in towers, talking and laughing together as night fell. While technically the setting of the sun is the cue for Muslims to break the fast, my friends and acquaintances in Malang marked the end of the day by the call to prayer more than by the setting of the sun, regardless of whether it was the month of fasting or not. Once, not during Ramadan, upon returning home from campus, I greeted my host family by the proper Indonesian language greeting for night, which begins after the sunset. They laughed at my greeting and said it was still evening, correcting my language use. I had just witnessed the sun set outside while they sat indoors, I protested, still early in learning Indonesian and attempting to apply the linguistic rules I assumed were as hard and fast in life as on paper. Just then, the nearest mosque played the call to prayer. Witnessing the sun set mattered less than the aural marker of its setting, the call to prayer, in shaping everyday behaviors and concepts about passage of time. I can only imagine how the experience of living would change if, like the residents of Horner, citizens of Malang were displaced from the shared sensory experiences that trained their bodies and behavior. 

The article about the Vice President can be found here: 

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/around_asia/AJ201507180016