Sonic Historiography, Migrating Music, and Collective Memory Beyond the Text- A Project Proposition

Somali Panda
Independent Sonic Historiographer
Sound Studies · Memory Studies · Migration & Civilizational History

Abstract

This article proposes Sacred Sounds of the Planet as a framework within sonic historiography for understanding collective memory through sacred and ritualistic sound. It argues that sacred sound functions as a living, transgenerational archive of humanity that includes migration, political rupture, and cultural transformation. Drawing from sound studies, memory studies, anthropology, and the a long-term framework of Migrating Music, the article conceptualizes listening as method, sound as historical evidence, and archiving as ethical responsibility. Subtly aligned with Global South epistemologies that privilege orality, embodiment, and repetition, the article positions sacred sound as a civilizational technology that encodes memory through ritualistic practice rather than textual fixation.

Keywords

Sonic historiography; Sacred sound; Collective memory; Migrating music; Sound studies; Memory studies; Oral tradition; Ritual sound; Listening as method

1. Introduction: Re-affirming Sound in Historiography

Modern historiography has largely privileged the written archive as its primary epistemic foundation. Historical knowledge has been constructed through texts, inscriptions, documents, and monuments, while sound has been treated as supplementary—ephemeral, aesthetic, or performative rather than evidentiary (Sterne, 2003). Yet human civilization predates writing by millennia, and during that vast pre-textual period, memory was carried through voice, rhythm, repetition, and listening. As examples we can refer to the Vedas, which is known alternatively as Shruti, that which is heard. It is primarily an oral creation later on transcribed in Aarsha language, the version of Sanskrit spoken by the sages of Indian sub-continent.

2. Sound, Collective Memory, and the Limits of the Textual Archive

Memory studies have demonstrated that memory is socially framed (Halbwachs, 1950), culturally institutionalized (Assmann, 1995), and symbolically anchored (Nora, 1989). Sound disrupts this hierarchy by existing only through renewal and repetition, aligning closely with epistemologies that privilege oral transmission and embodied knowledge (Ingold, 2011). “Migration of people is perhaps as old as the history of civilization itself. From the time immemorial people are walking down the path of happenings, leaving or losing their home in search of a newer one, with their own desire and dream, longing or desperation, music and amusement, and are interacting, creating, merging or emerging, in the course.  

This movement or migration has shown the path of unknown to the human race whose elemental urge is to settle down. There is the fallacy. The reasons may be as different as natural, spatial, political, economic, social or racial, people have to move toward a new horizon but with an incessant quest for the root somewhere deep in the mind.

Migration of people and their music across the world have been occurring to an unprecedented extent and in novel ways for sometime now. Researchers in a variety of disciplines have also been responding by studying musical flows and the formation of hybrid styles, and the way in which apparently similar music can mean quite different things in different contexts…” (https://somalipanda.com/2011/03/15/migrating-music-and-tagore-unbound-a-search/)

3. Sacred Sound as Civilizational Technology

Based on the studies on Migrating Music, this is an effort to understand the spirit of  humanity at its core. Sacred sound functions as a civilizational technology rather than a symbolic accessory. Across cultures, ritual sounds mark cyclical time, synchronize collective bodies, and encode cosmological order. Anthropological approaches emphasize that sound precedes explanation and entrains participants into shared temporal experience (Feld, 1984).

4. Migration, Transmission, and the Migrating Music Framework

The Migrating Music framework, developed through long-term sonic historiography, demonstrates how sound survives human migration with remarkable resilience. While language and territory shift, sacred sound adapts without dissolving, functioning as a mobile archive of memory. Cumulative memory has now been instrumental in documenting human history with more precision and perfection.

5. Listening as Method: Ethics of Sonic Historiography

Sonic historiography requires listening as ethical engagement rather than extractive documentation. Sacred sound is embedded within ritual, belief, and community, demanding consent-based, contextual archiving aligned with relational knowledge systems.

6. Sacred Sounds of the Planet: A Conceptual Framework

This framework proposes non-hierarchical listening, contextual anchoring, reciprocal archiving, and public listening as principles for a living acoustic common. This is going to be a procedure of random sampling of the minutest specimen of ritualistic or spiritual sound, and the silence within, with equal importance. After that following proper procedure archiving of the same. Then to go through all the specimens of ritualistic sounds or the lack of it to find a pattern that might take us to a possibility where region or humans will be more important facet rather than the instances of spiritual nuances.

7. From Dialogue to Duration: Listening as Peace Practice

Listening introduces shared duration as an alternative to discursive negotiation. Sacred sound cultivates co-presence without requiring agreement, positioning listening as a civilizational practice. This huge procedure will have to involve numerous bonding, collaborating, subscribing to views and in turn having layered visions gradually evolving into a horizon of Truth.

Conclusion: Remembering Through Sound

Sacred sounds endure not because they are preserved, but because they are lived. Sonic historiography restores sound as primary historical evidence, inviting humanity to listen to itself as a continuous memory. This will in course of time have a space to accommodate natural sounds, aboriginal originality, classical scripture to occult practices, primordial beats to operatic existence.

References (APA 7th Edition)

Assmann, J. (1995). Collective memory and cultural identity. New German Critique, 65, 125–133.

Feld, S. (1984). Sound as a symbolic system: The Kaluli drum. American Ethnologist, 11(2), 383–402.

Halbwachs, M. (1950). La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.

Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24.

Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[The whole of the procedure will include academic to everyday life knowledge, documentation in A/V format, and resource in intellectual and material ways.]