What does it mean to listen to the city in different ways? How does one listen when the sounds of resistance are silenced? What is the soundtrack of time spent in a prison? Can birds still be heard in the midst of noise pollution? What does the break of dawn sound like? When does the sound of celebration become violent? What is it in all these soundscapes that recalls the past and that proposes alternate futures?

These and other questions will be touched in this listening session. It will present an online publication called Norient City Sounds: Delhi, published in September 2023. It is part of the Norient’s multimedia series of virtual exhibitions and digital publications that explores and portrays the sounds of cities across the globe. After the earlier editions on Nairobi (2022) and Beirut (2022), NCS Delhi unpacks and complicates the notion of Delhi by scattering into many cities of Delhi with the colliding histories, timescales, and spatial arrangements, living archives and echoes of the past. The contributions by 29 artists unconceal the polyphonies within the ocean of sound that is Delhi, moving across eras, genres, practices, and impulses. NCS Delhi is curated by Suvani Suri, a Delhi-based artist and researcher.

On Friday, 5 April, curator Suvani Suri and Norient curator and editor Hannes Liechti will enter into a conversation on the deeply layered and composite sensorium of a city that both senses and is sensed in a multitude of ways in NCS Delhi. They will present and comment on videos, compositions, and images from the publication.


Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi. She works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, objects, installations, fictions, experimental workshops, and live interventions. 

Hannes Liechti, based in Bern, Switzerland, is a popular music scholar and lecturer, curator, cultural producer, and content editor. For Norient, he works as a production manager and as a curator for the Norient Space, The Now in Sound. He published his PhD on the culture of sampling in experimental electronica with Norient Books in 2022.