Cities And Memory

 "The world is not this world when heard through the auditory spectrum of a snake. It follows, then, that history itself might also shift if perceived outside the limits of human hearing. Naja Nostalgia is a sound work that employs field recording, geophone recordings, synthesizers, and an improvised Viridu performance to recreate the experience of walking through Sri Lanka’s Galle World Heritage Site—but imagined through the auditory perspective of a cobra. With a limited hearing range of approximately 50–1000 Hz, the snake’s acoustic world offers a radically different filter for understanding space, time, and memory. "What became clear during the compositional process was the surprising resonance between the snake’s frequency spectrum and the emotional texture of human nostalgia. The emphasis on low frequencies—vibrations, sub-bass tones, speaker resonance, and analog hiss—echoed the affective registers of longing and melancholia. In this narrowed spectrum, faint auditory artifacts emerged with heightened