"Bhutan Soundscapes"

I think of my brother often here.

Daniel is a composer, and while trained on the cello, he composes pieces around "found sound" -- he makes recordings of ambient sound and builds music around them.

The sounds here in Bhutan are so important to the experience that I can often imagine him here, alongside me, imagining ways to incorporate all these sounds into a Bhutan symphony. For instance...

• Chili & garlic. For many nights Kelly and I couldn't go to sleep with pipes rhythmically pounding in our house above our heads. Then they would wake us up again early in the morning. Eventually we realized they were not pipes, but our housemates in our apartment pounding chili and garlic. Now we are more accustomed to the sound, and it makes a reassuring rhythm that speaks of nourishment and comfort. Unlike...

• The infamous dogs. The city of Thimphu is full of dogs. They sleep in the roads and are found at every corner. Some are "owned", but most are just residents of the town along with human inhabitants. Not only does this make it a very hard city in which to be a cat, it also makes the nights hard. The barking is infamous, and last night we discovered a new and more uncomfortable twist when there was a full moon and the howling began. More than once my dreams have morphed into "Planet of the Dogs" nightmares. Any Bhutan symphony would need a dog tympany section.

• The dzong and monastery horns and bells. The deep chords hit by the horns of the monasteries (often shells or huge, long trumpets) resonate through your chest and intentionally hit a deep spot in anyone's soul. The word "om" (ओम्) is supposed to stimulate the central nervous system of the human body in healing and spiritual ways (which has always linguistically fascinated me, since "ohm" in Western parlance is a measure of electrical activity too). The sound of the monastic horns is like a musical "om", stroking your central nervous system with its deep resonant timbre. Small bells tinkle in a higher register as they are struck by spinning prayer wheels -- usually spun by humans, but there are also massive prayer wheels spun by hydropower from the powerful rivers and even some solar-powered wheels. In between these two sounds are the undulating sounds of chanting monks, like a Middle Way between the horns and bells. Deeply beautiful and moving, especially in the context of towering mountains and barreling rivers.

• Car horns. By way of contrast, my two least favorite things about Thimphu are very western and familiar (but intensified here): the trash and the car horns. The trash is ubiquitous and somehow unbelievable to my liberal western sensibilities -- that with all the introspection, extreme care with development, national recognition of the unique environment Bhutan enjoys, and the GNH concept, that the basic idea of not trashing the immediate surrounding environment would not hold more sway. Trash clogs the streams and gutters and is piled on street corners. In the context of noise pollution, the car horn is used much more freely than in Western towns. Part of it is because the roads are so narrow, so drivers feel it's necessary to alert pedestrians (as well as dogs and cows) when they are coming. Part of it is just cultural and communicatory. In this sense it is friendly, and eventually I interpreted it as such, but the horns themselves are built by Hyundai, Toyota, Mahindra and Tata rather than Bhutanese Buddhists, and are thus engineered to be shrill and penetrating alerts, not pleasant advisories. This makes walking around the city much less pleasant until the subconscious screens it out -- however our symphony would include it as a fundamental countermelody for the urban Bhutan environment. And just so that the description of urban Bhutan life is not portrayed too grimly, I have to point out a non-musical but charming feature: there are no stop lights. None. Possibly the only national capital in the world without a single stoplight, and intentionally so. When a few were installed, the Bhutanese population complained they were too "impersonal" and so the white-gloved police choreographers were reinstalled, doing a rigid and extremely formalized dance every 2 minutes to redirect traffic at the major traffic circles, almost like they are hearing a musical score of their own, invisible to the pulsating traffic around them, but as quietly critical to it as the moon to the waves.

• Workers breaking stone. All stone here, for construction and concrete, is broken by hand. It follows a musical score of its own, a thwunk thwunk thwunk *thwack* as each stone is broken. The construction goes incredibly fast, despite the manual stonebreaking and the fact that all concrete rebar is bent by hand (an amazing thing to watch). There is tons of construction going on in Thimphu, presumably as the city develops its infrastructure to accommodate the diplomatic changes that continue to open its culture to other countries. The predominance of "construction by hand", however, generates a completely different rhythm and soundscape than a Western construction site.

• And finally, my favorite Himalayan sound. The Bhutanese laugh. This is particularly true in the Emergency Department, maybe once you have a slightly more personal relationship than just meeting on the street. It is not a slow chuckle or an intrusive guffaw. The eyes widen, the face crinkles, and the laugh envelops you, bringing you into the hilarity with a jedi mind trick so strong you can't resist it. Beautiful. Ha!