How sound and smell define the spaces we inhabit

A space impacts you through the unseen as much as the seen. A set of rooms has inherent physical qualities, but is also shaped by abstractions. They have quietly powerful characteristics that often come to define how you feel about them. We consume places through all our senses, and while for most of us sight takes instinctual precedence, sounds and smells are as impactful, and in the long term can affect the way we think of a place.

I like to think that spaces use sound and scent as a way of asserting themselves, particularly on new inhabitants. These qualities take hold partly as an accident of the environment they’re located in and partly as the result of their nurturing, or lack thereof. When you move into a rented apartment, for instance, you’re dealing with the way that place has been treated by previous inhabitants and the qualities bestowed on it by way of the place it is located in. How you balance—or drown out—those realities to meet your own needs will dictate whether you are comfortable there or not. Scent and sound are two powerful mood and scene-setting factors in a space. Depending on your preferences, you have to create rituals to bolster or mask the realities of your home.

My partner and I decided to set up our office space in a residential neighbourhood rather than a commercial building. He is an architect, who is particularly interested in residential design, and I write about homes, so placing our workspace within a similar context was a natural decision. The space has fantastic light, but everything else about it needed a lot of love and patience to get together. An old house, maybe about four decades, which had received very little care from its owners, it held on to its scent of neglect even after we moved in. Fresh coats of paint are often just blush on bruised skin; it sometimes highlights the problem rather than masking it.

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Everyday when we arrive for work, we’ve ritualised burning dhoop, its sandalwood scent intermingles with the cups of espresso my partner brews first thing. The insect repellent floor cleaner leaves a faint scent of lemongrass, and the Muji floral scented sticks permeate the room when it’s closed. It makes me feel like the space is accepting us. The fragrance of our chosen scents gives me a sense of belonging, becoming a core memory of our daily routines in this space. My wrists always have some Oudh attar on them. When I’m working on the computer my wrists leave an imprint of fragrance on the table, a little bit of myself coalescing with other olfactory elements in the room. The Oudh itself is reminiscent of my childhood in Dubai. You couldn’t pass an Emirati without catching wafts of that strong woody scent and today, it is the signature note of any perfume I wear. In this newest geography of my life, a bit of my history intermingles and so this space is made more and more my own each day.

I’ve lived in relatively quiet environs all my life. For various reasons, I’ve always felt out of sorts in spaces where voices are raised or anywhere remotely cacophonous, even on the road. Again, this new workspace has demanded I change. The road right outside is always busy with sounds--traffic, hawkers, people and the general fracas of a neighbourhood. My neighbours are loud, the child next door listens to Baby Shark on a loop, and when the neighbourhood cat is in heat, we’re all witness to its hormonal inflections. I’m planning to begin production work on a podcast, and I’ve been pondering whether to shut out the sounds or bring them in as part of the story.

I’ve finally decided that these noises of the neighbourhood will participate in the storytelling. The life and sounds of the neighbourhood are part of what makes this space this space. When we think of locations for any space we’re likely to inhabit, we mostly consider its physical attributes, the bones, the spine, the structure, the location. The pathos, the personality, the emotional fluctuations of a place are usually invisible. How we shape the personal world will eventually also decide how we shape ourselves. In India we live with sensorial overload every day. Our malls have cacophonous music, the streets are raucous with conversations and all this shapes our tolerance for exaggerations in sights, sounds and smells.

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The seeming lack of control in our public sphere demands that we shape it in our private one. The choice of aroma in a home must be intentional. The levels of sound, which has nothing to do with the technology you choose to have, has to be modulated. Some things you can control, some things you cannot. You cannot drown out your loud neighbours with louder music or your world will turn into an auditory nightmare. In a workspace, I have chosen to live with some parts of the cacophony and make it an element of the story of the space. If the function of this space were different then my solution would have been different too. I like that every day, in small imperceptible ways, the decisions I make change this place that was once a stranger. One day, when I am no longer its inhabitant, someone new will come and sense the undeterminable scent of my time here. And that is all most of us leave behind in the spaces we call our own.

Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.