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www.travelweekly-asia.com | 3 TALKING POINT Arnie Weissmann has been involved in virtually every aspect of travel jour- nalism, publishing and media for the past 25 years. His writing has won more than 40 national awards, he created the industry's first destination information service (Weissmann Reports), authored a best-selling textbook and has served as publisher of critical hotel and destination guides for the travel industry. Published by NORTHSTAR TRAVEL MEDIA SINGAPORE PTE LTD SINGAPORE 91 Bencoolen Street, #05-08 Sunshine Plaza, Singapore 189652 • TEL: +65-6801-0450 FAX: +65-6801-0469 BEIJING Room 024, Building 8, Qijiayuan Diplomatic Compound, No.9 Jianguomenwai Street, Chaoyang District 100600, China • TEL: +8610-8532 3611 | FAX: +8610-8532 5293 SHANGHAI Room 2553, The Headquarters Building, No.168 Central XiZhang Road, Shanghai 200001, China • TEL: +8621-5179 8360 | FAX: +8621-5179 8360 Travel Weekly Asia is published on a monthly basis by Northstar Travel Media Singapore Pte Ltd. Located at 91 Bencoolen Street, #05-08 Sunshine Plaza, Singapore 189652. All rights reserved. Volume 10 Issue 6 Please address all subscription mail to the above address, Fax +852 3020 5794, or email travelweeklyasia@asia-ad.net. 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Kemp CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Lisa Cohen PRESIDENT, TRAVEL GROUP Robert G. Sullivan CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Matthew Yorke EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/GROUP PUBLISHER David Blansfield EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Arnie Weissmann SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF CONTENT DIRECTOR Lori Cioffi SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES Janine L. Bavoso SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & PRODUCTION Roberta Muller SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, IT INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS Rich Mastropietro VICE PRESIDENT, INFORMATION PRODUCTS GROUP Sheila Rice VICE PRESIDENT, DATABASE PRODUCTS Elizabeth Koesser TRAVEL WEEKLY EVENTS PRESIDENT, TRAVEL GROUP Robert G. Sullivan SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS, TRAVEL GROUP Alicia Evanko-Lewis Travel's Undervalued Soundtrack Thousands of Londoners gathered outside the Houses of Parliament on Aug. 21, 2017, to hear Big Ben bong out the noon hour, the last regular ringing of its bells for four years while repair work is underway in Elizabeth Tower, which houses the clock. "People can become complacent about sounds," Stuart Fowkes told me. "But there's now a gap in the lives of some Londoners. Sometimes, only when a sound is taken away do you appreciate it." Fowkes is a digital marketer living in Oxford, England, and in the City Sound Guides section on his website, CitiesAndMemory.com, he focuses on an aspect of travel that most of us take for granted or even dismiss as background noise: sound. Since childhood, Fowkes said, sound has been the primary sense he uses to process the world. The site is four years old, and the sounds have collectively had about a million plays. The quality varies, as does the intensity of the listening experience. You can hear a bird get decapitated in an open-air market, subway buskers singing and strumming or the interplay of sirens on New York streets. The site is a prime example of user-generated content, and he credits Twitter with expanding his base into the world of sound engineers. Fowkes is not only an archivist of 2,500 sounds from around the world, he's also a preservationist, consciously conserving what he considers endangered sounds that may define a place as much as any other perceivable aspect. Two days after I spoke with Fowkes, I found myself traversing Charles de Gaulle Airport with Joel Revzen, assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and his wife, Cindy Rhys, a former opera singer. I shared with them some details about my conversation with Fowkes. Given their vocations, I asked if sound played a prominent role in their travels. They both immediately thought of a recent trip to Cuba, where music was "wonderfully inescapable", Rhys said. She said she also has a tendency to hear rhythm in background sounds, from trains to construction sites. Revzen said he was tuned into birdcalls and at Lake Tahoe was quite taken by the sounds of water mixing with the sound of wind through the pines. Fowkes points out that sounds, like smells, can trigger memories. Many of my most powerful travel memories involve sound: silkworms munching loudly on mulberry leaves in a Laotian silk farm; Twa pygmies singing around a fire in the Ituri Rainforest; chai-wallahs hawking tea outside an Indian village train station. I remember the sounds first, then the images fill in. People who have developed one sense keenly help the rest of us appreciate what we would otherwise miss. It made me think of how passion and a unique perspective add value for travel advisors. In this age of increasing accessibility and bucket-list travel, coming home with a unique story is far more interesting and meaningful to others than predictable talk about how crowded Venice has become. "We go sightseeing," Fowkes told me. "Why don't we also go sighthearing"? This is an abbreviated version of the article that first appeared on Travel Weekly USA.

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