Mourning a Vanishing Soundscape: Vernacular Solastalgia in a Contemporary Javanese Geguritan

Abstract

This study examines Any Faiqoh’s Kangen Tembang as a literary representation of acoustic and cultural loss in contemporary Javanese life. The poem recalls children’s songs, gobak sodor, macapat, protective prayers, affectionate forms of address, and familiar nonhuman sounds that are perceived as gradually disappearing. Rather than treating the text merely as an expression of nostalgia, the study investigates how the loss of culturally familiar sounds produces estrangement within a continuing home environment. A qualitative interpretive design was employed through close reading, soundscape-oriented analysis, contextual interpretation, and analytical translation. The analysis identified four interconnected movements in the poem, namely the transition from nostalgia to place-based distress, the construction of the village as a vernacular soundscape, the association of cultural silence with moral disorder, and the transformation of literary memory into an acoustic archive. The findings show that the poem represents home not simply as a physical location but as an environment sustained through songs, games, ritual voices, intergenerational address, and human and nonhuman relations. Their disappearance weakens cultural familiarity, communal intimacy, moral orientation, and channels of transmission. To explain this condition, the study proposes vernacular solastalgia as distress caused by the erosion of everyday sounds, practices, and relationships that formerly made a home environment culturally recognisable. The concept extends solastalgia cautiously beyond visibly damaged landscapes toward culturally inhabited acoustic environments. The study also demonstrates how locally published and noncanonical literature can preserve affective traces of gradual cultural loss that remain marginal within formal heritage documentation.