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I. Deciso

When it comes to resolutions, I am a slow learner. Every January for more than a decade now, I have committed to something I am apparently congenitally incapable of completing — organizing my photographs from my previous year's travels. I had thought going digital would somehow make it easier to account for my photographs, but now instead of my linen closet it is my hard drive that is cluttered with old and frequently unremarkable pictures.

I had recently begun to wonder why I even bother to take so many photos on my journeys because, except for the ones I sell to magazines and newspapers, I seldom look at them again and tend not to share them with anyone unless I'm badgered into it. My father-in-law, a semi-professional photographer who can click off 753,000 shots before the sun has even come up on the first day of his vacation, spends many happy hours and days sorting and revising his handiwork. What was my problem with this part of the photographic process?

It was, ironically, in a bad photograph that I found my answer. It was a blurred picture that I took last spring in India: I was on the Ganges in a cockroach-infested boat with a small group of friends, trying to capture the exuberant commotion on the ghats of the holy city of Varanasi as Hindu pilgrims prepared to celebrate their sunset prayer ritual. As I studied the murky image on my laptop screen, my finger hovering over the delete key, I could make out a smudge of saffron-coloured robes, ribbon-swirls of distorted light from hanging lanterns — and in the foreground, the outline of a hand holding a small electronic device high in the air: a tape recorder.

Later, I asked the friend, an electro-acoustic composer who owned the tape recorder, if I could have a copy of the cacophony of bells and competing chants he recorded that night. I have finally come to realize that my most vivid travel memories are cemented not by sight, but by sound.

II. Appassionato

If, as the Bard reminds us, all the world's a stage, then I propose we photo-obsessed wayfarers might do well to lay aside our cameras and pay closer attention to the incidental music that punctuates the scenes and acts of our travelling days.

I am not talking here about the blue-chip performances that require advance tickets, balcony seating and fancy dress. I am speaking rather of those unplanned and unexpected gifts of music that tell us as surely as the food we are eating and the language we are speaking where we have landed on this planet.

When we come back from our travels, we are prepared for the usual questions: "Where did you go? What did you see? What did you do?"

And even before you have boarded your return flight, you have likely prepared your stock responses. But how would you begin to answer if someone were to ask: "Tell me — what did you hear?"

III. Dolce

I collected my first sound postcard when I was 14 years old and trapped in what seemed an interminable family vacation in the suburban barrens of Winnipeg. It was a hot July afternoon, and my younger brother and I, tired of running through my grandmother's sprinkler, sat on the scorching concrete steps leading to the never-used front door, stunned silent by the oppressive humidity.

Inside, my mother and her older sister, my Aunt Donna, had claimed the below-ground basement, the only cool place in the little brick-and-stucco tract house. Both accomplished violinists, they enjoyed playing duets whenever they got together. The screen door was open, and my brother and I could hear them tuning up as we meticulously picked the bits of grass off our feet that so annoyed my granny when we tracked them into her obsessively tidy kitchen.

It was the first time I ever heard Bach's double violin concerto. We laid back on the front stoop and let the joyous optimism of the first movement wash over us, and indulged, I think, a secret pride that it was our family members making that glorious sound. Some neighbourhood kids wandered into the yard and joined us on the steps to listen. Then more came and suddenly, as if lured by the Pied Piper himself, there were a dozen bored and sticky children gathered by the screen to enjoy that wafting musical breeze.

It seemed so risky at the time, but as a group we decided to descend to the basement, where we sat quietly on old couches and chairs to watch the performance. Neither player saw us enter: With their backs to the stairs, they were oblivious to anything but their instruments. I will never forget the look on their faces when the little audience jumped to its feet to applaud the final movement. I have no pictures from that long-ago summer, only the memory of that joyful noise — of family, and friends, and music shared without pretense.

IV. A capriccio

I struggled to like Switzerland. I wanted to like it, the way I had once wanted to like Disneyland, but something about the unremitting order and compulsive cleanliness, the smug affluence and scenic abundance — not to mention the way I was scowled at every time I laughed out loud in public — made me want to go and spray-paint the side of a bank or something.

The woman I was travelling with — this was the summer of 2005 — was a Swiss-born Canadian, and if I was behaving like Maria the novitiate in The Sound of Music, then she was the Mother Superior who knew what was best for me. On a warm June morning, she wrested me from Zurich's cold embrace and brought me by train to Aarau, where 200,000 people had surged into the little town to take part in the national festival of — wait for it — yodelling.

You might think that with its surplus of cow bells and lederhosen and Heidi braids and alpenhorns, Jodelfest is a sop to the tourists, but you'd be wrong: It's a musical gift the Swiss give themselves. Every three years in a different region of the country, the event welcomes more than 10,000 yodellers from 26 cantons (and around the world), who parade sober-faced through the streets in their national costumes to the frantic applause of their countrymen and women.

The eerie, pitch-perfect unison singing; the fierce clamouring of hundreds of massive cowbells; the flap-and-snap of giant Swiss flags being tossed high in the air and confidently caught by ruddy-cheeked young men; the mournful calling of the tree-sized alpenhorns: The whole affair is broadcast on national television, and when the gang from my friend's home village of Weinfelden marched past, she whipped out her cellphone to celebrate with her father, who was watching it all at home on TV.

I thought: So this is how the Swiss get down. I liked the place a lot more after that.

V. Teneramente

In the French village of Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, in the Pyrenees near the city of Pau, the Sisters of St. Bruno live in the Monastère de Bethlehem, which was once a working farm. They wear simple robes, and every afternoon they file silently into the whitewashed old barn, now the chapel, to sing Latin vespers. They did it today. They did it yesterday. They will do it tomorrow.

I went there on a whim on the last day of a busy week-long visit with my friend Eleanor, who moved her family to rural France from British Columbia in 2003 and took a large part of my heart with her. We sat in what would have been the hayloft, above the sisters, who stood single-file along the two long side walls, their backs to us. There were two other unknown visitors sharing the loft with us; the intense silence made its own profound noise. Eleanor and I used to sing together in a women's choir, and we are familiar with the rhythm and ritual of Latin chant.

We understand its meditative purpose and ability to break down spiritual walls. So I don't know why I was so surprised by what happened next: We suddenly found ourselves clasping each other's hands and weeping a silent goodbye.

When the nuns retreated, we blinked our way back to the car, where Eleanor's husband was waiting with a splash of Pimm's, as if he knew we might need fortifying after all that peace and quiet. I remember laughing and sniffling, and feeling an incomparable lightness of spirit. We drove home through the 24-karat evening light, and the children ran up the lane to meet the car.

I don't have the photograph. But I'll never misplace the picture.

Special to The Globe and Mail

Audio clip in section I: Audio from the Varanasi sunset ceremony, recorded on the Ganges River in April, 2006 by Martin Gotfrit, director of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Audio clip in section III: Bach Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter and Salvatore Accardo with the English Chamber Orchestra, EMI. Audio clip in section V: Monks engaged in liturgical chant, Allelulia de l'Ascension, Notre Dieu est au ciel et sur la terre: Chant Liturgique des Moines de Bethleeme, de l'Assomption de la Vierge et de Saint Bruno.