Between the Headphones: Listening to the Practitioner (original) (raw)

The cinematic soundscape: conceptualising the use of sound in Indian films

SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience

This article examines the trajectories of sound practice in Indian cinema and conceptualises the use of sound since the advent of talkies. By studying and analysing a number of sound- films from different technological phases of direct recording, magnetic recording and present- day digital recording, the article proposes three corresponding models that are developed on the basis of observations on the use of sound in Indian cinema. These models take their point of departure in specific phases of technological transitions and intend to highlight characteristics defining the sound aesthetics that emerges from these different phases of sound practice. The models furthermore seek to frame the aesthetics within theoretical frameworks of sound studies in general. The argument developed following the observations is that, through different phases of cinematic sound practice, Indian films have been primarily shifting the relationship between audio and visual from a merely vococentric contra...

The auditory spectacle: designing sound for the ‘dubbing era’ of Indian cinema

The New Soundtrack, Edinburgh University Press, 2015

This article emerges out of my ongoing research into the historical developments of cinematic sound from the analogue eras to the digital realm, and conceptualises the specific practices of designing ambient sounds (or a lack thereof) in the ‘dubbing era’ of Indian cinema (1960s to 1990s). The basic argument that I will develop is that the creative practice of designing sound in Indian films of this period inculcated a technologically informed approach using analogue sound processing with expressionistic and melodramatic overtones that led the spectator to imagine the pro-filmic space instead of bodily experiencing it in cinematic sound. In this article, following film analysis and finding actual evidence in the interviews of sound practitioners, I will demonstrate that magnetic recording and dubbing rendered the cinematic imagination of this period as something spectacular, with extravagant songs and dances in foreign locations and actions packed with studio-manipulated and synthetic sound effects. Add to this a deliberate lack of ambience, and this practice triggered a cinematic experience of emotive tension and affective stimulation.

Sound Design to Sound Scape: Indian Sound in Surround Days

TAKE ONE: Reflections on Cinema, 2011

''Sound Design Then and Now', Dept. of Sound Recording, Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Kolkata, 2010 There is a consistent anxiety among the best of the sound engineers and sound designers in India that the auditory simulation model, the ‘grammar’ of sound ‘aesthetics’ of surround sound has been and is being constantly torn apart by the mainstream demands of the cine industry. In a way this anxiety can be placed in the historiography of a longer chain of technological appropriation in Indian landscape for more than hundred years, starting from the tactile realism of oil painting, or the use of Renaissance Perspective in painting and cinema in Indian condition. While this linking can be relatively easy, thanks to the works of cultural theorists and cine-scholars to some extent, what we need to look at is that – whether there is a significant change in the mode of technological appropriation, which can explain the often demand for +100 dB level of sound, various other ‘non-realistic’ movements of sound elements (digital SFX or pre-recorded sound passed through various digital sonic filters, almost on the verge of non-recognition of the sound source) in the surround channels and often a kind of over-deterministic applications of musical bits and pieces throughout the soundtrack. Somehow the job is more complex than it looks, for that we need to map somewhere the cultural history of sound production and listening, the politics of ‘noise’, the frequency spectrum of the indigenous sound producing instruments, specially in the lower strata of the society and even the subaltern/dalit aesthetics -- which hardly can be done within the span of the present paper, nevertheless some speculation can be done. And a take off point can be reached, where we may propose, whether there can be a kind of extension of Deleuzean Movement-image, Time-image, Affection-image etc to the sonic images as well! The challenge of surround sound has different signification for the ‘avant-garde’ section of Indian cinematic forms. While there are some scanty moorings on the possibility if Indian theory of cinematic sound, specially in the writings of Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Ashis Rajadhyaksha etc, the surround sound phenomenon has not been addressed there for obvious historic reasons. We can take cues from the works of these masters (e.g. reverse perspective in Khayalgatha, musical or non-diegetic use of diegetic sounds in the films of Ghatak and Kaul) and place these works vis a vis the important sonic sequences from world cinema (e.g. trolley sequence from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film Milky Way by Benedek Fliegauf etc). That comparison might lead us to understand one of the latent tendencies of cinema – the cinema becoming ‘ambient’ in nature, ‘ambient cinema’, and the possible sphere of negotiation of Indian cinematic forms with this upcoming, yet futuristic form of cinema; because in ambient cinema, more than the realism of sound, the ecology of sound is important, more than the relationship of sound to the visuals of cinema, the sound has the potential to be treated as independent soundscape, even as a kind of sound installation. It is important to look for the possibilities of Indian responses to this form of perceptual extension of cinema.

Soundbaazi: The Sound of More than Music

'Loud' is the word that most easily springs to mind when one describes the soundtrack of the archetypal Hindi film. The main purpose of sound is to heighten the melodrama, to imbue the hero with a mythic aura through blood-and-thunder dialogue. What, then, is the role of sound effects in the composite soundtrack and how are they conceived? Drawing from conversations with several sound professionals and filmmakers, Gautam Pemmaraju gives us an insider's view of effects production and aesthetics during the analogue era of sound production in Hindi cinema. From the age of the talkies he takes us through the dubbing era to the digital age, when technology brought about a radically different tone, texture and timbre to contemporary sounds.

Backpacking Sounds: Sneha Khanwalkar and the "New" Soundtrack of Bombay Cinema

The Bombay film music industry has been dominated by male music composers for the past eight decades. In this essay, the author explores the work of Sneha Khanwalkar, a young female music director who has brought forward new sound practices on popular television in India and in Bombay cinema. Instead of working in Bombay studios, Khanwalkar prefers to step out into the " field, " carving out dense acoustic territories using portable recording technologies. Her field studio becomes an unlimited space as readers see her backpacking, collecting sounds and musical phrases, and, finally, working with the material she has collected. Khanwalkar's collaborative approach to musical sound has challenged genre boundaries between film music and folk music on the one hand and the oral and the recorded on the other. Her radical intervention in sound and music brings together unexplored spatialities, voices, bodies, and machines by foregrounding the process of citation, recording, and digital reworking. Through an exploration of Khanwalkar's work, involving travel, mobility, and a prosthetic extension of the body through the microphone, the author brings into discussion emerging practices that have expanded the aural boundaries of the Bombay film song. The Bombay film music industry has been dominated by male music composers for the past eight decades. Their domination extends to the fields of sound engineering , location sound recording, and music orchestration. The only exception has been the near-hegemonic control of the field of playback singing by the Mangeshkar sisters. 1 In this article, I explore the work of Sneha Khanwalkar, a young female music director who has introduced new practices of sound on Indian popular television and Bombay cinema over the past decade. Moving out of the confines of the Bombay studio and into the " field, " Khanwalkar's is creating a digital archive of music of the regions. Moreover, I argue that her radical intervention in sound and music brings together unexplored spatialities, voices, bodies and machines by foregrounding the process of citation, recording and digital reworking. Finally, through the lens of Khanwalkar's work, I offer some

Writing About Sound: The Early Talkie Periodicals in India

International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Text, Object, 2019

This chapter investigates the aural impact on the cinematic discourse of film periodicals in India in the 1930s, when synchronized sound became part of the filmic medium. Based on contemporary disciplinary revisions that have made sonic influences part of a more inclusive and perceptual approach to cultural engagement (Erlmann 2004), I explore how the sonic inscribes itself in the textual/visual of the early film magazines and journals, which in itself is an interesting site that negotiates the demands of mass production of the film industry in a bourgeois form with claims and aspirations to engage the cultural aesthetics of the new format. There are two primary facets of the periodical that I wish to engage as part of my analysis: first, the “noise” that emerges around film music in the cinematic discourse. Music became the primary identifiable sound for the new talking film produced in different parts of India. Its presence was extremely popular and constantly discussed in terms of as a guilty pleasure in these film magazines, which constantly desired and posited the idea of an alternative modern form. It also serves as an important background to theorize listening for talking films. Second, I consider how the aural interacts and integrates with the emerging visual narrative of early stardom in the country.

Interrogating immersion: Case studies from Indian cinema sound

This paper probes the concept of sonic immersion by analysing non-normative approaches to immersive and surround sound by contemporary Indian filmmakers Gurvinder Singh and Shaji Karun. The use of immersive/surround sound by these filmmakers are theorised in this paper as a form of 'media inoperativity'-a deactivation of the ontological capacities of immersive sound and their simultaneous re-appropriation and reuse in a divergent aesthetic context. Like most filmic technologies, spatial and immersive sound emerged in response to the aesthetic requirements of the Anglo-American film industries, especially those of Hollywood cinema (Sergi, 2013). In this paper I claim that the use of surround and immersive sound observed in the formalist/expressionist context of Indian art films Swapaanam/The Voiding Soul (Karun, 2012) and Chauthi Koot /Fourth Direction (Singh, 2015), redefines the concept of sonic immersion. The sound design approach in these films frees sonic immersion from its association with a limited notion of sensory realism and naturalism, thereby expanding its aesthetic possibilities. To argue my point, I have analysed the soundtracks of the two films, examined interviews of the directors and sound technicians, and evaluated their claims in the context of recent developments in film sound scholarship. Sonic Immersion-in theory and practice Over the past one decade 'immersion' and 'immersive technologies' have emerged as key concepts in our engagement with 21 st century moving image forms. The idea of immersion as a mode of cinematic engagement has existed since the 1950s, manifestly, in large format cinema, stereophonic visuals and sound, eventually in the form of 3D cinema and Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (Doane, 2016, Zone, 2012). Theorists have drawn our attention to the fact that digitally remediated experiences like 3D cinema and spatial audio have made the cinematic experience more haptic and visceral, with recent scholarship challenging some of the established norms and discourses about filmic representation (Recuber, 2007, p315-330, Chion, 2013, p325, Ross, 2012, p381-397). For example, Miriam Ross underlines the fact that filmic immersion attempts to blur the distinction between image and representation by virtually