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The Music Box and its Reverberations

Technology and Music in India

14 – 17 January 2015

School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium, Jawaharlal

Nehru University

Musical Performances at The School of Social Sciences

Auditorium

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Conference Concept Note

The explosion of digital technologies for sound in the past two decades has thrown into sharp relief the tangled mediations of the musical, the technological, and the social-institutional. As a medium for aesthetic creation, the digital facilitates processes such as sampling and remixing that confuse popular notions of authorship and originality in music. The particular materialities of digital circulation, reproduction and storage of audio have simultaneously impacted established music industry norms and subjective engagements of listeners with music. Indeed, the digital’s blurring of existing practices of creativity, circulation and listening draws our attention to music as a sonic-social-technological-legal assemblage (Born 2005, 2011). Debates about what the digital signifies in contemporary musical experiences also encompass reflections on previous technologies; especially, the digital’s prolific remediation of previous technological formats gives rise to a provocative binary between it and the analogue. From this perspective, the digital allows us a unique opportunity to open anew conversations on the analogue, ranging from continuities and parallels between the two, to a radical split in the digital context. A way to historicize the digital, then, might be to peek at analogue sound technologies as mediums for aesthetic creation as well as circulation of/for different musical sounds and genres.

This conference enters these discussions from the vantage point of India, taking the opportunity to rethink claims about the digital and its precursors through India’s particular combination of several musical forms and technologies in modernity. We begin from the coordinates of ‘popular’ music (film, vernacular) and ‘classical’ music, aiming to open up routes that probe technologies as they intersect with questions about definitions of categories, re/configurations of genres, musicians’ livelihoods and music industries (especially popular music industries), and affective engagements of musicians and audiences. For instance, for music that continues to be associated with oral circulation — specifically, the regional/vernacular and the classical/art — technologization has been perceived as a singular mode of recording for posterity while simultaneously inciting anxieties about the loss of the ‘liveness’ central to their performance and transmission. The digital,

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in these contexts, is emphasized through its seemingly infinite possibilities for archiving and dissemination, and an ever-increasing attention to the ‘live’ aesthetic. In contradistinction, with digital production tools, music genres that are ontologically technological — for instance, Hindi and Bhojpuri film songs, remixes, Indipop — have explicitly embraced new generic formations, and sonic and musical textures. Further, if it accentuates certain kinds of differentiation, the digital also flattens production hierarchies and differences by promoting new kinds of industry and engendering new modes of listening.

Organized collaboratively by the Music Digitisation Mediation project based in the University of Oxford, UK and the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, the conference uses these lenses to trace musical experiences in the Indian context as they are mediated by technologies of music production, circulation and consumption. Choosing to concentrate on the aural as against the audiovisual (following Ochoa Gautier 2006), we draw upon scholarship from several disciplinary orientations to focus on selected domains of the interfaces between sound socialities and musical technologies. We aim to bring together perspectives from academics and practitioners through papers, roundtable discussions and performances. We propose the following themes, without being limited to them:

§ Sonic technologies, aesthetic regimes and the crafting of genres/categories

§ Technologies, digitization and film music industries

§ Individuals, institutes and processes of collecting, storing and archiving music

§ Amplification, circulation and the creation of musical/sonic publics

§ Enmeshed technologies of the object and listening subject/s and practices

§ Musical livelihoods, economies and sonic technologies

Each conference evening will culminate in a performance/concert that will speak to the several musical practices that we are using as organizing schema.

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PROGRAMME

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP WITH JONATHAN STERNE & GEORGINA BORN

Wednesday, 14 January

WORKSHOP I

10:00-12:00 Jonathan Sterne Introduction to Sound Studies

12:30-1:30 pm Lunch

WORKSHOP II

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INAUGURAL SESSION

Wednesday, 14 January

4.30-5.30 pm Registration

5:00-5:30 pm Tea/Coffee

5:30-6:00 pm Introduction and Welcome – Dean, School of

Arts and Aesthetics

Address by the Vice Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Introduction to the Music Digitisation Project by Prof Georgina Born, Oxford University

KEYNOTE

6:00-8:00 PM Music, Technology, Aesthetics: A Conversation across Disciplines

Amlan Dasgupta, chair Jonathan Sterne

Stretching Time: Quantum Musical Legacies from Denis Gabor to Ableton Live

Georgina Born

Directions in Digital Musics: On the Entanglement of Technological, Social and Aesthetic Change

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CONFERENCE

Thursday, 15 January

9:00-9:30 AM Registration

PANEL I

9:30-11:30 AM Hindustani Classical Music: Histories, Sounds, Technology

Chair/discussant: Vidya Rao Amlan Dasgupta

Notes Towards a Possible History of Musical Sound: Interpreting Archival Evidence

Justin Scarimbolo

Commercial Recordings and the Construction of Gharana Identity

Anubhuti Sharma

Neutral operator or aesthetic tool? Kumar Gandharva and the question of technology

11:30 AM-12 NOON Tea/Coffee

PANEL II

12 NOON-1:30 PM Music in South India: Shifting Aesthetic Paradigms in the Early Twentieth Century

Chair/discussant: Bombay Jayashri Ramnath Vikram Sampath

Creation of a Carnatic Music ‘Aesthetic’ in the Early Twentieth Century

Stephen Hughes

Sound Unbound: Visualizing Technological Change in South Indian Musical Practice

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PANEL III

2:30-4:00 PM Vernacular Music Practices: Culture, Media, Politics

Chair/discussant: Lakshmi Subramanian Aditi Deo

Technologically Crafting Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Vernacular Music Documentation in India

Stefan Fiol

Khud Lagni Cha: A Social History of Music, Media and Folk Culture in the Garhwal Himalayas

4:00-4:30 pm Tea/Coffee

Roundtable I

4:30-6:30 pm Archiving Music: Theory and Practice Moderator: Shubha Chaudhuri

Participants: Suresh Chandvankar, Gopal Singh Chauhan, Bhaskar Kaushik, Sukanta Mazumdar, Yatindra Mishra, Vikram Sampath,

Musical Performance I

7:00-8:30 pm, The School of Social Sciences Auditorium Bombay Jayashri Ramnath

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Friday, 16 January Panel IV

9:30-11:30 am Stardoms Meri Awaaz Suno”: Cinematic and Aural

Chair/discussant: Ranjani Mazumdar Neepa Majumdar

Music, Mediation, and Cinematic Self-Reflexivity

Yatindra Mishra

The Structure and Melody of Hindi Film Songs

Amanda Weidman

Constructing the ‘Husky’ Female Voice in Analogue and Digital

11:30 am-12 noon Tea/Coffee

Roundtable II

12 noon-2:00 pm Technologically Yours: Film Music and Sound Practices

Moderator: Ira Bhaskar

Participants: Jayashri Ramnath, Biswadeep Chatterjee, Sneha Khanwalkar, Arjit Dutta, Ravindhar Randhawa, Kunal Sharma. 2:00-3:00 pm Lunch

Panel V

3.00-4.30 pm Seeing Print, Hearing Film: Reception Histories of Music and Sound

Chair/discussant: Ravi Vasudevan Madhuja Mukherjee

To speak or Not to Speak: An Enquiry into Technology, Mediations and early Bengali films

Vebhuti Duggal

The Swarlipi in Madhuri and other stories: Tales of listening

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4.30-5.00 pm Tea/Coffee

Panel VI

5.00-6.30 pm After the Great Divide: Digitization and the Vernacular Music Industries

Chair/discussant: Ravi Sundaram Ratnakar Tripathy

Enabling Music: A Comparative Perspective for Bihar and Haryana

Gregory Booth

The ‘Long Tail’ in the Digital World: Musical Diversity and the Survival of India’s ‘Minor’ Labels

Musical Performance II

7:00-8:30 pm, The School of Social Sciences Auditorium Moushumi Bhowmik and Satyaki Banerjee

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Saturday, 17 January Panel VII

9:30-11:30 am The Business of Sounds: Music Industries, Retailing, Piracy

Lawrence Liang, chair Vibodh Parthasarthy

The Business of Making Sound: Entrepreneurial Practices at the dawn of the analogue Era, 1900-1908

Jayson Beaster-Jones,

‘Copy bhi milega’ [Copies are also available]: Reproduction and Distribution in India’s Family Run Music Stores

Bhagwati Prasad

Kai Choti Kahaniya Banati Hai Badi Kahani

11:30 am-12 noon Tea/Coffee

Panel VIII

12 noon-1:30 pm Fiddling with the Dials: Radio, Performance and Listening Cultures

Chair/Discussant: Partho Dutta Srinkhala Sahai

Alaap on the Airwaves: Indian Classical Music on Web Radio and Digital Technologies

Ravikant

Cinema on Radio: Voice, Music, Words

1:30-2:30 pm Lunch

Panel IX

2:30-4:00 pm ‘Noise’, Technology and Music Chair/discussant: Jonathan Sterne

Shikha Jhingan

Music as Noise: Sonic Disorders, Mobility and Devotional Music

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Samhita Sunya

High-Fidelity Ecologies: India v. Noise Pollution in the Contemporary Public Sphere

4:00-4:30pm Tea/Coffee

Panel X

4:30-6:00 pm Electronic Music Cultures Chair/discussant: Georgina Born

Natalie Sarrazin

The Rise of the Gigabyte Guru: Technology’s Impact on Indian Music Education

Ankush Gupta

Electric Dreams: Questions of Gender and Technology

6:00-6:30 pm Vote of Thanks: Georgina Born and Kaushik Bhaumik

Musical Performance III

7:00 – 8:30pm, The School of Social Sciences Auditorium Arijit Dutta and Vinay Lobo

References

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