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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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