Background Sounds

In the autumn of 2006, I was a final-year student of audiography at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), a prestigious institute for film education in India. I was invited to speak about my experience as an emerging sound art practitioner and my concerns regarding the use of sound in cinema at a conference titled Sound Cultures in Indian Cinema. The conference was held with the intention of launching an Indian film sound research programme in the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University in Kolkata. I presented a student paper at the conference, which was later published in the Journal of the Moving Image (2007). The paper was my first critical intervention within the field of (film) sound research and, as such, allowed me to enter academic debates around sound in film and audiovisual media as an active sound practitioner and artist.

This intervention was significant for several reasons. Firstly, as a sound practitioner, that is, one who explores the medium of sound for aesthetic, cultural, and artistic purposes, as well as one who theorizes about it, I was able to offer novel insights into the ongoing academic debates in film sound research, which, up to that point, had been based on mostly non-concrete ideas about sound recording and design in films by seasoned academics, who were not sound practitioners themselves.