[Reader-list] I-Fellow Budhaditya Chattopadhyay: First Posting

[budhaditya chattopadhyay]

Hi all

I’m Budhaditya, a student of Sound Engineering in Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata. For the last two years I am actively working in the area of Audio Restoration. I feel a very strange fascination for sound with an old look. And I always would like to share my love for sounds with that warm and worn out texture. For me, digitally generated sound has its own kind of odour that I’m not comfortable with. Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong to the world of cold, clear and stiff binary sound.
So I decide to work with analogue recordings: the forgotten, misinterpreted and dusty bunch of old spools and shellacs. They are piling up in dustbins without care. 
I discover some of them from chorai market of rejected commodities, some of them from dark and farthest corner of cupboards. And I develop a pitiful love for them. 
But they are unplayable. Years of neglect has put bruise marks on them. Even if some chemical treatment follows, it is difficult to make them play, either the players are not available or they are pretty expensive. What I need to do is to make them playable for at least once and dump them on the all pervasive work stations. Then the rigorous task of critical noise reduction, keeping originality and warmth, and then processing them to extract the quintessential sound quality and finally mastering them to take them up on a storage device for further listening pleasures and archiving, for re-reading and re-searching and for the so called posterity. Obviously the whole process needs time, dedication, concentration and money.

In any casual visit to Bishnupur one will get struck by the indifference of people towards their own history. Drawing rooms, pan stalls, fare grounds and street corners are always blaring out the same tunes of the latest item number. It’ll seem that the sameness of a mundane soundscape is all the city of red-dust now capable of. But this land was a land of antiquity - of heritage architectures, finer crafts, a hundreds of years old music style and a handful of amazing voices. This particular style of music is one of the oldest gharanas in northern India and the only established one in the music history of Bengal. The tradition is dying as people don’t care about the practice and performance of the gharana.
If somebody seizes to memorize, then he is forgetting himself. And if a community starts to forget the roots then it denies the very basis of its collective unconscious. A small girl on the way to her new school for music lessons with a heavy school bag on her back is never aware of the treasure of music close to her. Only in some corners of the city a few people of another generation are talking in soliloquy about the magnificent sound that was once heard. Then where is it if somebody wants to hear it again?
It might be lying on the garbage, inside an old almirah or in a dead personal collection,
as hardly playable tapes, scratched discs or dementia. 
Between memory and oblivion stands the chronicler, who reminds of forgotten melodies. Every society needs the chronicles to look at their own bodies at least for once.

My job is to help remembering some lost sounds: lost from a community of singers, musicians and musical practice. For my project with SARAI, I am going to locate, document and restore the recordings of the exponents from Bishnupur Gharana to make an audio archive for everybody. It can be used as the resource for any further research work on the gharana system itself.  I’m thankful to SARAI for supporting me.

Regards,
Budhaditya


My livejournal blog URL
http://tumbani.livejournal.com/
  
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