Description
Recording studio is the rite to passage in popular music production from its inception. Be it for voice dubbing, live instruments recording or mixing and mastering ‘recording studio’ is incessantly ‘in between’ after a composition is made and its release as a popular song to the listeners. Situating ‘recording studio’ as the hardware infrastructure of making of popular music, paper will take an ethnographic journey into popular music production scene of Assam. Paper emphasizes primarily how recording studio is assemblage of musicians, audio engineers and technologies which proliferates popular music scene. That echoes what Brian Larkin in Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria refers “Infrastructure to the totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” (Larkin 2008,6). But paper along with it, from the vantage point of making music which always has been profoundly and primitively collective, further follows Tim Ingold’s thesis of “making is a correspondence between maker and material in case of art” (Ingold, 2013, xi) in Making Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture inversely argues it is the collectiveness of musicians that enduing recording studios (read infrastructure here) and recording studios as audio infrustructure rendering Assamese popular music making. What musicians engage with contemporary audio technologies in recording studios which I call hardware infrastructure and the technology which formulate sound i.e. timbre of Assamese popular music which I call software infrastructure i.e. Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is an audio plug-in software interface. Finally, paper will argue translocality and its discontents, describing VST plugins made from abundance of resources in technological center in Global North like Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, a Hamburg, Germany based musical software and hardware company is creating songs of scarcity in periphery of Global South like Guwahati, Assam, India.
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