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E-book Brought to Life by the Voice : Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India

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Penilaian

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In 1975, a reviewer for the Toronto Sun reported on a live performance by Lata Mangeshkar, then the reigning playback voice of Hindi cinema, during her first North American tour. “Lata Mangeshkar is what is known as a ‘playback singer,’” he wrote. “That is the vocalist who replaces the voice of the leading lady [in a film] whenever she breaks into song. . . . And if the actress is anyone important, her singing voice is supplied by Lata Mangeshkar” (Deora and Shah 2017, 45). Though North American audiences had become acquainted with the sounds of Indian classical music in the 1960s through the Beatles and the concert tours of sitarists Ravi Shankar and Amjad Ali Khan, this was their first exposure to Indian popular film songs. The term playback refers to a system that relies on the technical capac-ity to separately record and subsequently synchronize aural and visual tracks in the production of the song sequences that are a central part of Indian popular films. Playback singers are so called because their voices are first recorded in the studio and then “played back” on the set as the visuals of the song sequence are being filmed.Indian playback singers embody a combination of characteristics and roles that would have been unfamiliar to North American audiences in the 1970s. Singers who, in the North American context, would have been relegated to a behind-the-scenes, anonymous role, were in India clearly well-known celebrities. Yet, as the reviewer noted, while their voices commanded tremendous affective power, these singers’ live performances did not include visual signs of self-expression or involve-ment with the performance. “An obstacle for the potential fan of the media-saturated Western world is the show’s rigorous lack of visual distraction. There is no dance, no interpretive acting—just the music” (Deora and Shah 2017, 45). The reviewer’s conclusion—that both the music and its mode of performance were “an acquired taste”—reflects the fact, as true now as it was then, that playback singers embody a culturally specific form of celebrity for which there is no real equivalent in the North American context.Taking its cue from the reviewer’s puzzlement, this book seeks to understand playback in India as a culturally specific institution that has generated novel forms of celebrity, publicity and performance, and affective attachment to voices. Though playback relies on particular technical capacities and media assemblages, it is more than a simple technological process of substituting one voice for another. Tech-nological capacities alone did not determine the institution that playback would become in India; for instance, they did not dictate that the aural track would be recorded before the visual, that singer and actor had to be two different people, or that the singer would be a known celebrity rather than a behind-the-scenes ghost singer. Moving beyond a narrow technoindustrial explanation of playback, this book explores its significance as a realm of vocality and performance that has become intricately encoded with meaning over the roughly seventy years it has been in use in India.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

301 WEI b

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

272 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520976399

Klasifikasi

301

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sociology and Anthropology, Society

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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