The Auditory Setting in the Digital Era

It isn’t difficult to observe that sound in Indian films has been inconsistently produced due to evolving phases of production practices, affected by technological innovations and shifts. There have been phases of sound practice (such as the entire ‘dubbing era’), that cared less about quality, giving more importance to the typical narrative tropes such as songand- dance sequences, dramatic use of sound effects, studio processing, sound editing, and dialogue replacement, as explained in chapter 6. However, there are also phases such as the ‘digital era’ (2000–) where some degree of careful and creative rendering of sound is observed. In this light, I consider the advent of digital technology in the form of ‘sync sound’ and surround design in Indian cinema to be significant, given the evolution of sound use through earlier phases of Indian cinema’s production practices. The scholarly perspectives on sound production in the digital era in Hollywood (Kerins, 2011, 2006; Sergi, 2004; Sonnenschein, 2001) and the aesthetic impacts of digital production practices on the cinematic experience have often been described by film scholars as ‘real’ (Altman, 1992), ‘sensorial’ (Sobchack, 2005), or ‘authentic’ (Biancorosso, 2009). Although these expressions cannot be uniformly applied to Indian cinema in the context of its historical trajectory, much can be discussed along these lines. As I have mentioned in the Introduction and earlier chapters, mainstream Indian film’s general tendency has been to ignore subtleties of sound while reconstructing the pro-filmic space into film space.