Chennai@Midnight

Chennai@Night Time is an experimental Sound Art piece aimed to understand the workings of Night time life on a normal weekday in Chennai. Chennai, despite being a metropolitan city in India, is known to sleep early and hence the composer decided to drive to some of the places in Chennai where he could achieve sound samples of an apparently “sleeping” city. Characteristics sound of night time Chennai include sparse traffic, Ice Cream vendors with there occasional bells, sporadic hubs of people and traffic where food is sold or some shops are open to sell cold drinks or cigarettes; 24 hour takeaway outlets that always have delivery men who talk amongst themselves as they perform their night shift jobs. Finally, this experiment made way for an excursion into the vast expanse of Marina Beach where the homeless and destitute sleep in the open beach at night and there are hardly any sounds except an occasional dog barking or someone snoring. The sea shows its true form in this quietness as the lapping of the waves is heard even 1 km away from the sea. This Marina Beach clip has been superimposed with the rest of the sounds of Chennai in order to reiterate that Chennai is a coastal city and that nature is never far away from all the urbanization. The places that were visited in order were as follows

§  Ice Cream Vendor – Subburayan Nagar, Kodambakkam

§  Movenpick Ice Cream Parlour  - Nungambakkam

§  Dawn n Dusk – Khader Nawaz Khan Road, Nungambakkam

§  Sorroundings near Buhari Hotel – Egmore

§  Beach Road and the Beach itself - Marina Beach

Ice Cream @ Midnight

Ice Creams in Chennai are a welcome treat and the sound of the ice cream hawker trolley bell is a welcome sound for the common man. At midnight however, their supply runs out and one can only procure ice creams from the head office in every area where all these trolleys finally park themselves at the end of a night’s work. One such ice cream man was interviewed by us and was told to go to the office to get the said ice cream. He was enamoured by the audio equipment and the interaction of the layman with advanced audio equipment - something that does not seem out of the ordinary to music students - is being explored in the is video. Oh yes, and we got some orange ice cream on the side! :)

The Cottar

Well, I found students getting tired, confident to do well in the KM annual day and opera scenes very much interesting. They were working hard and they wanted to impress the audience, guests, and achieve success. Then I thought, I could record some of their talk during/after their rehearsal. So, I found different sets of people with different emotions. Some of the students really wanted to finish off the events, some wanted to gain the fame and meanwhile some students were enjoying the rehearsals. I got to capture most of the students’ reaction about the KM annual function event rehearsals and I also captured the sounds of labourers’ conversation during a house construction which’s just opposite to the college. Everything I found were two different types of labourers and their dedication to work. The labourers’ during the house construction were having fun conversation and enjoying the work where I captured a bit of their conversation and a scratch sound which came out when labourers were trying to mix the cement and concrete. The labourers in the college campus have different reaction to the work where I could capture their rehearsals and the talk about the rehearsals. 

Sounds Inside and Outside KM Music Conservatory

KM Music Conservatory is surrounded by different sounds, so I went around the conservatory to capture sounds and most interesting one I have found is the KM choir singing “Mozart’s Requiem- Lacrimosa” inside KM and the heavy machinery sounds behind the conservatory. I was watching a dramatic movie based on World War II named "Fury" a day before the sound walk, so these sounds gave me a cinematic effect of a war and it was quite terrifying to listen to the machinery sounds as I could relate them to the sonic effect of heavy ammunitions in the war field. 

Music from the Mechanic

Recording outside the conservatory: the area of Arumbakkam around KMMC is often infused with music itself, either from vendors, a tea shop, fruit shop, mechanics down the street or the temple right next to it whose loudspeakers extend all around a four-block radius in the neighborhood. A fitting backdrop for the "film" of the student's lives at KM Music Conservatory: the trappings of the Indian urban landscape striving to develop rapidly and its sounds, and especially its music. The temple, auto mechanic, tea shop and fruit juice place all share the sonic space with a remarkable degree of friendly cooperation. I've never heard two stereos on at the same time!  Today the auto mechanics stereo was on. The necessity of practice doesn't allow for this kind of musical cooperation in the conservatory itself except during concerts of course. 

Auto Mechanic:

Gate to KM Music Conservatory

Directly opposite the gate a few meters away: building new residential apartments

Production and Practice

Spaces and worlds of sound collide inside the KM Conservatory as every niche of the building is being used. The sounds of classical cello practice therefore overlap with the sounds of electronic music production. The sounds of opera mix with the sounds of tabla, and so on. The sound of practice and of production have a similarly halting pace, interrupted with breaks of verbal communication or self-talk. There the similarities between the process of practicing an acoustic orchestral instrument and of producing electronic music probably cease, however. Oh, except for the click – the important metronome which keeps both the track and practicing musicians in line. Each of a metronome's clicks are exactly the same, but totally different because of the passage of time. The metronome can seem a dictator, loud anti-musical intervention of technique, but also the most tried and true method for successful coordination of musical time. The metronome is a ruler, a teacher, but one of the most demanding distracting sounds there are. The many different ways that students express themselves in music and strive to become better create a struggle of sounds that interweave and clash in the inside of a conservatory.

The competition of these various sounds creates the potential for a constant evaluation of the various types of value these different types of music have, their capital, the cache associated with them. One is constantly confronted with the differential... what do cellos have that a modern studio doesn't? Is there any way that the cellos can keep from being completely swallowed up with the hungry ear of the industry's microphones and possessed? The Sunshine Orchestra, the KM College of Music and Technology flagship orchestra project has been summoned into existence thanks to the capital and generosity of the man who is one of the greatest success stories in the history of Indian film: A R Rahman. Where and how does the sound of classical cello fit in to the mythos associated with this man and the institution he's founded?

Night Time Around KM Music Conservatory

I - A Cold Limca Bottle

This clip talks about how the heat of the summers in Chennai even seeps into the freezer of a small shop selling groceries outside KM Music Conservatory. Hence when one asks for a Cold bottle of Limca, an aerated beverage, the “Cooling” - as the shopkeeper refers to it, is seemingly not enough. The tail end of the clip speaks to some of the students of the conservatoire regarding the recording device used to capture this clip.

II - KM Guard After Hours

Owing to the oddly scheduled early closing hours of the conservatory, students often walk into the campus to find a sleeping guard blocking their path asking them to come back the next morning when the school reopens at 830am the next morning. This is a conversation this guard in Tamil regarding this, combined with his underlying irritation at being woken up.

III - KM Student Blabbers

While the hustle and bustle of student movement near the Chai shop outside KM Music Conservatory is a common sight to behold; at night time, this area isn’t nearly as populated. The sparse group of students commonly hanging out in the area indulge in friendly banter, with promise of artistic collaborations or new compositions or musical ideas that they are working on. Such conversations mostly end up without consequence as can be seen from the tone of this short excerpt.