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Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
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Interview: 10 questions
1. When did you start making music, what is/was your motivation to do that?
I left my job as an electrical engineer to join film school to study sound design in 2003. Gradually, my film school education made me disillusioned with film sound.
I started to find out an alternative way to work independently with raw sound still enjoying my artistic freedom.
I started to work with soundscape design and composition as a way to understand my surrounding aural space and my relationship with it. Slowly I get more and more involved with my work as a mode of expression in the area of new media art.
2. Tell me something about your living environment and the musical education.
I have been trained in Indian classical music before my engineering study. I grew up with classical music as we have a musical family. My exposure to European classical music started from childhood because we had a huge collection of old records. In the engineering days I listened more to rock and gothic. In film school I came in contact with ambient and trance music, my own idea about music is influenced by ambient musical genre.
3. Is making music your profession? What is the context in which you practice nowadays?
Doing film sound design is my profession but making my own soundscape work is absolutely my choice to work independently without any constraint or burden as
such.
I believe in the musical possibility of environmental sounds. While living within a vibrant aural space, my creative persona gets influenced by sounds around me, I feel, world makes it’s own music, we need to hear more openly. My own philosophy about music is indebted to emerging ideas like acoustic ecology and soundscape studies.
My work with sound falls within the context of re-reading my surrounding world to search for creative associations and survival strategies.
4. How do you compose or create music or sound? Have you certain principles? Use certain styles etc.?
I extensively record sound from my environment, select sound according to it’s aesthetic possibilities and musicality of it’s tone, texture, quality and context.
I manipulate my field recordings with digital tools and techniques like layering, processing and mixing. I don’t follow styles where field recordings are kept raw.
5. Tell me something about the instruments, technical equipment or tools you use?
I use an MD recorder called acoustic engine along with a SONY ECM microphone for field recording. I do edit, mix and process in my own DAW having NUENDO 3.
6. What are the chances of New Media for the music production in general and you personally?
New media for me opens up the possibility to experiment with my creative ideas and imaginations. New media makes it viable to work with new forms and genres which can be personal and innovative at the same time. To me New Media gives me creative license to work with my own stuff, and a sense of democracy to work in my own personal way.
7. How about producing and financing your musical productions?
Till now I produced my own work. About publication, Gruenrekorder helped me to publish my soundscape designs and compositions in their audio art label.
8. Do you work individually as a musician/soundartist or in a group or collaborative?
I work individually, but when I install my work with images, I collaborate with Julia Milberger, photodesigner from Munich.
9. Is there any group, composer, style or movement which has a lasting influence on making music?
Gruenrekorder is a group/label I am associated with. I believe in their philosophy about music, to appreciate and promote soundscape as a form of sound art.
10. What are your future plans, dreams as a soundartist or musician?
This year end I would like to release my solo album of field recordings and soundscape compositions. My next plan is to do a project with city sound. Next year I am also going to join a PhD programme in sonic arts.