A Genre Entangled with Infrastructure: Making of ‘Assamese Modern Song’ in Studios in Guwahati, Assam

How can we know about a music genre from the vantage point of an infrastructure? Roaming inside and around three studios of Guwahati, Assam, India while conducting ethnography for 14 months, an anthropologist ruminates an existing genre “Asomiya adhunik geet” (Assamese Modern Song) or composers, musicians, engineers around the studios referred as Modern songs, from the vantage point of sound making infrastructure. What musicians of Assamese popular music pursue this genre as its evolution from its origin as All India Radio (AIR), Indian state-owned public radio broadcaster, produced genre called “Sugam Sangeet” vis-à-vis produce regular interval and engage with contemporary audio technologies in recording studios which I say as hardware infrastructure and most importantly the technology which formulate the sound of this genre which I call it software infrastructure i.e. Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is an audio plug-in software interface. For this exploration, the paper will engage with the mediation between musicians and audio technologies in production of Asomiya adhunik geet” (Assamese Modern Song). Following their process of creations (songs), the paper will argue how the contemporary audio digital technologies/medium especially VSTs as the software infrastructure materializing mediation of a cultural identity in the form of music and how it is metamorphosing sound of a genre of popular music. So finally in larger context of human (musicians) and non-humans (audio technologies), this paper wants to explore popular music from the standpoint of audio technologies (non-humans), further possibilities it can allow us to think about popular music and methodologies or limitations of existing anthropocentric methodologies emerge out of this engagement.