Contribution long abstract:

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 sub-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 i.e. timbre 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 entanglement between musicians and audio technologies in production of Asomiya adhunik geet” and VSTs as the software infrastructure how it is metamorphosing timbre of a genre of a popular music. Finally, paper will argue translocality and its discontents, describing VST plugins made from abundance of resources in technological center Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, a Hamburg, Germany based musical software and hardware company is creating songs of scarcity in periphery like Guwahati, Assam, India.