Department of Music

"Female Voices in The Public Sphere: The Changing Sound and Image of Playback Singers in Kollywood."

Playback singing, a process in which the voices of professional singers are first recorded in the studio, and then “played back” on the set to be lip synched by actors, is foundational to Indian popular cinema. More than simply a technological process, it is a cultural phenomenon enabled by technological capacities that allow voices to be recorded, manipulated, amplified, circulated, and matched with various images. Playback singers are celebrities in their own right, and playback singing is a realm of vocality intricately encoded with meaning, as voices are explicitly and powerfully linked to class, caste, community, and regional identity through film song sequences.

Based on research among female singers in Kollywood, Chennai’s Tamil film industry, this presentation will explore the shifts, between the 1950s and the present, in vocal sound and performing style cultivated by female playback singers. It will focus on the last fifteen years, a period which has ushered in new technological capacities for sound manipulation and a flood of female singers into a field previously dominated by only two or three. These years are more generally marked by India’s economic liberalization and the increasingly transnational orientation of Indian popular cinema, trends that are reflected in changing ideals of the female voice.

Amanda Weidman is assistant professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses on ethnomusicology, the anthropology of language, media and technology, and South Asia. Her book Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern (2006), is a critical social history of South Indian classical music. She is also a violinist in the Western classical and Karnatic traditions.