Budhaditya Chattopadhyay: newly published editions

Chattopadhyay, B (2021). The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) 

The book introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and production. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-auditory-setting.html

Chattopadhyay, B (2022). Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues (London: Palgrave Macmillan)

This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global South, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.  The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-consumerist cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-99732-8

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