Sonic Footprint: How Sound Technology Shaped Bombay Cinema Music

Film Music

Discussions of music in South Asian cinema have largely centered on popular film songs—their lyrics, vocal styles, visual coding, narrative placement, and afterlives across various media. Moving beyond this song-centric framework, this entry redefines film music by tracing its sonic footprint through evolving media technologies and listening habits. The aural force of cinema carries an emotional charge beyond words, generating a web of intertextual memory largely overlooked by scholars until recently. This discussion focuses on commercial Bombay cinema, which has long dominated the subcontinent’s popular music and forms the core of my own research.

Songs, sounds, and the verbal-nonverbal tension

The overt presence of music in films as song has been understood as a continuation of musical theater traditions rooted in classical raga-based melodies. Audiences’ fondness for humming film songs with straightforward, repetitive musical structures was tied to their connection with communal folk music (Beeman, 1980). Interestingly, it was the circulation of film music through printed chapbooks and song booklets that encouraged listeners to focus on lyrics while overlooking instrumental passages. Radio later stepped in, maintaining listeners’ connection to those non-verbal musical sections. Ashok Da. Ranade (2006) emphasized the creative tensions between verbal and nonverbal elements in film music, pointing to aesthetic principles that unite auditory and visual components. The opening instrumental sections of film songs and background scores play a crucial role in producing these divergences.

Sources and hierarchies

A persistent challenge for composers and filmmakers has been establishing a hierarchy of musical sources. Satyajit Ray found Indian classical music inadequate for background scores, arguing it lacked a dramatic narrative tradition (Robinson, 1989). Noticing how Bengal’s Jatra companies blended Indian and western instruments in curious ways, Ray pursued a similar experimental path. Colonial-era missionaries, military bands, jazz clubs in Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore, gramophone records, and the screening of Hollywood films had all familiarized Indian listeners with Western classical and popular genres. These influences seeped into cinema. In 1950s Bombay, working within an industrial context, music directors like Naushad Ali shared Ray’s concern, feeling that instruments such as the sitar, sarod, or flute fell short in conveying violence or dissonance within a film’s narrative.

State policy and the industry

Naushad Ali was also responding to the postcolonial Indian state’s critique of film music through revamped broadcasting policies. Links between colonial governance and film music can be traced along interesting paths. Under colonial administration, musicians at All India Radio (AIR) were taught Western staff notation to introduce harmony into Indian music (Luthra, 1986). By the late 1940s, many of these musicians migrated to Bombay to work in film, while AIR, implementing its national cultural policy, formed Vadya Vrinda in 1952—a specially trained orchestra led by Ravi Shankar—aiming to craft a sound that could “harmonise the pure modes of Indian music” (Luthra, 1986). At the same time, broadcast slots for film music on AIR were drastically cut compared to classical music, partly due to film music’s heavy reliance on rhythm and melody from Western popular music, and more importantly, because cinema’s auditory landscape drew from courtesan voices, Urdu (as opposed to Hindi), and erotic song lyrics (Lelyveld, 1994).

Borrowing and blending

Popular Bombay cinema gave music directors the freedom to borrow from folk music, regional traditions, devotional and classical sources, while also freely incorporating Latin American rhythms or Middle Eastern tunes (Arnold, 1988; Beaster-Jones, 2015). This freedom extended beyond state radio oversight. Goan musicians and arrangers, proficient in Western styles, became central figures in the film music industry, though they remained “behind the curtain” (Booth, 2008). Playing in jazz bands at night and film studios by day, these Goan artists gave Bombay cinema a sound of “bold modernity” (Fernandes, 2012). Beyond scoring each section for color and harmony, arrangers devised inventive methods for bringing vocal melodies, string sections, sitar, piano, trumpet, cello, and dholak into dialogue, forging a distinctive musical culture (Booth, 2008; Chandavarkar, 1987). Composers like Naushad Ali deployed large, Hollywood-style orchestras in both film songs and background scores—the coda of “O mere lal aaja” from Mother India (1957) employed “extensive chromatic movements, large leaps and unmelodic sections” to convey disturbance, discomfort, or suspense (Morcom, 2007).

Experimenting with timbre

Conversely, many examples exist where a single instrument or a small ensemble was used to create an eerie sound or erotic charge. Since at least the 1950s, musicians in Bombay studios were bending, warping, and experimenting with voice and the acoustic coloration of both acoustic and electronic instruments. The been/pungi sound of South Asian snake charmers was reimagined in Nagin (1954) by weaving a harmonium with a clavioline for the opening music of “Man dole, mera tan dole.” The extended opening sequence in Nagin has a swooning effect on the heroine, setting the stage for the song’s repeated replay on Radio Ceylon. While film songs traveled across media formats and spaces (Duggal, 2020), background scores remained overshadowed, receiving little attention until the action-oriented “angry man” films of the 1970s introduced new sonics.

New landmarks in sound

The childhood traumas of Vijay, a character played by Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1975), and Trishul (1978), were underscored by aural motifs that resonated subtly across the protagonist’s temporal and spatial journey. The dissonant banshee’s wail used as Gabbar’s leitmotif in Sholay (1975), created by R. D. Burman and his team, marked a new milestone in Indian sound cinema, defying the conventional use of French horns and brass instruments to signify villainy. Extended openings and longer musical interludes accommodating action sequences became a hallmark of Hindi films in the 1970s (Bhattacharjee & Vittal, 2011).

Cassettes to digital mashups

The arrival of cassettes as portable objects unleashed an unprecedented expansion of music genres—disco, rock, ghazal, and devotional music—while allowing local and regional forms to flourish. Music became a key space for fluid cultural borrowing across the subcontinent in the 1980s, with singers from Pakistan and Bangladesh, including Salma Agha, Reshma, and Runa Laila, leaving a significant aural imprint in India (Jhingan, 2016). The 1990s brought film music streaming into television. Live orchestras performed instrumental preludes to film songs on shows like Close-Up Antakshari (1994–2005), where contestants identified songs based on their memory of these non-verbal pieces Ironically, just as synthesizers and sampled audio were displacing live orchestras and acoustic musicians from recording studios, audiences could watch ensembles playing together for television shows that functioned like live performances. Shifts in technology and studio practice—like the rise of programmable music—created new sound aesthetics, a change recognized by the Filmfare awards, which introduced the “Best Background Score” category in 1998.

Working with digital tools and a small studio ensemble, A. R. Rahman brought greater sonic complexity to film soundtracks (Sarrazin, 2014). In Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), Rahman incorporated a leitmotif approach by “blending voices and instruments,” a hallmark of his style (Wilcox, 2017). The music of films like Bunty Aur Babli (2005), Rang De Basanti (2006), Jab We Met (2007), and Om Shanti Om (2007) helped scale up the “big Bollywood sound,” crossing territorial boundaries by merging contemporary global music with Bhangra, Sufi, Indipop, and remixed versions of older film songs. Yet films like Dev D (2009) and Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye (2008), with their sounds of brass bands, wedding orchestras, and mobile ringtones, offered an alternative sonic imagination. The dense auditory experiences of North Indian towns and cities, with their sensory infrastructures, became part of these films’ musical environments, blurring boundaries between film song, background score, and noise (Jhingan, 2015; Mukherjee, 2017). The sonic ecology of item numbers, emphasizing extreme amplification, was crafted by crucial figures such as DJs, playback sopranos, and mixing engineers (Mukherjee, 2016). More recently, music-driven films exploring the lives of angst-ridden youth have amplified genres like rock (Rock On, 2008; Rockstar, 2011), rap/trance (Udta Punjab, 2016), and rap/hip-hop (Gully Boy, 2019), acknowledging the rise of amateur music production and DJ-driven practices. Sound design and visual coding that index distinct spatial and sonic universes play a key role in fleshing out performed music sequences in these films.

Future directions

Future work in film music studies should expand the field to pay greater attention to background scores, orchestration, and the use of chorus. The emergence of new aesthetic practices in film music alongside digital sound cultures, and their feedback loop, demand further examination in the broader context of regional films and the many cinemas of South Asia.