The best place to record is in a [walk-in] closet,” says KJ Singh in the midst of this discussion, highlighting how the music industry was caught scrambling to comprehend technology during the pandemic. The National Award-winning Indian audio engineer, who has worked closely with AR Rahman, has been part of the industry since music was consumed on cassette. 

The advent of digital synthesisers, he says, was among the early factors that changed the course of music-making. “We no longer had to have all artistes gather at the same time to record a song. Early influences of the synthesiers can be seen in the works of RD Burman, and it became clear that listeners were enjoying those tunes. Technology made it easy to replicate acoustic sounds. I could create sounds of drums and bass on the computer, and we no longer needed live musicians for it,” says Singh, who hosted a session on the subject yesterday, as part of the Indian Performing Right Society’s (IPRS) session, New Era of Music.