Music performance as technological reproduction: the first recording studios and the introduction of microphones in south India
From the late nineteenth century, sound recording and the mass circulation of commercial records helped reconfigure South Indian musical traditions, loosening them from earlier temporal, spatial and social settings. Alongside the much-discussed shift from courtly patronage in Thanjavur to the urban concert culture of the Madras music sabhas, new forms of mass media reshaped musical performance, repertoire, commercial practice, patronage and audiences, and from the 1930s radio, recording, cinema and loudspeakers altered south Indian music profoundly. This talk returns to this terrain with a focus on a discrete but consequential moment: the first electric recording sessions in Madras in the early 1930s.
When Columbia Records established its first dedicated studio in Madras (now Chennai) in 1931, it introduced the first purpose-built “studio” space for recording music in south India, and with it an important new technology. The microphone was at the heart of the new electrical recording process, and it would eventually transform vocal technique (Weidman), reconfigure performer-audience relations, and become a ubiquitous presence across an expanding assemblage of sound media: recording, radio, cinema and public address (Bate). This talk asks how, when and where south Indian musicians and their listening publics first encountered the microphone as a practical and aesthetic intervention.
Drawing on newspaper accounts, trade catalogues and promotional materials, I argue that these early studio encounters did not simply inaugurate a technological rupture. Instead, they refigured older musical practices within a newly mediated yet recognisably familiar set of temporal, spatial and social coordinates, and reframed musical performance itself as a form of technological reproduction.
Dr Stephen Putnam Hughes is a Research Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. A specialist in the anthropology of media, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught for many years at SOAS, University of London. He also served as Film Officer and Film Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in London. He is currently engaged in the AHRC-funded research project Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections. He is also a Harry Ransom Center Fellow, 2026–2027 working on a project, "Image Worlds of Empire: The Reuse and Circulation of Photographs in Colonial India".
Dr Hughes's research focuses on cinema history, audience studies, documentary and ethnographic film, visual anthropology, and the broader social and cultural dimensions of media. He has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Tamil-speaking South India for more than four decades, examining the intersections of media, the arts, religion, and politics. His work combines historical and anthropological approaches to explore how media practices shape cultural and public life.