From a young age, I recall spending late nights at special family gatherings dancing to Bollywood songs, regardless of whether I understood them or not. As I grew older, my Hindi comprehension skills remained limited but the sounds of Bollywood continued to play a vital role in upholding my Indian identity.
At home, I was always exposed to my culture through celebrations of Indian festivals with my family and close friends. I felt strongly tied to my Indian identity when getting dressed in traditional clothing, feasting on Indian festival food and paying homage to the history behind Indian celebrations.
When walking to class or taking the elevator, I often overhear other Indian students conversing in Hindi. In those moments, I recognize the language they speak, but my inability to understand their words hinders me from fully relating to other members of the South Asian community.
By listening to Bollywood songs, I began to appreciate the unique sound that sets them apart. Unlike the mainstream Western music I grew up with, Bollywood songs combined instruments and production in a manner that practically forced me to dance along.
Mehma Jolly, a third-year human biology and society student and co-president of Bruin Bhangra, said living in India for a few years taught her about Indian classical music and sparked an appreciation for modern artists who incorporate traditional or folk instruments.
In my experience, Bollywood music transcended the language barriers I faced. While I struggle to understand every lyric of my favorite Hindi songs, I resonate with the ideas conveyed through music, emphasizing that language surpasses words.
To the delight of my parents, I downloaded Duolingo and was inspired to set out on a journey of learning Hindi. To my surprise, I quickly realized that Hindi was not so different from Marathi and began picking up the language faster than I expected.
At the beginning of my first year at UCLA, I was met with the challenge of maintaining my cultural ties without the support I relied on at home. Now, as I approach the end of my first year, I feel proud of the journey of cultural exploration I embarked on.
The first and most crucial step in learning to sing Bollywood songs is to listen to them. Listen to various genres of Bollywood music, including romantic, sad, upbeat, and classical songs. This will help you to understand the different styles, expressions, and emotions that are a part of Bollywood music. Make sure you listen to songs sung by different artists to get a sense of their unique styles.
Like any other skill, singing requires practice. Start by practising basic vocal exercises to strengthen your voice. These exercises can help improve your breath control, pitch, and vocal range. Here are a few exercises you can practice:
Recording and listening to yourself can help you identify areas of improvement. Record yourself singing a Bollywood song and listen to it carefully. Pay attention to your pitch, rhythm, pronunciation, and emotions. This will help you to identify areas where you need to improve and work on them.
Working with a vocal coach can help you to improve your singing skills. A vocal coach can help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and provide you with personalized feedback. They can also help you to develop your vocal range, improve your pitch, and work on your overall singing technique.
Joining a music school can also help you to learn to sing Bollywood songs. Music schools offer structured courses that cover various aspects of singing, including music theory, vocal exercises, and performance techniques. Joining a music school can also give you access to performance opportunities, which can help you gain valuable experience.
Performing in public can help you gain confidence and experience. Look for opportunities to perform in front of an audience, such as local music competitions or open mic nights. This will help you to get feedback from your audience and improve your overall performance skills.
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The first song recorded in India by Gauhar Jaan in 1902 and the first Bollywood film Alam Ara (1931) were under Saregama, India's oldest music label owned by RPSanjiv Goenka Group.[3] Linguistically, Bollywood songs tend to use vernacular Hindustani, mutually intelligible to self-identified speakers of both Hindi and Urdu, while modern Bollywood songs also increasingly incorporate elements of Hinglish.[4] Urdu poetry has had a particularly strong impact on Bollywood songs, where the lyrics draw heavily from Urdu poetry and the ghazal tradition.[5] In addition, Punjabi is also occasionally used for Bollywood songs.
The Indian Music Industry is largely dominated by Bollywood soundtracks, which account for nearly 80% of the country's music revenue. The industry was dominated by cassette tapes in the 1980s and 1990s, before transitioning to online streaming in the 2000s (bypassing CD and digital downloads). As of 2014, the largest Indian music record label is T-Series with up to 35% share of the Indian market, followed by Sony Music India (the largest foreign-owned label) with up to 25% share, and then Zee Music (which has a partnership with Sony).[6] As of 2017, 216 million Indians use music streaming services such as YouTube, Hungama, Gaana and JioSaavn.[7] As of 2021, T-Series is the most subscribed YouTube channel with over 170 million subscribers.[8]
Right from the advent of Indian cinema in 1931, musicals with song numbers have been a regular feature in Indian cinema.[9] In 1934 Hindi film songs began to be recorded on gramophones and later, played on radio channels, giving rise to a new form of mass entertainment in India which was responsive to popular demand.[9] Within the first few years itself, Hindi cinema had produced a variety of films which easily categorised into genres such as "historicals", "mythologicals", "devotional, "fantasy" etc. but each having songs embedded in them such that it is incorrect to classify them as "musicals".[1]
The Hindi song was such an integral features of Hindi mainstream cinema, besides other characteristics, that post-independence alternative cinema, of which the films of Satyajit Ray are an example, discarded the song and dance motif in its effort to stand apart from mainstream cinema[1]
The Hindi film song now began to make its presence felt as a predominating characteristic in the culture of the nation and began to assume roles beyond the limited purview of cinema. In multi-cultural India, as per film historian Partha Chatterjee, "the Hindi film song cut through all the language barriers in India, to engage in lively communication with the nation where more than twenty languages are spoken and ... scores of dialects exist".[10] Bollywood music has drawn its inspiration from numerous traditional sources such as Ramleela, nautanki, tamasha and Parsi theatre, as well as from the West, Pakistan, and other Indic musical subcultures.[11]
For over five decades, these songs formed the staple of popular music in South Asia and along with Hindi films, was an important cultural export to most countries around Asia and wherever the Indian diaspora had spread. The spread was galvanised by the advent of cheap plastic tape cassettes which were produced in the millions until the industry crashed in 2000.[9] Even today Hindi film songs are available on radio, on television, as live music by performers, and on media, both old and new such as cassette tapes, compact disks and DVDs and are easily available, both legally and illegally, on the internet.[1]
The various use of languages in Bollywood songs can be complex. Most use variations of Hindi and Urdu, with some songs also including other languages such as Persian, and it is not uncommon to hear the use of English words in songs from modern Hindi movies. Besides Hindi, several other Indian languages have also been used including Braj, Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Bengali and Rajasthani.
In a film, music, both in itself and accompanied with dance, has been used for many purposes including "heightening a situation, accentuating a mood, commenting on theme and action, providing relief and serving as interior monologue."[11]
In a modern globalisation standpoint, Bollywood music has many non-Indian influences, especially from the West.[12] Many Hindi film music composers learned and mimicked Hollywood's style of matching music to scene atmospheres into their own film songs, the result being Bollywood music. These songs can be considered a combination of Western influences and Hindi music.[13]
Songs in Bollywood movies are deliberately crafted with lyrics often written by distinguished poets or literati (often different from those who write the film script), and these lyrics are often then set to music, carefully choreographed to match the dance routine or script of the film. They are then sung by professional playback singers and lip-synched by the actors. Bollywood cinema is unique in that the majority of songs are seen to be sung by the characters themselves rather than being played in the background.[14] Although protagonists sing often, villains in films do not sing because music and the arts are a sign of humanity.[15] In Western cinema, often a composer who specialises in film music is responsible for the bulk of music on the film's soundtrack, and while in some films songs may play an important part (and have direct relationship to the subject of the film), in Bollywood films, the songs often drive large-scale production numbers featuring elaborate choreography.
The key figure in Bollywood music production and composition is the music director. While in Western films, a "music director" or "music coordinator" is usually responsible for selecting existing recorded music to add to the soundtrack, typically during opening and closing credits, in Bollywood films, the "music director" often has a much broader role encompassing both composing music/songs specifically for the film and (if needed) securing additional (licensed) music. In this sense, a Bollywood music director also plays the role of a composer and music producer.
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