Music Room

This music room on narrative.in is a work-in-process dedicated to exploring the tension between designing and experiencing what has been designed. Listening, but more; rather, navigating spaces. Orienting oneself, feeling, engaging in dialogue, sharing critical reflections on action. From music in the primary sense of the word to the music of things, tastes, senses, and sensations.

It allows us to explore and experiment with concepts that were inspired by my master thesis on the film “The Music Room,” directed by the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and by research in Japanese cinema related to the notion of benshi (弁士), the star Japanese narrators of the silent film era. Revisiting this work between India and Japan and connecting it with research in Europe related to narratives and design brings to mind what was already happening in music rooms (salon de musique) in the 18th and 19th centuries—crossroads where musicians and writers, poets, philosophers, and painters engaged in dialogue, fostering the renewal of forms, access and participation for amateurs, the refinement of instruments, the establishment of new aesthetics, the blending of disciplines, and the rise of the melody, the string quartet, and so on.

What happens if we bring a Benshi into the Music Room?

In 1996, as a Japan Foundation fellow, I proposed the Benshi as a metaphor for “interactive narrative”: a person, near a screen, tells a story inspired by what is happening, or could happen, on the screen. The Benshi tradition in Japan is connected to the influx of cinematic innovations into theaters. But we must go back to Bunraku, Noh, and Kabuki and revisit the influence of these figures who sensed the audience and moved them. Present in the theater, they commented on the plot, embodied the characters’ voices with theatricality, and guided the spectators. Today, in interactive storytelling, we would say that this storyteller becomes the interface, adapting the rhythm and dramatic intensity according to their perception of the audience’s expectations.

In 2007, after several high-tech installations using mixed and augmented reality, I launched PechaKucha Brussels, which can also be described as a low-tech interactive storytelling exercise, in the style of Benshi, as practiced in Tokyo and its surrounding areas at the beginning of the 20th century. Here, we find a person standing near a screen, sharing a story. However, it was in 1996 that I began this exploration of the concept of Benshi, as a Japan Foundation Fellow, within the framework of the Kigeki No Hoshi project, notably with the video installation Tokyo Vignettes.

I then continued it with the Transfiction narrative software engine and in conferences and workshops, with the notions of narrative transintermediation and extrafiction (in the context of the International Transmedia Storytelling Seminar, in 2012, at the Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, with Fernando Carrión, Henry Jenkins, Lina Srivastava, Mayus Chavez, Bill Boyd, Robert Pratten, Javier González Casado, …).

In 2014, we worked with composer/musician Stéphane Orlando and actors Mélissa Cornu and Eric De Staercke on TempoBenshi at La Bellone in Brussels, blending silent films, live music, and theatrical performance.

This space on narrative.in aims to extend these reflections on the creation, conception, and reception of ideas, drawing in particular on the work written for film studies at the University of Brussels: “Let the Music Room Open!” and the residency in Tokyo as part of a Japan Foundation Fellowship. We will supplement these with various materials gleaned from our explorations of media, film, food, and other experiences. We will navigate between ideas, images, sounds, tastes, models, metaphors, textures, tones, tensions… all in rhythm – tempo. We propose to revisit these narrative, musical, scenic, and performative investigations. and to extend them in a new configuration, à la “Benshi in the Music Room”.

Alok b. Nandi • www.aloknandi.com •