Carnatic Violin Project

For my creative project, I learned to play a traditional Carnatic/Indian violin tune on my violin and attached it to a video capturing nature scenes of Ayemenem.

I found that my approach to this assignment opened my senses and increased my sensitivity to the surroundings and environments described throughout the book and, in turn, allowed me to more clearly and intensely feel the deeper, emotional impact that Arundhati Roy’s descriptive language and story can have on a reader. The elaborate descriptions of the story’s setting and backdrops that Roy incorporates throughout The God of Small Things formed in my mind, before all else, detailed images of the characters’ surroundings. These images were rarely, if ever, created together with an audio element. Though I was easily able to translate the pictures Roy draws with her words into realistic images in my mind, I rarely heard the sounds to accompany these images. Besides the majority of her imagery being devoted to the description of what is to be seen around the characters, the passages in which she discussed what is to be heard by the characters still seemed to bring forth visual images before or rather than sounds. When Roy writes, “Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun” (p. 1), I imagined first and foremost birds rapidly and dramatically flying about until they bounce off the glass and fall to the ground. Only later came along a far less vivid imagination of the hum of the birds and the thud-thud as their stunned bodies ricochet off the windows and onto the ground. My exploration into the sounds of the story through my experimentation with traditional, carnatic music, as well as its relation to the nature and atmosphere of Ayemenem, made me more attentive to and appreciative of the opportunities to not only see, but hear the imagery Roy provides. By layering sounds that I had created and had put much time and thought into on images of Ayemenem that shared several similarities with those Roy describes, I was able to form strong ties between sound and sight. These ties brought to my attention the contribution sound can make to the significance and impact of a scene, as I found both the video itself and the images I had created in my mind over the course of reading this book to be far more colorful, brilliant, and moving when attached to the music I made.