From inbandra.in. My Bandra days in 2008, the climax years in Mumbai, when i rented a room in the Sea-Mist building opposite the Pot-Pourri coffee cafe in Bandra. Sea-Mist is the building where the actress of yore Madbubala is said to have lived once. 2 minutes on my left were Salmans Galaxy Apartment and a minute further up, SRKs Mannat; 2 minutes on my right were Ranbir, Deepika, Sanjay Dutt, Aamir Khan and a host of others. It was mayhem........ SOUND OF SILENCE AT CARTER ROAD - Arshad Shah The Carter Road Amphitheatre may be a godsend to a city with appallingly few outdoor performance spaces, but for people who live near it, the concerts and events it now hosts regularly are anything but Roshan Daboiwala, trustee of the Bandra West Residents’ Association and resident of Carter Road, says, “There is a concert every other weekend, and it disturbs the entire neighbourhood. But this is a public space, so we can’t do anything about it. People like entertainment and we can’t stop them from having fun.” The problem, of course, is that the amphitheatre uses traditional sound systems, not unlike - in principle at least - those you might find at, say, an Iron Maiden concert. Such systems require sound levels to be set very high, for the benefit of people in the back rows. This, unfortunately, can make things quite unpleasant for people who live nearby (not to mention the front-benchers). The answer may lie with Pali Hill resident Vickram Crishna. Called distributed sound, his is an ingenious technique that delivers sound that’s as loud as the audience wishes (yes, even earsplitting) but almost inaudible just a few meters away. How is that possible, you ask? Well, it involves replacing traditional large speakers with a number of smaller ones, distributed amidst the audience, to create or sort of cocoon of sound. It’s the very system that has kept the Banganga Festival alive for the past three years, after a court order banned it for noise pollution. Roshan Daboiwala, for one, is all for it. So what’s the hitch? Well, money, of course. Such a system would have to be custom-built, and would cost approximately Rs 2 lakh, according to Vickram. “It would also have to be portable, easy to set up and take down after each event for safe storage,” he says. And since we’re talking about Carter Road here, storage itself is not a trivial issue. “However, I believe that if the money was available, some public spirited individuals would come forward to share the burden of safe storage,” Vickram adds.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 13:51:11 +0000
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