Male elephants will come running from a very, very long way away when they hear that special call. You can do a playback experiment on these poor bull elephants to see if they respond to these sounds. They do. So this is how, with playback experiments, Lucy King determined that elephants have a specific signal for honeybee, vocal signal,
They're building an Elephant Ethogram, elephant dictionary, where you have large data sets of recordings of these different sound clips associated with specific behaviors. And through playback experiments, you can start really confirming whether or not your hypotheses about what these different signals mean are indeed correct. That's how we test for individual names.
Good. Very nice. Another question I wanted to ask you was about the creative process. Because people who do playback boxing in Bollywood, do you go there, somebody has done the lyrics, somebody has done the music, you just go memorize your part. But ghazal singing and producing an album, what you do, figuring out-- share with us something about that whole creative process.
You're not allowed to just copy and paste. You can't just playback what I gave you. You've got to come up with something new, but it has to kind of fit that pattern in a really rough way.
And with this, I would like to invite our guest today, the celebrated singer, playback singer, from "Bheege Honth Tere" who won the Filmfare award for best playback singer, male, Mr. Kunal Ganjawala, here at Google. This is fine. Good morning, and happy Independence Day for all the Indians.
Is it a medium that is going to be moving to take over? Is it a playback device? I mean, you have like high fidelity in the Pono device, or FLAC audio files.
But actually, it could be liberating if you remember to keep it fresh. and then watching playback .
I mean I thought it was so gripping and powerful and a worthy follow-up of the mini-series. And after the playback the producers invited me to come look at the next episode. And I thought, “Okay. We’re doing two episodes of Battlestar.” So that feeling of waiting for, I can get fired tomorrow, though,
ordinary" things -- more novel things -- big. And shrinks down the stuff that's likely boring and you've done it a zillion times. And in there is, If you mouse over it, you see that stop motion/playback of your life. So automatic summarization, telling the story of your day just based on shooting thousands of photos as you go. In the end, once we have all this stuff, what do we pass on to the next generation?
No, I normally don't say that to everybody. He's a soul of Indian playback singing, as most of you know, right? A lot of ghazals he's composed, and sung, and produced more than 30 albums of ghazals, which is an incredible feat.
Remember, the way the brain works is in fact to sort out what's valuable and keeping it. They want this sort of non-contact playback .
singers of all time, sort of as a mentor. hear your question and also for later playback .
So I guess it's at the end of the day, I think it's destiny. And after "Naam," you did many other playbacks . Oh, yes. I did.
And so they reasoned that it could be that the elephants were avoiding the bees. So the first thing they did was do playback experiments of angry bees-- the buzzing of angry bees. And it turned out, yes, the elephants ran away.
Manharji was learning Urdu from a very, very renowned Urdu teacher. Manharji was learning only because he was pursuing playback singing, and he wanted to really make his diction very refined, and he wanted to make sure that whatever he sang was perfect.
So we'd cut a take, and they'd all go out in the hallway on their computers, checking their emails and checking their text and everything while I'm in listening to the playback . Now, back in the '70s, we'd all rush into the control room, because we were all involved.
It's all over the place. recordings on a very Lo-Fi or modest playback system.
What is happening? So you've trained some model that can then find the patterns in what the bees are communicating? So to step back a moment, playback experiments have long existed in this field. So Lucy King in East Africa did some excellent work where she recorded the sounds of elephants exposed
So the next idea was to see whether this could be useful in resolving some of the conflict between farmers and elephants. And the problem with that, with using playback of the songs of angry bees, is that the elephants will very quickly realize that there weren't any real bees-- that, actually, it was a loudspeaker.
With a field. It's an actual field that I fall into. I jump up and then I jog over to where there's playback and I watch what I just did. And I say, "It's good," or "It's not good." And then, usually it's not good.
Then when they're getting called to from the director, they can modulate the playback speed super smoothly with this lever, and even slow it down to zero all the way at the bottom if you need to.
And then it also shows me other ongoing stuff, like phone calls or music playback , and then I control them from that back screen.
You can do a playback experiment on these poor bull elephants to see if they respond to these sounds. They do. So this is how, with playback experiments, Lucy King determined that elephants have a specific signal for honeybee, vocal signal, and for the threatening human hunter and the non-threatening humans, so they're able to distinguish between different groups of humans.
Everything had to be synced up electronically, both during recording and playback .
I wanted to see if you had any stories from that or thoughts on the broader collaboration between playback singers and more Western styles of music?
My rhymes are laid back, so lay back while I drop the playback .
That wheel on the right lets them scrub through the footage in either direction, and the lever on the left lets them control the playback
You can train AI, your algorithm, to recognize patterns in these data sets of nonhuman sounds. And by painstakingly doing field research, and linking those sounds to nonhuman behaviors, and testing those through playback experiments, you can begin to decode the meanings of the acoustic communication of other species.
It's unbelievable. They will walk right off stage with our coaching team and in real time on the playback watch their performance and self-evaluate.
We're not doing-- like, in the trailer and stuff, that's playback .
And then, obviously, came the issue of language, because ghazal, as you know, basically-- the medium, the language is Urdu. And it was, again, a coincidence that my eldest brother, Manhar Udhas, was a very famous playback singer. Manharji was learning Urdu from a very, very renowned Urdu teacher.
and I was a newcomer, basically. However, I tried and, obviously, I didn't succeed as a playback singer in cinema. So obviously, my heart was always with ghazals, and cinema, though it was an attraction, I wouldn't lie,
I'd like you guys to have a big round of applause for this noble mission. And with this, I would like to invite our guest today, the celebrated singer, playback singer, from "Bheege Honth Tere" who won the Filmfare award for best playback singer, male, Mr. Kunal Ganjawala, here at Google.
They were the ones who brought in the system and set it all up. And in our conversations, they've mentioned things like, yes, we have these big playback systems that can do the 9.1 set up, or even larger set ups, but also encoders that work in stereo left and right for that.