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This chapter examines the technologies and the changing “limits of the possible” under which film musicians, recording engineers, music directors and film producers in Mumbai, India operated. It suggests that despite the limitations of technology there were instances when Mumbai musicians and engineers exceeded the technological limitations of their environment. In this way, technology has been the ground on which the professional and social structures of daily life were constructed and the primary determinant in a determinist history of this music culture.

This chapter focuses on aerial surveillance and targeting, and how they provide both revelation and ignorance. This view is a reminder that there is more in the subject matter that cannot be seen, either due to technological limitations or physical limitations apparently insurmountable by technology. The triumph of the surface is unavoidable in the visual domain, and aerial surveillance and aesthetics are almost completely dominated by that which constitutes the visible. The visible, however, like the tactile, can only engage surfaces. What predominate are the most emergent and immediate dimensions of the object—those which are graspable by hand and eye. Yet the surface also always presumes a depth underpinning it: the aerial view always implies and depends on the subterranean invisible, and depth is accessible only by sound and sound waves.

In the late 1950s, several European and American composers engaged in the aleatory debates, which ask how chance elements can be incorporated into music. The controversy was most famously visible at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1958, where Cage antagonized Boulez, Stockhausen, and other European composers. This chapter reassesses the who, where, and how of the debates. A series of analyses demonstrate that European composers hardly rejected chance interventions in their electronic and acoustic works. Whereas Cage, Tudor, Brown, and other American experimentalists hewed toward performer-centered indeterminacy, European avant-gardists such as Pousseur, Ligeti, Boulez, and Stockhausen experimented with open and mobile forms and statistical interpolations. In fact, composers debated together how to incorporate chance from a range of inspirations, including literature, linguistic theory, and phonetics. Aleatory experimentation on both sides of the Atlantic was highly conditioned by questions of human and machinic agency, as composers grappled with prodigious performers like Tudor, as well as with the technological limits of the studio machines and the materiality of magnetic tape. Electronic studios in both the United States and Europe were rich sites in which composers negotiated the terms of the aleatory debates.