Check Out Shireen Ghosh’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shireen Ghosh.

Hi Shireen, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m originally from a city called Kolkata, in India. Growing up, I learned to play piano but I wasn’t a very good student – I was always distracted by the sheer amount of other things there are to learn about music! As a teenager, I taught myself several other instruments, as well as how to record music using borrowed equipment. As much as I enjoyed music, I was much too undisciplined and chaotic to be able to intentionally choose it as a career path, so instead I did my undergrad in English, a “safer” subject to pursue. But my enthusiasm for weird sounds never left me, and throughout my college life, I was constantly connecting with filmmaking students and working on their projects, playing live shows, assisting sound engineers, teaching music to preschoolers, recording foley, editing podcasts, producing songs – in hindsight, I was always in a constant state of learning and developing my music and audio skills, even though I didn’t realize it.

When I finished my undergrad, I knew my interest really did not lie in English, so I kept working in audio, doing any and all jobs that I could possibly find. Doing this, I understood that my strength was really in learning practical skills on the job rather than doing it traditionally in an academic environment – this was how I learned to harness the constant chaos in my brain rather than fighting it. Another way was by watching a ridiculous amount of educational videos on YouTube – I very much identify as a child of the internet when it comes to my education in music. I learned almost everything I know about harmony, orchestration, mixing, teaching philosophy, playing techniques, and music theory / analysis from the internet.

After several years of working on films, TV, and ads between Kolkata and Mumbai, I made an impulse decision in the pandemic to apply to Columbia College Chicago. I was definitely nervous to go back to an academic environment, but I had an incredible experience in the program, and I learned so many new skills and ways of thinking. After I graduated, I moved to Los Angeles, and have been working here ever since, and I’m so grateful for the chance to keep leveling up, and this is one of the best places to do it in!

For most of my life I didn’t really know what I wanted (and honestly that’s still pretty true). The world is so full of cool new things to learn, and I want to do more things than are humanly possible! But looking back, I can clearly see that in spite of all the times I’ve strayed from the path of working with sound (and there are many!), I’ve always come back to it somehow. I’ve never had the singular certainty to say “I definitely want to be a musician!” – but I somehow keep doing it anyway. At this point, it’s so deeply ingrained that I probably couldn’t stop, even if I wanted to.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think anyone’s life is ever a smooth road. For me, trying to establish a viable career as a musician in my home city was really hard. Starting out without prior connections to the industry is obviously a challenge, especially in a place that’s fairly misogynistic and where it’s the done thing to take advantage of young people who don’t know how the industry works. When I was trying to establish myself in those kinds of situations, it also didn’t help that, as I said before, I didn’t know how to have a clear idea of what I wanted. I feel like a lot of people in my position find it easy to say, “I watched X movie as a child, and it changed my life, Y is my favourite composer”, but I’ve personally always found that kind of thing very hard to talk about, so I’m often not great at starting conversations and conveying the message that I do in fact know what I’m doing, and I do in fact want to be here. It meant I was often not taken seriously, treated condescendingly, and taken advantage of by my seniors in my field.

An example that comes to mind is I worked for several years for a content farm that churned out low-quality children’s media. My videos on their YouTube channel were super successful, some of them have over 100 million views, but they were extremely shady with their payments, and they paid me next to nothing. and as someone with no education in business of any kind, I had no idea what I was supposed to do – but I had to keep doing it anyway because in my mind earning something was better than earning nothing.

I’ve been in several positions like this before, where I was being grossly underpaid and had no idea what the norm was. All my peers were in similar positions, so while we were vaguely aware that we were being exploited, we didn’t grasp the scale of it. When you work in a field like music, which is not the most socially acceptable thing to do, there’s this pressure to immediately be successful and prove to everyone that you aren’t wasting your life, and so you end up in situations where even though you know something is wrong, you don’t have the resources to push back – especially because if you get too pricey and demanding, there are a thousand other people who’ll happily do the same work for much less, so it becomes a race to the bottom. Getting out of that cycle is unbelievably difficult.

So for me, between lacking the confidence in knowing what I wanted, and lacking a non-exploitative work situation to support me while I figured it out, I spent several years in a very horrible feedback loop of despair and failure. While being a foreigner in the US has been very challenging in its own way, I feel like nothing compares to the previous situation, and I’m now motivated to get as far away from that headspace as possible.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a composer, producer, and sound designer for media! My favourite kinds of projects to work on are animation and video games, and I think I like both of those mediums for the same reason – both of them are inherently stylized and usually a little over the top, not aiming for any kind of practical realism. I love being able to experiment with sounds that pair with a unique visual aesthetic. I also really enjoy mixing songs and being able to help other people form the shapes of their creative vision with songs. Mixing is often seen as something very technical, but I personally find a lot of creative inspiration in it.

A recent project I’m very proud of is a short film called Priyo Ami, an experimental animation by Suchana, a close friend of mine from Kolkata who I’ve worked with for years. Because of the experimental style of this film, it needed to have a sound design that functioned like music – without actually being music. This was an interesting challenge because even though it seems like music and sound design are related, they actually usually aren’t and perform different roles in a film. It premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2022, and has since been to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, and was shortlisted for a BAFTA Yugo Award in 2023. I loved working on a project like this that defies the conventions of what you typically expect in animation, both in terms of visuals, and subject matter.

In LA, I currently work as an assistant to the composer Austin Wintory, who’s been an incredible mentor so far, and the kinds of projects he works on are also things I’m really interested in. Just getting to be around what he does on a regular basis is so inspiring and I hope I can continue to learn from his distinctive approach to music and to life. I’m also working on several freelance projects, a couple of short films, and a video game! I’m really excited to see how they turn out.

I’m an analytical problem-solver by nature, and scoring media projects really scratches that itch in my brain. I love the process of figuring out how to use the technical side of art to serve the emotional side which serves the storytelling. I’m a tech enthusiast, and I really enjoy recording all the strange sounds I come across in my daily life and exploring different ways of combining those organic recordings with various signal processing techniques to achieve unique and memorable textures. Especially when it comes to animation, I absolutely love analyzing the physicality of movements and translating that to sound. It should feel like the picture and sound were never separate entities.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
The buzzword of 2023 is AI, and that’s definitely something to look out for. It has the potential to change the way we think about several aspects of what we do – from copyright law to daily organizational workflow, to software tools, to research. It can be pretty polarizing, and I like to stay realistic when it comes to technology, so really the only thing to say about it is we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

I think we as a society also haven’t fully processed the effect that the pandemic has had on the world. A good side effect has been the fact that remote meetings and sessions and collaborations are much easier to coordinate than they used to be. But I think everyone has been so eager to “get back to normal”, and there is so much complexity involved with the messaging around public health that I feel like there are probably some more long-term effects of the collective trauma we went through that will show themselves over the next few years.

The strikes in Hollywood this year have also been pretty momentous. Hopefully, it sets a better precedent for the entire industry and allows existing business structures to adapt to a changing world in a way that’s fair to artists, rather than be dragged kicking and screaming into it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shireenghosh.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shywren905/
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/metronome-honeycomb

Image Credits
John Betten, Robin Jamkatel