MUMBAI: Suresh Wadkar’s Ajivasan Music Academy and Shemaroo Institute of Film & Technology (SIFT) have teamed up to offer Sound Engineering and Sound Editing at the former’s hub in Santacruz, Mumbai. In an exclusive interview with Radioandmusic, SIFT Studio Deputy VP Aneri Salva shares details of the collaboration, course details, Suresh Wadkar’s contribution and more.

Commenting on the association, SIFT Studio Deputy VP Aneri Salva said, “As you are aware, Suresh Wadkar’s Music at Ajivasan has instruments, singing training etc., but they don’t have courses like Sound Editing, Sound Engineering, which is an extension for anybody who wants to build a full-fledged career into sound. It basically helps in terms of a lot of technical knowledge and capacity. We don’t teach singing, vocals etc., but expertise in these post production courses and sound being one of our courses that we offer, which makes the perfect fit for both of us because they already have an established institute at Santacruz, which caters to a lot of young students as well as for people, who seek music from the professional point-of-view. Since, we are already teaching at our institute at Andheri East, it therefore, makes a lot of sense for us to have an extension with one more unit, which has specific sound-related courses.”

“We have a lot of roadmaps, where we will be evaluating certain associations like this. Being quality driven, our focus is to train, groom as well as polish talented individuals for the industry. We, therefore, want to do it very cautiously even when it comes to selecting our partners as we just don’t want to keep adding units and play with the volume. We have a very fewer goals of making sure that we don’t compromise on the quality of our education,” Salva further added.

When asked about Suresh Wadkar’s involvement in the sessions, she told, “This model will have some polishing and grooming sessions pertaining to music, which will be taken care of by Suresh Wadkar’s academy as well. We have designed this specific course, where both the parties will involve and ensure that expertise at both the end is taken care of grooming the students.”

Further commenting on the financial investment, Salva told, “Yes, there is a financial investment. The entire infrastructure, place etc., is being taken care of by them while we are the knowledge partners and add a complete commercial value to it, where both the parties are sharing resources.”

On being quizzed about how students would benefit from this partnership, Aneri Salva further said, “Currently, we have one unit at Andheri and this partnership benefits us because there a lot of students already coming to Ajivasan for other courses as well as local students, who are coming for vocal courses. If they are interested to do mixing courses, then it’s kind of the same destination, where they will get an additional course requirement under one roof. They don’t have to travel because currently we don’t have any other unit, but this one, we have come up with.”

Sound engineering and sound editing is a very rare course and very few people actually take interest in them. On being asked if there are any plans to promote the curriculum, Aneri said, “We started consciously with Sound Editing only right now. Future collaborations in terms of addition of courses will happen in phase two depending on the demand of that unit in terms of what courses existing students that are coming are inclined to.”