Six Tracks, Three Weeks: Correcting a Museum Audio Guide
A city museum is producing a six-track audio guide for its new music gallery. Each track runs exactly 90 seconds, so the whole script is about 540 words. The draft, written by a curatorial assistant, contains: (1) 'Amir Khusrau invented the sitar and the tabla.' (2) 'Qawwali was the Mughal court's favourite entertainment.' (3) 'Dhrupad came to India from Persia.' (4) 'Tansen's ragas could light lamps and bring rain.' (5) 'Khayal replaced dhrupad because it was easier to sing.' A senior historian calls the draft 'unfootnotable'; the curator wants it 'punchy for school groups'; the audio contractor has already recorded track 1 and charges Rs 18,000 to re-record a track; the gallery opens in three weeks. The museum owns a painted portrait of Tansen and a pakhawaj that it wants displayed, and it wants the guide to end on a line that is both accurate and memorable.
1. Classify claims 1 to 5 as keep, reword or cut, and supply the replacement wording for anything you keep.
Read the worked answer
- 1 - cut, or reword with attribution. Khusrau (1253-1325) is traditionally credited with the sitar and the tabla, but the instruments in their familiar form belong to much later centuries, and a museum cannot turn tradition into invention. Defensible line: 'Legend gives Amir Khusrau a hand in both instruments; the instruments we display took their present shape centuries later.'
- 2 - reword. Qawwali grew in Chishti Sufi assemblies of remembrance, not as court entertainment; courts patronised it later. That distinction is the whole point of the genre and costs nothing to state.
- 3 - cut. Dhrupad developed from the prabandha and the temple-court milieu; Persian influence shows in court language, patronage and instruments, not in the origin of the form. As written it is simply false.
- 4 - cut, or reframe as legend. The miracle stories are hagiography, valuable as evidence of how Tansen was remembered, worthless as acoustics. If kept, label it: 'Later stories claimed...'
- 5 - reword. Khayal rose gradually through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as patronage and court taste shifted; 'easier' insults the form and misstates the history.
Standard: every sentence must be either documented or explicitly marked as tradition or legend.
2. Track 1 is already recorded and re-recording costs Rs 18,000 from a small budget. What do you do, and why?
Read the worked answer
Re-record, but ask first for a punch-in edit of the single sentence rather than a full track. The claim is not a stylistic quibble: it is the kind of error a school group will carry home and a teacher will have to undo. Three weeks is enough to schedule a twenty-minute session if the contractor is asked for one sentence, and a sentence-level edit is normally a fraction of the full-track fee.
The fallback matters too. If the contractor cannot edit in time, do not insert a spoken 'correction' after the error, because a listener hears the error and remembers the correction as an afterthought. Replace the whole track with a shorter, safe text read by a staff member, or drop the track to five and renumber.
The budget argument is weaker than it looks: Rs 18,000 buys accuracy in a permanent installation that will play for years, and the museum's authority is the product being sold. Punch-in first, re-record second, silent erratum never.
3. Write a 40 to 60 word closing line for the final track that tells the Persian-influence story accurately and is still memorable.
Read the worked answer
'Persia did not give India its ragas. It gave its courts a second language, its ensembles new instruments, and its poets new metres, and Indian musicians absorbed all three without surrendering a single shruti. What you have heard tonight is a conversation, not a conquest.'