Unheard India

Music Bytes

India’s richest stories are often the quietest. In a world driven by viral trends and mainstream soundscapes, Unheard India calls on young composers to tune into the voices, rhythms, and languages that rarely take center stage. Music-Bytes 2025 invites participants to craft original compositions that use digital music as a bridge, blending tribal chants, folk tales, and indigenous rhythms with experimental or chill-electronic styles. The goal: to spotlight communities, cultures, and traditions that exist on the fringes of popular media but form the soul of our nation. This year’s challenge goes beyond melody, it’s a call to listen, document, and amplify. Use your song to inform as much as it inspires.

Genre Focus:

1. Experimental or chill-electronic music 2. Fusion with tribal, folk, and regional elements (e.g., Gond, Siddi, Bhil, Khasi) 3. Integrate vocal samples, chants, or ambient soundscapes to enrich the narrative. 4. Let your track become a vessel for the unheard—where technology meets tradition, and silence becomes song.

Rules and Regulations

1. The length of the song should not exceed 4 minutes. 2. The composition should have a mix of instruments and vocals, and the genre may be chosen by the teams themselves. The theme for the song is “Unheard India”. 3.The composition must be completely original, with each team writing their own lyrics and composing their own music. However, any FREE SAMPLES are permitted for use, provided their link is given. Any plagiarism will lead to disqualification. 4. Teams must use a DAW software such as Garage Band, Logic and Ableton. 5. Only FREE PLUGINS are allowed for use (or those inbuilt in the software), given their links are provided. 6. Each team will be required to email the composition’s software project to Vasant Valley, as to ensure adherence to guidelines. 7. The project will be assessed on the following metrics:
a. Creative use of the software
b. Composition, melody, lyricism and intonation 8. The completed track will need to be inserted into a lyrics video in MP4 format(white lyrics on a plain black background). The video should be in MP4 format, the audio film should be in MP3 format (maximum length: 4 minutes), as well as the project file will need to be uploaded by Sunday, 27th July 2025, 11:59PM IST. The link to upload the files will be shared after registration. 9. There will be a panel of three judges for the final round. Vasant Valley School reserves the right to appoint the judges and the decision of the judges will be final.