Salil Bhayani: The Weight Of The Score
· Free Press Journal
A Portrait of a Mumbai-born Musical Visionary Who Turned Everyday Digital Media Into High Art.
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For more than a century and a half, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has served as a sanctuary for the tangible. Its sprawling galleries are devoted to the physical weight of human history—Hellenistic marble, intricately woven tapestries, and Renaissance ceramics. So, in the autumn of 2018, when the museum dedicated a major exhibition to video games, it sent a shockwave through the fine-art establishment. For the first time, an institution of this magnitude applied the same curatorial reverence to digital code that it traditionally reserved for antiquities. It introduced Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt not as a nostalgic arcade retrospective staged in a basement gallery, but as a major exhibit examining the medium alongside its permanent collections.
The curators filled the space with blockbuster franchises like The Last of Us and Bloodborne. But to push the boundaries of the medium, the Victoria and Albert Museum also commissioned three independent studios to create totally new, experimental works. One of those commissions went to Studio Oleomingus, an award-winning Indian arts studio operating far from the tech hubs of the West, out of Chala, a small town in the state of Gujarat. Founded by Dhruv Jani and Sushant Chakraborty, the studio is famous around the world for their interactive fictions that serve as absurdist, post-colonial critiques of Indian history.
Their commissioned piece, In the Pause Between the Ringing, was a staggering visual puzzle. Yet, to engage with the installation was to be struck primarily by the atmosphere of the room. The visual design invited curiosity, but the audio commanded a profound, almost uncomfortable stillness. Built on sustained, mournful drones and fragile acoustic dissonance, the soundscape discarded the synthesized loops commonly associated with digital play. It felt like a breathing historical archive.
The composer who built that auditory space, Salil Bhayani, is Studio Oleomingus’s essential musical voice. For the studio’s founder, Dhruv Jani, Bhayani’s compositions always solve narrative problems that visual design alone cannot. “I have been struggling for a month to try and squeeze both a kind of playful irreverence and a melancholy mood into a single scene,” Jani recalls of their collaborative process. After trying to capture the dual tone architecturally and making the scene "defiantly colorful," Jani found that the music effortlessly carried the psychological weight: “Salil managed to conjoin the two disparate ideas so perfectly, as if delight and yearning or rumination and joy and grief and hope have always belonged together. It was perfect and I was, as ever, astounded by his staggering insight and felicity!”
Bhayani brings this same psychological depth to the rest of the studio’s portfolio, including the hyper-literary A Museum of Dubious Splendors and the critically acclaimed Under a Porcelain Sun, anchoring these surreal, interactive spaces with immense symphonic scale.
Born in Mumbai and currently working in Los Angeles, the thirty-seven-year-old Berklee College of Music honors graduate possesses the profound classical foundation required for traditional cinema. He has earned the Best Original Score award at the Hollywood Blood Horror Festival for his work on the thriller Landfill, and provided music for Chase, which took Best Action Film at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival. Yet, instead of confining his orchestrations to the movie theater, Bhayani directs his symphonic rigor toward the screens we use every day.
Historically, formats like educational web animations, interactive video games, and short-form documentaries were treated by the entertainment industry as secondary mediums, often accompanied by purely functional soundtracks. Today, they are exhibited in elite galleries, screened at major international festivals, and consumed by billions. Bhayani’s music has been a driving force in this elevation. By applying the symphonic complexity and psychological nuance of a concert hall to the digital screen, his scores have fundamentally altered how these formats are experienced. The immense global demand for his collaborations confirms a new industry reality: profound storytelling is no longer defined by the size of the screen, but by the auditory depth of the narrative.
Operating with a fine-art sensibility translates beautifully to the mass commercial market, allowing Bhayani to command both spaces with equal fluency. The underlying compositional approach that anchors a London museum exhibit is the identical foundation he applies to Krafton’s Battlegrounds Mobile India, one of the most widely played mobile games on the planet, and Amazon MGM’s Webby-winning Claynosaurz franchise. He also continuously honors his domestic musical roots, recently composing the major Hindi commercial single “Chand.” Sung by Rego B—the grandson of the legendary composer Bappi Lahiri—the track accumulated millions of views within days.
The formats through which we learn, play, and remember have fundamentally shifted. A web animation now carries the emotional resonance of a historical documentary; an interactive digital puzzle functions as a museum-grade critique. Yet, the screen only provides the visual framework. It is the audio that breathes a soul into the code, forcing us to feel the weight of the history we are watching. By treating these everyday mediums as canvases for profound auditory exploration, Salil Bhayani ensures that our digital era will not be remembered with a synthesized loop, but with a symphony.