Tag: music

Feeling Fieldwork: Affectivity, Co-creativity, and Multimodality in Ethnographic Music Production

Jamie Glisson · TUNDRA Listen to ‘TUNDRA’ Ethnographic work is an affective experience. While anthropological research methods have often focused on cataloging ethnographic moments through field notes and interviews, most ethnographers will agree that the written word can’t quite capture what it feels like to be in the field. As a musician, filmmaker, and producer in my work alongside anthropology, I decided to explore how skills associated with my songwriting and sound engineering might further explicate the effervescent quality of what fieldwork feels like on an embodied register. Much like an ethnography, an album comes together through a process of refinement, of connecting what may feel like disparate ideas into a narrative whole. The analytical aspect of ethnographic work also bridges the hemispheres of the brain in a similar way that recording music does. The process of translating emotions, interactions, and expression through sound relies on a basic understanding of (read more...)

Platypod, Episode Six: An Anthropology of Algorithmic Recommendation Systems

Download the transcript of this interview. On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation, which was published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. In that meeting, we recorded an episode for the Playpod podcast, which is available at the link above. (read more...)

Uncovering Ethnography in Creative Practice Research with Machines

This blog post comes out of a discussion with Ritwik Banerji about the ‘hidden’ role of ethnography in the work involved in creating new experimental systems for music improvisation. Ritwik put it to me that “it seems that a lot of work … involves a kind of ‘implied ethnography’ – that is, it’s clear that the author/designer has lots of personal experience with the domain they’re designing for, and yet the technical documentation of such systems makes scant mention of it.” This was a welcome invitation to reflect on my past practice since I had once been a student of social anthropology and am now, as an associate professor 25 years on, re-engaging with ethnography as a methodology. Have I been implicitly using ethnography all along, and could/should this component have been more explicit in the presentation of my work in an academic context? I will begin with some scene setting. (read more...)

Abu Dhabi Soundmarks: Building Community in the Midst of the Pandemic, One Voice at a Time

Editor’s note: This post is the fifth in our five-part series “COVID-19: Views from the Field.” Click here to read an introduction written by series organizer Rebekah Ciribassi. Editor’s note: Click the links throughout the article to experience the soundscape of Abu Dhabi under COVID-19 In March 2020, I arrived in Abu Dhabi from the island of Sardinia, Italy, to shelter in place with family members, here. As I recently documented elsewhere, after the lockdown was imposed in Italy, the soundscape of that place, and especially the culture of talking, physical contact and making face-to-face music, changed significantly. (read more...)

Inhabiting Public Space: Guerrilla Music on YouTube

*Many of the names and places mentioned below have been changed.* While the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) have sometimes been categorized as a ‘peasantist’ (campesinista) guerrilla group (Pécaut 2013), in seeking to capture the attention and support of urban and border zones, this group—first as a guerrilla organization and currently as a political party—has employed a variety of mechanisms and media platforms, among which the appropriation of online spaces is especially noteworthy. Among the digital artifacts the FARC have produced online, YouTube music videos are of particular interest. By studying these videos, and how they circulate, we can not only gain a better understanding of the currently understudied representational tactics of the FARC, but also problematize how we understand the ‘presence’ of this armed group in times and spaces of war. It can be argued that these online spaces—combining digital audiovisual content with representational discourses that contradict the predominantly negative and dehumanized image of the FARC—have allowed this insurgent group to establish an alternative presence in the public sphere, and engage with a broad variety of audiences. In this post, through the particular experiences of a former member of the FARC who has uploaded music videos to YouTube, I will explore how the presence of the FARC is materialized in different spaces. (read more...)

Are You Singing of Science?

In January, researchers from National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan and Alpen-Adria-Universität in Austria published a study in the journal Public Understanding of Science exploring the use of science words as lyrical elements in popular Taiwanese mainstream music. The intent of the study was to understand better how non-scientists were using science terminology in creating pop music songs, and perhaps learn something about bridging social contexts by exploring aspects of the most fundamental element of science communication: words. The study examined the content and quantity of scientific terms and expressions distributed throughout mainstream music lyrics as a potential reflection of the presence of science into Taiwanese popular culture and life. Starting with a list of 4526 songs created between 1990 and 2012 generated from the Golden Melody Awards, Asia’s mainstream music awards, the authors then reduced the sample based on the “relation of lyrics to science/technology” criterion. A total of 377 songs were ultimately selected for analysis by a panel of three researchers from the fields of science communication, communication, and popular culture. They examined the lyrics looking for scientific and technological terms, scientific metaphors, and/or expressions of scientific implications, and then categorized them as scientific activity or products, scientific research subjects, or cultural idioms. In those 377 songs, the researchers found 858 science words or phrases. (read more...)