Category Archives: research

community arts research

Grantmakers in the Arts Podcast

Grantmakers in the Arts interviewed me for their podcast series. On this podcast, I talked about doing research, data strategy, architecting knowledge systems, the power of community-driven data collection, building learning communities among arts researchers and administrators, the importance of raising shared inquiries among arts funders, blah blah blah. And my transition from academic ethnomusicology and digital humanities to public-and-cultural-sector work.

Thanks to Grantmakers in the Arts for inviting me!

building design research

My audio sabbatical (and the economic reality of my creative work)

A little while ago, I was awarded with a flash grant from Shuttleworth Foundation, thanks to Shuttleworth fellow Sean Bonner for his nomination. If you’re unfamiliar with Shuttleworth, it’s a neat foundation with a mission to create “an open knowledge society with limitless possibilities” through funding projects that embody the ethos of openness.

As a believer, thinker, and doer of open knowledge, Shuttleworth’s progressive message hits me close to home. This flash grant affirms my sharing of what I do while I am doing it, a work style that I’ve come to develop over the years. This openness challenges the competitive norms of this society, a world organized by individualism, meritocracy, and institutional forms of privatization and policy protectionism. In academia and the art/music world, I have learned and unlearned many lessons regarding the social consequences of knowledge production and dissemination.

To me, knowledge production has to be checked with social reality of what it does to our community. How do we talk about what we know? Who do we learn from? Who has access to this knowledge? Who is entitled to this knowledge? With whom should we share our learnings? Who benefits from this knowledge? Who is harmed by this knowledge? Which institutional and economic contexts support (or regulate) the production of knowledge? (I’ve talked about some of these concerns in the context of open access publishing and ethnomusicology previously.)

These are complex questions (and many folks including Deb Verhoeven, Kimberly Christen, and Michelle Kisliuk have spent lots of time thinking about this). The idea of openness itself is further complicated by the fact that there are multiple publics in the society, some weak, some strong. These questions form an ethical compass throughout all of my professional and creative endeavors. Because there are political and economical concerns tied to all knowledge production and dissemination, we should consider each context thoughtfully.

Last month, I completed a two-year fellowship. The ACLS Public Fellowship was a tremendous opportunity in which I learned my ways as a public-sector researcher and digital strategist during my time at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The Shuttleworth grant came at a good time to help support my post-fellowship work in a few community sound projects that I’ve put on the back burner. Specifically the grant is supporting my time and labor while I make progress to deepen my sound-based research and creative engagement to re-make the public sphere in Los Angeles, a city that I came to adore and care for.

I’m making progress in LA Listens, a collaborative project that explores sounds of urban vibrancy in Los Angeles. In the last year, we developed a community-based methodology to engage with the social, ecological and experiential dimensions of the soundscape of city streets. Our methodology has contributed to the creative re-imagining of the acoustic public of particular locales and broader civic discussions about the role of sound in neighborhood changes and urban planning policy. Through a collaboration with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), We have shared research narratives including sound compositions based on our data have spurred a series of sound walks, location recordings, and sound-based provocations among urban planners and organizers in cities worldwide (summarized in this CityLab article by the Atlantic). I’m using my time to explore possible community partnerships and share our project reflection as blog posts and possibly a journal article. I’m also excited about funding a research internship for the project. Rounak Maiti, a former student from Occidental College, has joined the team to assist with field recording analysis and re-composition.

Soundwalk in Boyle Heights neighborhood, Los Angeles
Soundwalk in Boyle Heights neighborhood, Los Angeles

I have remobilized the Movable Parts team (a socially concerned maker collective) to produce a creative intervention regarding the collective mobility experience in LA. With a microgrant from Metro, we built a prototype for Movable Karaoke, a participatory multilingual system on a pedicab. During California Rideshare Week, we staged a series of karaoke events through the streets and at transit hubs such as metro stations, bus stops, sidewalk, parklets and plazas (documented on instagram). Residents and passersby in Koreatown, East Hollywood, Thai Town, Hollywood, Chinatown, and Pershing Square came to us, with adults sharing personally meaningful songs, children trotting along on the sidewalk and in the schoolyard. In the coming weeks, I plan to share my thoughts on rickshaw design along with some stories and experiences of collective mobility.

Movable Karaoke, Chinatown
Movable Karaoke, Chinatown

Working with fellow sound ethnomusicologist Yun Emily Wang, I’m co-designing a sound installation that will be included as a part of an exhibition at the upcoming Society of Ethnomuisoclogy meeting in Austin, Texas. This collaborative project will explore the meaning of  “雜 (dza) through materializing the mixed, blended, miscellaneous, and insignificant odds and ends of sounds in Taiwan.” This coming Wednesday, I will be recording a live video set with my ghost pop band Bitter Party for the Ear Meal Webcast series. This performance will feature field recordings collected from recent trips to Taiwan, adding a new context to the band’s ethnographically driven song arrangement.

Concept drawings for Dza, a sound installtion for SEM
Concept drawings for Dza, a sound installation for SEM

Labor and time are the building blocks in our creative economy. I give a shout out to Shuttleworth for playing a critical role in supporting me through this highly creative period, and for sustaining our broader creative ecology. Honored and thankful, I will continually share what I do in these exciting projects in the near future.

 

 

 

 

 

design research

Re:Humanities Keynote at Swarthmore

Last week, I gave a keynote talk about enacting humanist possibilities at Re:Humanities, a undergraduate conference organized by Tri-Co DH (Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford College). In this paper, I raise the question: how do we as humanists translate humanist critiques into actionable insights? I cite Rita Felski’s list of the problems of cultural critiques — noting that critique is, by design, negative, slow, past-oriented, and produced for a small audience who produce critiques. Seeing the inactionability of cultural critiques, I advocate for a two-part process, using the musical analogy of a call and response, to transform critiques into practice.

Pivot Civic Innovation Diagram

I employ the principles of “contact -> pivot -> prototype” to suggest a new framework. I illustrate this model by discussing our design process used in the Paperphone project. I also contend for the practice of humanities-inspired speculative design (while citing Dunn and Raby’s book Speculative Everything). My talk ends with close look at my current work at an ACLS Public Fellow with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, researching and designing for a more human(ist) government.

My slides are below. If you would like to see my notes, click on the little gear icon to “open speaker notes.”

Additionally, I’m working on a short essay (for an edited volume) that will refine and develop some of these ideas. The goal is to come up with a model for civic digital humanities and contribute to the larger conversation about the continuum between digital and public humanities. So any feedback is welcome!

research teaching

Visiting RMIT

I did a mini-residency at RMIT University in Melbourne a few weeks ago. The generous folks of the Digital Ethnography Research Center invited me to give a talk + workshop on my research related to digital ethnography. I wrote up this description of my talk + workshop entitled “Digital Ethnography Design Workshop”:

How do ethnographers engage with the changing form of culture as it becomes increasingly mediated by digital technology? This workshop explores emerging digital methods for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and narrativizing ethnographic materials. In the first hour, I will introduce the utility of digital tools and computational approaches – including webscraping, mapping, and visualization – for ethnographic inquiries. Drawing empirical examples from my research on Asian American musicians’ digital diaspora, the street music-culture in Taiwan, and my research/design work with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, I will discuss the affordances (and limitations) of the digital extensions of participant-observation. The second hour of the workshop will be a speculative research design lab in which we collectively explore touch points with the digital in the participants’ own research processes and come up with potential research designs.

I introduced some of my new research ideas related to touchpoint, a pivotal point that allows the researcher to theorize and design research methods to interrogate the digital-analog interfacing in contemporary social life. The touchpoint concept is built on Fabian Girardin’s work on friction. Presentation documentation: slides; annotated slides.

The workshop portion of the event provided an interactive co-exploration of digital-analog touchpoints in the participants’ own research projects. The flow of the workshop is guided by questions on this handout.

touchpoint schematics 3b

Additionally, I gave a talk titled “Performing research / researching performance? A multimodal approach to knowledge and creative production” to a group of music industry students. In this talk, I examined the creative intersection between ethnographic research, performance, and arts organizing.

event research

A couple of things for Open Access at SEM

Instead of a physical participation at the Open Access roundtable at the annual meeting of Society of Ethnomusicology (SEM) in Pittsburgh today, I’ve offered my thoughts in the form of an audio recording and a post for Ethnomusicology Review (reblogged by JustPublics@365 out of CUNY). In this post, I traced the lifecycle of two of publishing projects from fieldwork to journal articles and argued for a productive tension between blogging and academic writing.

To sum up the post, I end with the following:

Publishing, to me, in its simplistic sense, is to make something public. If our public precludes those who have been our research associates, or individuals without institutional affiliations or access to scholarly journals, then we should rethink how we communicate our scholarship. Lastly, I return to the question of research impact, an inquiry central to the ethnographic perspective and a critical step of the ethnographic feedback loop. The issue of transparency can set the course of impact of our research. Having an open and transparent channel of communication is the beginning of a meaningful dialogue we ethnomusicologists can foster with the public. Informational openness, however, is a complex discourse that requires further contextualization and its discussion would not complete without a full consideration of access, ethics, and responsibility (Christen 2012). We’re living in a moment where the value of scarcity associated with industrial mode of production (Suoranta and Vadén 2008:131) is being challenged by the dispersed openness afforded by digital media. The scholarly publishing industry itself is a cultural field with policies and infrastructures driven by commercial values (Miller 2012) that mostly defy public interests. We should maintain our critical viewpoints as we engage with our own scholarly communication practices.

For a more personal framing on the meaning of open access publishing for a young off-tenure-track scholar, listen to this short audio recording. It’s kind of a pep talk.

community arts design research software teaching

What I do these days

Many people have asked me what I do these day. To respond to a request from my home department at UVa, I wrote a blurb about my job earlier today. I’m sharing it more broadly to show how I’m utilizing my graduate training in music studies (ethnomusicology!) and digital humanities and give visibility to postdoctoral careers outside of the conventional academic path.

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Me at work, photo by Sonia Hsu

As an ACLS Public Fellow, I work with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). I use the phrase “research & design” to encapsulate my role here at DCA. The goal of my fellowship is to help the department augment its digital relevance by developing information systems and resources to increase public engagement and transparency. I hope to contribute to the early efforts of establishing the department as a public cultural broker in the information age, shifting the role of government away from a regulator to an enabler and educator.

At work, I ask prickly questions about the intersection among the arts experience, civic participation, and technology. Combining my training in ethnomusicology and digital humanities, I spend my days making sense of data culture at the city and understanding large amounts of arts and cultural data from various departmental programs. I research innovative forms of information technologies across sectors, keeping abreast of academic and public discourse about the ethics and civil rights concerning information culture. My research produces recommendations for data and information system redesign. I help implement some solutions by generating prototypes for arts data mapping and impact data storytelling, for instance. I also engage in staff education through teaching new methods of research, analysis, and communication including geospatial information system (GIS), digital photo story, and data visualization. My recommendations often speak to social issues related to culture and technology touching on topics such as big data, public-private partnerships, gentrification, and neoliberalism. I strive to make effective procedural and occasionally programmatic recommendations based on my observations and participation of municipal work, as the city government transitions into a new information era.

Within DCA’s divisional structure, I work closely with the Marketing and Development Division. Currently, I’m co-leading the departmental website project with our Assistant General Manager and Communication Director with the goal to design a suite of digital services. To help increase transparency and build trust among our constituents and related stakeholders, I manage social media (@culture_LA) and develop digital communication guidelines, articulating the department’s mission and impact to the public.

Additionally, I serve as the department’s liaison with the Mayor’s Office, consulting and developing inter-departmental projects including the Open Data initiative and the Great Streets program. I interpret Mayor’s requests for data-driven approaches to quantify arts and cultural programming and design possible implementations that are sensitive to the richness and sometimes immeasurability of cultural experiences.

Aside from my work with DCA, I continue to publish my research and lead digital and public scholarship projects including Movable Parts, a socially engaged maker project; and Paperphone, a scholarly audio app funded by Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute. I also write songs and perform in Bitter Party, a band that reanimates my research findings related to Asian American melancholia and postcolonial wartime musics.

research

Digital Ethnography Paper Is Out!

Digital Ethnography article in JDH byWendy Hsu

I’m thrilled to announce that my article entitled “Digital Ethnography Toward Augmented Empiricism: A Methodological Framework” is finally out in the latest issue of Journal of Digital Humanities. This paper is the culmination of a series of making, coding, experimenting, writing, and reframing efforts to redefine the role of ethnography in the age of digital information. I open with the following provocation:

Culture takes variegated forms, including lived experiences, social interactions, memories, rituals, transactions, events, conversations, stories, gestures, and expressive disciplines like music and dance. These processes and artifacts of social life make an ethnographer’s job as analyst and cultural documentarian dynamic and challenging. The increasing digital mediation in the field of ethnographic inquiry is undeniable. Through the engagement of individual users, governments, corporations, and even grassroots organizations, the ubiquity of computational technology has a far-reaching impact on social life. These technologies mediate culture by documenting, sharing, sensing, tagging, locating, trading, synchronizing, filtering, automating, remixing, and mining the everyday experiences of our research associates. Rather than walking away from the digital, we ethnographers should give serious considerations to software as infrastructure and materiality at the sites of our research. We should also be mindful of our own digital research practices as we utilize digital technology to organize, manage, and publish our field findings.

A preview of what my paper delves into:

In this article, I examine how working with a variety of digital tools, including webscraping, mapping, and sound visualization, could widen the scope of ethnographic work and deepen our practice. I stay within the domain of data gathering in part one. In part two, I talk about the process of interpreting field data and the value of geospatial visualizations. The last part explores digital methods that magnify our perception of physical senses like sound, sight, and space. Throughout these discussions, I will also comment on the methodological, and where relevant, the social implications of these approaches.

Finally, I end with the call:

Digital ethnography as I have methodologically reframed is not fundamentally different from traditional ethnography. We have learned much from doing things across the silos of the society and the academy because doing in the form of participation, as opposed to thinking or theorizing alone, is humbling and it pushes the boundaries of our horizons. This multiplicity—in senses, modalities, information sources, languages, categories, data types, and frames of analysis—speaks to a juncture at which technology underlies the change in form and content in our social life. In addition to speculating and theorizing this change, we should heed the praxis axiom of ethnography to open up the black box of ethnographic methodology, so that we can experiment with how we practice, embody, and enact the lessons from the field. Maybe then we can be better informed as we shape the development of technologies that undergird our work.

This paper wouldn’t be possible without the thoughtful feedback from Bethany Nowiskie, Tricia Wang, and JDH editor Stephanie Westcott; and support from the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab (special shoutout to Joe Gilbert!) and Occidental College’s Center for Digital Learning + Research. I am grateful of you.

For those who are code-curious, I appended the webscraper code to the article.

 

community arts design research

Nakashi: making sound and place, from Taipei to Los Angeles

Cross-posting from the MovableParts blog — I’m writing to introduce a new series that explores the intersection between my research on nakashi street music-culture and contribution to the concept design for Movable Parts.

I revisited our project concept as I was preparing for our talk in the Arts and Electronics for Designers class at UCLA Extension. The latest version of my vision for Movable Parts is: to deploy a sound/place-making paradigm transplanted from Taiwan in order to spark bustling experiences in Los Angeles. In this post, I will elaborate on the meaning and practice of the nakashi (那卡西) street music-culture and connect to it our current creative engagement in and with Los Angeles. This is an attempt to bridge my research on Taiwanese and more broadly global practices and platforms of mobile performance with the Movable Parts design and build project.

What is Nakashi?

Nakashi is an itinerant performance practice in Taiwan. Brought over from Japan during the Japanese Occupation Era, Nakashi in its original Japanese is “Nagashi” (流し), meaning “flow.” Flow refers to a flexible mode of performance that has spatial and social connotations. Nakashi musicians use sounding objects such as instruments and loudspeakers to create ad hoc, mobile stages. Traditionally, using acoustic guitar and accordion, Nakashi musicians traveled on foot to perform popular songs of their time in tea parlors and hot springs resorts. Over time, nakashi performers innovate their practices by constructing stages on pickup trucks and farm tools to set up performances in the streets and public areas such as temple plazas. Equipping these mobile stages with loudspeakers, they turn toward the streets and public spaces as their stage  and spontaneously attract audiences. The photo below is an example of a performance troupe that traveled on a truck bed while disseminating sounds of their performance in the streets. Notice the loudspeaker that’s mounted on top of the mobile mini shrine.

“Sound truck for a temple god in Yngge” – CC-licensed photo by Joel Haas

The sound truck is a pervasive model in the nakashi street culture in Taiwan. It has become a platform for vendors to generate mobile and spatially flexible audiences and clientele.  The practice of mounting speakers on a moving vehicle is common among street vendors (ex. “dirt-roasted chicken” 土窯雞, freelance recyclers, and campaign trucks). These moving sound trucks make up a distinctively Taiwanese soundscape. Representing the voice of a migrating urban underclass, sound trucks constitute the gritty sound of the loudspeaker culture that is increasingly disciplined by informal and formal noise control in urban Taiwan.

On my last field trip in Taipei, I encountered a sound truck that in many ways represents the Nakashi performance platform and sensibility. Parked across from Lungshan Temple, the largest temple in Taipei in Mejia (Monga) district, the Exhortation Touring Tricycle is a mobile sounding platform that functions as a store that sells religious and folk recordings to passersby. The multi-colored LEDs, calligraphy writings, and custom-built shelving add to the down-home, ostentatious sensibility of nakashi. Encased within hand-built cabinets that are mounted in the back of the truck, the speakers broadcast popular Taiwanese tunes mixed with didactic music that teaches taoist morality and buddhist cosmology. Mobility serves as a dissemination tool. Sounds of exhortation move while extending its messages through the streets.

"Exhortation Tricycle", Taipei, photo by Wendy Hsu
“Exhortation Tricycle”, Taipei, photo by Wendy Hsu

On sound trucks or in stationary performances, amplification is a critical element in nakashi performances. Stationary nakashi performances typically take place in public spaces such as parks and metro stations. They are all unabashedly powered by diesel generators.

On my trip, I stumbled upon a performance in a park across the street from Lungshan Temple. Sound of amplification becomes aestheticized and is often heightened in a nakashi performance. In addition to its utility, the generator becomes an invisible sonic constituent that underlies all of these performances. In the video below, listen to the sound of the generator that powers the sound amplification. An overdriven amplified sound results a distorted, gritty, and lo-fi timbre. With an added effect of reverberation (in the vocals usually), nakashi amplification make up a uniquely textured sound-space.

What nakashi provides us is a mobile performance paradigm that intersects sound and place making through the use of low-resource technology. The constituents of both sound and place are inseparable. They make up the utilitarian and aesthetic core of the nakashi culture. Sound constitutes the social experience of a place; and vice versa. Sound plays a central role in creating not just any kind of space, but a bustling place where people congregate and form transient but meaningful micro-communities.

Sound/Place-Making for a Bustling LA

So how does this streetside practice in Taiwan relate to Movable Parts, a project based in Los Angeles? LA has an unusual history as a metropolis without distinctive sites of urban density. A city built for highways and suburbs, its decentralized structure makes location-based vibrancy a scarcity. At my day job where I work as an Arts Manager with the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, we routinely come up against the city’s geography as physical and social barriers when we administer arts and cultural resources.

To mitigate the geographical and social fracturing that marks the LA experience, we at Movable Parts thought to make human-scale creative systems. Developing systems that generate a creative friction against the urban sprawl, coupled with event design and community collaboration, we spark place-based social interactions.

As a sound ethnographer of Taiwan, I’m interested in recreating a particular notion of bustling — renal 熱鬧. Re means “heat” (often used to describe the heated, hyper state of human presence) and nao means “loud.” Together, with an abundance of human and sonic energy, renao represents a specific kind of vibrancy that is lacking in LA. I’d like to think that what we’re doing is to create a platform to ignite an abundance of energy in a city that lacks these elements of social life, particularly in the public; or otherwise, to amplify the less legible social energy in an a city with compartmentalized and hard-to-access publics.

In the video, LISTEN to the embeddedness of conversations, scooter sounds, and lo-fi music blasting from the Exhortation Tricycle’s homemade speaker cabinets. Pay attention to the dynamic between sound and place-making in this scenario. This immersive multilayered sound environment is culturally desirable in Taiwan. A sonic and spatial experience at once, this recording comes close to embody the meaning of renao, a place-based abundance of social energy.

On a slow sound walk through the Menjia Night Market, I captured layers of nightlife cacophony saturating the bustling “Old Taipei.” Sound sources in this location recording include pervasive pinball arcade, children’s bantering over games, passing scooters, and pre-recorded techno music and sales messages piped in through lo-fi loudspeakers mounted discreetly in the semi-outdoor vendor’s booths. I love how one could identify the human, mediated, and (analog) machine elements of these sound sources in the recording. This variegated texture signifies social multiplicity and technological vicissitudes as, I would argue, key meanings of renao.

Provoking a Bustling Downtown at CicLAvia

For the first iteration of our project, we designed and built a pedal-powered generator that provides electricity for a set of PA speakers. Each piece of the system — the battery and the hub motors — could be transported via bicycles. By bringing people together to pedal in order to generate electricity (I blogged about the social meaning of power generation earlier), we create a Movable Party. Resonating with the classic nakashi model of generator-powered performances, the Movable Party is an outcome of our engagement with sound and place making through a combination of low-tech and high-tech modes of practices.

I captured this video at our performance at Ciclavia last October. Teaming up with a group called DanceLAvia, we set up our bicycle generator in front of Grand Park in downtown LA to encourage CicLAvia participants to slow down for a dismount point. There we spontaneously recruited passersby as participants including the young participants shown in the video. On that day, we made progress toward our goal of making a bustling micro-community in LA.

Does this embody the Taiwanese notion of bustling — renao? Who could we mobilize individuals to participate in the making of bustling in LA? What would renao in Los Angeles sound and feel like? Does it depend on the neighborhood and other social and geographical factors? I hope that by asking these questions, we will continue to productively experiment with this wild transpacific sound and place-making paradigm.

research

Recap of Digital Ethnomusicology talk at SEM (slides with notes)

I came back from the 2013 Society of Ethnomusicology meeting in Indianapolis. Our roundtable on Digital Ethnomusicology went well and was superbly productive. The roundtable consisted of 4 young scholars’ take on digital methodology in their work [read abstracts].

A group of engaged interlocutors participated from the audience. Our short presentations on respective digital methods provoked questions related to the ethics, privacy, licensing, and boutique and vernacular tools for digital ethnomusicological research. In addition, a discussion about technological literacy was sparked providing a context for the roundtablists to speak to how each of us came to engage with digital practices as researchers, but more importantly, to foreground the necessity of collaboration in digital projects.

This was probably the first time words like “digital ethnomusicology” and “big data” (ala Daniel Shanahan‘s paper “Using Big Data to Examine the Effect of Environment on Listening Habits”) appeared on session titles at SEM. In the coming year, I hope to further organize this conversation into a formalized and better distributed form.

I’ve  posted my the slides with notes from my talk “Multimodality and Scalability: A Deepened Engagement with Software and Physical Materiality of Music-Culture” here. Let’s keep the conversation rolling.

event research

SEM Preview: Digital Ethnomusicology, a roundtable

I’m thrilled to be chairing a roundtable on Digital Ethnomusicology at the Society of Ethnomusicology (SEM) meeting in Indianapolis in November. Come chat with us about the affordances, limitations, and sociopolitical implications of digital methodology, and interact with the bright minds in the room. Below is the roundtable abstract that I proposed, along with the individual abstract provided by the five roundtablists.

[UPDATE: the roundtable is taking place on at 8:30 – 10:30AM on Thursday November 14, 2013, first session at the meeting. And Ben Tausig, due to his flight schedule, will not be joining us.]

Digital Ethnomusicology: the affordances, limitations, and sociopolitical implications of digital methodology

Which digital tools can extend our listening, communicating, and field data collecting and processing? How do we approach the study of communities that straddle the boundaries between on- and off-line, high- and low-tech, digital and analog? How do we integrate emerging media and technologies in our methods while maintaining sensitivity to issues of access and representation? This roundtable will discuss a range of methodological and critical approaches to digital and computational ethnography. The conversation will be expansive and yet focused on how the digital creates a host of possibilities for a new, multimodal engagement with teaching, fieldwork, and ethnographic representation. The roundtablists will present on the role of digital processes including social media analysis, topic modeling, mapping, webscraping, spectrograms, and field recording within the context of their research. The roundtablists will offer insights on their work, and provocative claims and questions for the purpose of initiating a broad-based discussion with the audience on the affordances, limitations, social and political implications of digital methodology in ethnomusicological endeavors.

————————– Individual paper abstracts ————————–

Challenges and Opportunities in Mapping Traditional/Folk Music: Musical World Map as A Case Study
Ozan E. Aksoy, The Graduate Center, CUNY

I developed Musical World Map, a digital mapping project about folk and traditional music around the world, as a pedagogical framework for my students. The Musical World Map was designed to map audio examples taken from free archives and sources such as the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, and other public and private archives including my own. Built in the Google Map environment, this web-based project enables users to navigate online while listening to the music associated with that particular location on the map. The project’s content is drawn from current scholarship in ethnomusicology and comparative analyses. The goals of the project were to highlight sonic commonalities in neighboring countries and to demonstrate the tension between sonic, cultural, and national borders. In this roundtable, I will talk about the challenges I faced during the mapping process, especially questions of representation of specific ethno-religious groups. I will also talk about the technical challenges in digitizing, categorizing, and mapping recorded music in an “unbiased” and “representative” fashion. I will share my thoughts on the sound-to-location mapping algorithms that I applied as a way to initiate a discussion on theoretical and practical opportunities and implications of mapping traditional and folk music.

Community Listening in Isle Royal National Park, a sonic ethnography
Erik DeLuca, University of Virginia

Sounds not only change physically as they travel across and through spaces and places, but they also change, and shape, dense webs of relationships between people and things across sociocultural contexts. Within this space, what can we learn from individualized listeners? And what can we learn by listening to how these peo­ple listen? My contribution to the roundtable will focus on one of these relationships. Blurring the line between soundscape composition, audio documentary, and sonic ethnography, my work documents how I listened to, and became part of a dialogue between the leading wolf biologist of the longest running wildlife study and a community of wolf-listening park visitors. I focus on this unique way of listening from my field research. Similar to Colin Turnbull, Steven Feld, and Michelle Kisliuk, I am also interested in how this way of listening exists within, and is tied to a place. During the multimedia presentation I will discuss the recording, interpretation, and representation of my field interactions. I will discuss how this particular way of listening is intrinsically and symbiotically tied to the ecological well-being of the park, which is currently at risk. The wolves in this isolated environment play a vital role in maintaining this health and they are on the brink of extinction. This in turn will endanger this profound community-based listening practice.

Multimodality and Scalability: A Deepened Engagement with Software and Physical Materiality of Music-Culture
Wendy Hsu, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs

This paper focuses on how we as ethnographers might use computational technologies to deepen our engagement with the nuances of software and physical materiality of music-culture. I will draw from two distinct moments in my field research in order to illustrate the usefulness of a computational exploration of field content. First, I will discuss how the development of a set of custom-built software tools enabled me to visualize the geographical contour and boundaries in a “digital diaspora” formed by American rock musicians on Myspace. Second, I will talk about my experimentation with spectrograms as a method to visually identify the characteristic contours of vocal timbres of musicians performing in the postcolonial itinerant style in Taiwan known as Nakashi. Finally, I will offer a few theoretical remarks regarding the ethnographic objective of immersion in light of emerging media and technologies. I argue that the deployment of computational methods can augment empirical precision and generate further questions and inquiries. This layer of pattern exploration can provide a productive analytical tension with embodied and qualitative meanings. With the multimodality and scalability that computers afford us, we can begin to consider challenging questions that simultaneously relate to the general scope of our field, however multi-sited, multimediated, or hypertextual, and to the depth and nuanced meanings in embodied and material culture.

Approaches to Analyzing Online Discourse about Music
Christopher Johnson-Roberson, Brown University

Many ethnographers have sought to uncover the hidden layers of enculturated meaning with which acts and discourses are imbued. Although researchers in statistics and computer science have historically pursued different aims, they too have dedicated considerable effort to inferring latent structures from observational data. These approaches can be fruitfully combined in the study of online environments, where social signifiers such as verbal communications or the reified relational ties of a social network are stored in quantities that make them amenable to statistical analysis. I explore the application of two methods — social network analysis and “topic modeling,” a computational means of inferring themes from textual data — to the study of the online community Rap Genius. This community, focused on the exegesis of hip-hop lyrics, consists of thousands of users who annotate songs with line-by-line interpretations and interact with each other via message boards and live chat. In my study of Rap Genius, an ethnographic approach provides a glimpse into how users conceptualize the process of annotation on the site as a form of scholarly activity, while computational methods provide a bird’s eye view of their interactions and illustrate how the site’s scoring system and editorial hierarchy condition users’ experiences. This case study shows how qualitative and quantitative approaches can complement each other, providing new insights to scholars interested in online discourse about music.

The Limits of Digital Ethnography in a Low-Fi World
Benjamin Tausig, New York University

Digital ethnographic methods are fast becoming a part of ethnomusicology, as well as many other disciplines that rely on interpersonal exchange in research. Technology undoubtedly opens useful new portals. In order to sufficiently theorize these methods, however, researchers must be aware not only of their affordances but of their constraints. There are broad spectrums of online access and digital literacy, as well as a range of ways of using and experiencing digitality. These ways are as culturally determined as any other dimension of human life. Music is reproduced, circulated, critiqued, and reworked in digital fora with great diversity, to which scholars must be sensitive. Evgeny Morozov has recently critiqued a universalist digital optimism that may be classist and Eurocentric in its assumptions. I suggest, in line with Morozov and based on my own ethnographic fieldwork on protest music in Bangkok, epistemological caution as the discipline moves forward with its (absolutely necessary) embrace of digital methods. To ensure that these methods are robust will require that we get our hands dirty with the local particulars of ethnographies of digital sound, that we listen as seriously to the tinny signal from a reverse-engineered iPod as to a high-bitrate stream of a premium account on a celestial jukebox.