Insider or outsider? Exploring some digital challenges in ethnomusicology - Patrick Egan

 Computation in ethnomusicology

 

Ethnomusicology as we know it, is focused on music in its social-cultural contexts. In recent years, with the arrival of more digital technology, ethnomusicology has tried to improve its relationship with computation, approaching and innovating with computational research in the field of Digital Humanities.  

 

Today ethnomusicologists are working on projects that rely on processing and understanding large amounts of digital data, producing new research and focusing on the use of computing for extracting musical information, such as Music Information Retrieval (MIR) or Computational Ethnomusicology (Egan, 2021, p. 479). The application of computing and technology in ethnomusicology keeps growing, bringing benefits for both research and fieldwork. One of its greatest examples is the Seán Ó Riada Project at University College Cork in Ireland. The Seán Ó Riada Project, named after the famous Irish composer, had the goal of arranging and contextualizing metadata related to the composer’s musical practice; exploring ways in which computation could help organize the archive while raising several questions on classification in ethnomusicology. 

 

The SÓRC Project successfully mapped Seán Ó Riada’s published materials and their dates of production by tracing and visualizing the available data, developing timeline prototypes, datasets and using interdisciplinary tools like coding to categorize each music project (Egan, 2021, p. 480-483).

 

Classificatory thinking

 

For a while musicologists and ethnomusicologists argued about the different ways to approach and consider classification. For obvious reasons, Western bias in classifying musical phenomena tends to be problematic for ethnomusicologists. But with the current flow of research and a careful consideration of the way in which information is presented, ethnomusicologists can reach a more balanced approach to classification (Egan, 2021, p. 484).

 

The growth of the already large amounts of ethnomusicological data from around the world calls for the need of more useful classification attempts (Egan, 2021, p. 484). One of the very first examples of collection and classification of audio recordings was the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, intended to store audio recordings collected by researchers from different parts of the world after the invention of Edison’s phonograph (Egan, 2021, p. 484). From that point on and throughout the 20th century, different approaches to classification were debated and developed by ethnomusicologists.

 

Today, archives and cultural institutions are in charge of data collections that are growing exponentially (Egan, 2021, p. 485). Ethnomusicologists are pulling away from comparative methods of classification and focusing instead on decolonizing our understandings of these cultures. Luckily, classification methods have evolved a lot since the early 1900’s correcting many past mistakes (Egan, 2021, p. 485).

  

Computation has a lot to offer. The Seán Ó Riada Project is an example on how continually gathering data, working with digital tools, creating digital prototypes and visualizing results can help classify ethnomusicological archives. Leading to a constant evaluation of the available data and exposing all of the complexities of the archival collection itself. Immersion and experimentation with metadata and digital tools, is useful for discovery but also for a deeper understanding of archival documents and musical practice (Egan, 2021, p. 496).

 

Reference:


Patrick Egan (Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin) (2021) Insider or outsider? Exploring some digital challenges in ethnomusicology, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 46:4, 477-500, DOI: 10.1080/03080188.2021.1872144

 

 

 

 

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