Folkways in Wonderland: a cyberworld laboratory for ethnomusicology (original) (raw)
Curating Ethnomusicology in Cyberworlds for Ethnomusicological Research
Ethnologies
We describe a musical cyberworld as a virtual space for curating ethnomusicology, as well as for conducting research: the ethnomusicology of controlled musical cyberspaces. Our cyberworld differs from most online music curation in enabling immersive, social experience. Considering such cyber-exhibition of ethnomusicological research as itself a form of social and musical practice also calls for an ethnomusicology of such exhibits. Research in ethnomusicology has typically been conducted through qualitative fieldwork in uncontrolled settings. By contrast, we design a custom musical cyberworld as a virtual ethnomusicological laboratory, a platform for research geared towards better ways of designing online musical exhibitions for discovery, learning, and aesthetic contemplation, as well as contributing towards our general understanding of the role of music in human interaction and community formation.
Asian Musicology, 2024
This paper regards internet users who "convene" in moderated groups according to a common interest, social attachment, or other multiple intersected connections as an "imagined" community that surfaces on a social networking platform. The validity of the community, especially when being of an ethnographer's interest, is argued through a documentation of responses captured and operated as ethnographic data. This is a preliminary study of music culture in the digital age through online survey as virtual ethnography to explore a glimpse of the reality via reactions of an "imagined" community. Through a systematic and critical presentation of the ethnographic data, music culture in the contemporary time is interpreted as a trajectory which significantly essentializes an "imagined community" as genuine as a physical field site in the light of cultural musicology.
The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, 2016
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler\_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
The Phenomenality of Things: Music Research in the Internet Era
Música em Contexto, 2018
A modern civilization characterized at the dawn of the Internet of Things has extensively transformed human lifestyle that gives drastic magnitude to virtual connections we make with the surrounding through computer-mediated devices. This new living experience potentially changes the patterns of seeing and thinking. Henceforth, ways of understanding music in the Internet era is no longer linear and singular, while the conventional ethnographic habits of thought and work are to be re-examined. As the rising of both the Internet and the virtuality thinking re-configures the conception of time and spatial dimensions, the existing knowledge of music deemed as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ may become inadequate today, since all other attributes that shift across time and spaces may have been disregarded from being a part of the reality. A recent doctoral research in Buddhist music, which employs a methodology in virtual ethnography, embarks on a perspective of parallel ideas in phenomenality and virtuality that is tailored to the rising of the Internet. It is often predicted that both the ethnographic methodology positioned in this study and the problematic appearances of music would become issues to ethnographers. However, one of the findings of this study demonstrates that these typical issues could be resolved by the consideration of the following: the virtual property of music is deemed integral to the reality; and the causation of phenomenality in the making of the ethnographic object is significantly regarded. Though the nature of the music acquires an extensive understanding in the Buddhist philosophy, this study proposes a possible approach in the sense-making of contemporary researches in music as a way of knowing.
Comunicar. DOI: 10.3916/C38-2011-03-09 , 2012
"Sites for representing music have been classified by the equipollence between their expressive value and transmission value. In this dialectic game, the media have had a determining influence as an intervening space, from music imagined on the radio to its visual representation on a screen to today’s multimodal display created through the integration of current existing media that expand music’s potential both in terms of production and consumption. An interest in ‘cross-media’ is the basis for this research which focuses on its most integrated and interactive aspect: immersive worlds. The aim is to classify the environments of immersive worlds through analyzing those most used as spaces for musical representation. Documentary research techniques have been used in order to obtain: a) a census of current immersive musical environments, and b) a functional analysis of important cases. Through this analysis, various proposals are made for uses for immersive worlds, from both a technical perspective as well as from their potential as an interactive medium. In the conclusion, the possibilities for musical representation offered by these metaverses are assessed and possible future scenarios are discussed. "