To create the virtual dance installation Ghostcatching the digital artistsPaul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar used a computer-based optical system to track the movements of the choreographer Bill T. Jones. The data from this motion-capture system formed the basis for three-dimensional digital animation.
The work challenges previous modes of commodification and enjoyment of the racialized other; it also provides a new generation in a genealogy of mechanized figures and automatons, as exemplified by the photographic work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904).
In 1996 Mira Omerzel-Terlep reported that a bone fragment excavated at the Divje Babe I cave site in Slovenia is considered to be the oldest man-made flute, dating from 45,000 years ago (“Koščene piščali: Pričetek slovenske, evropske in svetovne inštrumentalne glasbene zgodovine” [Bone whistles: Origins of the Slovenian, European, and world history of instrumental music], Etnolog: Glasnik Slovenskega Etnografskega Muzeja/Bulletin of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum VI, pp. 235–294). Further studies sought to demonstrate that the fragment had originally belonged to an instrument capable of producing a diatonic scale.
Other researchers were skeptical, though, and in 1998 Paola Villa et al. tried to put the speculation to rest, showing that the holes in the bone were the results of gnawing by animals (“A Middle Paleolithic origin of music? Using cave-bear bone accumulations to assess the Divje Babe I bone ‘flute’”, Antiquity LXXII/275 [March], pp. 65–79).
The argument has not abated. In 2002 a pair of essays staking out the opposing camps was issued in Archäologie früher Klangerzeugung und Tonordnung/The archaeology of sound origin and organization; Musikarchäologie in der Ägäis und Anatolien/Music archaeology in the Aegean and Anatolia (Rahden: Leidorf); April Nowell states that the results of taphonomic testing offered no viable proof that the bone fragment was an instrument (“Is a cave bear bone from Divje Babe, Slovenia, a Neanderthal flute?” pp. 69–81) while Robert Fink presents research supports the theory that it was (“The Neanderthal flute and origin of the scale: Fang or flint? A response” pp. 83–87).
More recently, an exhaustive study by Cajus G. Diedrich of Paleo-Logic, Independent Institute of Geosciences, ends with the conclusion that “The ‘cave bear cub femora with holes’ are, in all cases, neither instruments nor human made at all” (Royal Society Open Science, 2 : 140022; the paper can be read in full here).
Still, the controversy is alive and thriving on the Internet.
Below, Ljuben Dimkaroski performs on a reconstruction of the alleged original bone flute.
The eminent British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers, CBE (1873–1946), joined an anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait and Sarawak in 1898, and his studies of musical traditions in those places resulted in several articles. Like many of his contemporaries, he suspected that the study of ethnic traditions could help to tease out universals and illuminate the origins of music.
In “The beginnings of music” (Essays and studies presented to William Ridgeway on his sixtieth birthday [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913, pp. 560–582]) Myers provides detailed descriptions of the musical traditions of the Meriam people of Murray Island, Australia, the Vedda people of Sri Lanka, and the peoples of Sarawak. The Vedda examples suggest an evolution of the scale as a synthesis of steps, the Sarawak examples suggest scalar evolution as a filling-in of larger intervals, and the Meriam examples suggest a synthesis of the two approaches.
Myers concludes that the beginnings of music depend on eight factors: (1) discrimination between tones and noises; (2) awareness of differences in pitch, volume, duration, and quality; (3) awareness of absolute pitch; (4) recognition and use of small, approximately equal intervals; (5) recognition and use of larger consonant intervals, and awareness of their relationships to smaller ones; (6) melodic phrasing; (7) rhythmic phrasing; and (8) musical meaning.
The article was reprinted in Music, words and voice: A reader, edited by Martin Clayton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 21–23). Above, the Murray Island courthouse and community hall in a photograph from the 1898 expedition that Myers joined.
The Expression Synthesis Project (ESP) involves a driving interface for expression synthesis, making high-level expressive musical decisions accessible to nonexperts. The user drives a car on a virtual road that represents the music with its twists and turns, and makes decisions on how to traverse each part of the road. The driver’s decisions affect the rendering of the piece in real time.
The pedals and wheel provide a tactile interface for controlling the dynamics and musical expression, while the display portrays a first-person view of the road and dashboard from the driver’s seat. This game-like interface allows nonexperts to create expressive renderings of existing music without having to master an instrument, and allows expert musicians to experiment with expressive choice without having to first master the notes of the piece.
In an experiment, 250 adults were offered a glass of wine in return for answering a few questions about its taste. After clearing their palates, each received a glass of either cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay and was taken to one of five rooms: four that each featured a different type of music playing in a continuous loop, and a silent one serving as a control. Participants were asked to spend about five minutes sipping the wine, and were told not to converse.
A smaller pilot study had determined the four types of music:
“powerful and heavy” (“O Fortuna” from Orff’s Carmina burana)
“subtle and refined” (“Вальс цветов” [Val’s cvetov/Waltz of the flowers] from Cajkovskij’s Щелкунчик [Ŝelkunčik/Nutcracker])
After drinking the wine and listening to the music, participants were asked to rate the wine’s taste on a scale from zero to ten in the categories represented by the music types. In each case, participants perceived the wine in a manner consistent with the music they had listened to while drinking it.
Charles Samuel Myers, CBE (1873–1946), who coined the term shell shock during World War I, was among the psychologists whose work fed into comparative musicology and, later, ethnomusicology. He joined an anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait and Sarawak in 1898, and his studies of musical traditions in those places resulted in several articles.
“The ethnological study of music” presents a glimpse of how psychologists viewed ethnic music around the turn of the century. In this essay, Myers points out that unfamiliar music may seem as disorderly and meaningless as unfamiliar language, but in both cases sufficient study and habituation reveal inherent order and meaning. All music serves an expressive function, he states, and universal elements such as rhythm, harmony, scale, and tonal center may serve as bases for cross-cultural comparisons.
Myers goes on to argue that the documentation and study of non-Western musics is an urgent matter, as traditions are already becoming polluted by outside sources. Fortunately, he notes, the advent of sound recording has greatly facilitated this enterprise, making it unnecessary for the ethnographer to transcribe performances during fieldwork. Myers ends with step-by-step instructions and procedural recommendations for making field recordings with the Edison-Bell phonograph (above).
In an experiment, male and female college undergraduates made and viewed videotaped presentations that included stating a preference for classical music, country music, soft rock, or heavy metal. These preferences were found to influence heterosexual attraction in specific ways.
Devotion to classical music and to heavy metal proved to be gender specific: A love of heavy metal greatly enhanced the appeal of men, but it proved detrimental to that of women, while a preference for classical music produced the opposite reactions. A love of country music was found to diminish attraction in both genders.
Numerous examples of the Freudian concept of repression may be observed in black cultures in Africa and the Americas. Though they do not use the Western term, these cultures involve a full awareness of repression and its attendant dangers for individuals and society, and they have developed therapeutic activities to mitigate it.
This according to the 1934 essay “Freudian mechanisms in primitive Negro psychology” by Melville J. Herskovits, which was included in Essays presented to C.G. Seligman (London: Kegan Paul International). While the word primitive has since been discredited, the piece is a milestone in the history of anthropology and is considered the first successful application of psychoanalytic theory in that field.
Herskovits explores how in many cases these therapeutic activities comprise satirical or insulting singing events that express what cannot be spoken directly, providing a release of repressed feelings in a socially supported framework. He discusses examples from Benin, Haiti, and Suriname, with particular attention to the Suriname Maroon lóbi singi ritual.
Usually performed by women, lóbi singi may comprise an exchange of insulting song verses, or it may involve a woman who socially redeems herself through singing satirical verses about her notorious past in alternation with a chorus of her peers; in both cases, social wounds are healed by the expression of repressed feelings.
This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here or on the Black studies category on the right to see a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.
Top: In 1929, Herskovits contemplates ritual objects that he collected in Suriname.
Cell phone ringtones have been the subject of scholarly investigation for at least a decade; approaches to them have ranged from the practical to the postmodern.
The earliest academic study that we know of is “On the ringtones of cell phones (携帯電話着信メロディーについて)” in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan (社団法人日本音響学会) LVII/11 (2001), pp. 725–728. Legal aspects were explored the following year in “Die Lizenzierungspraxis der GEMA bei Ruftonmelodien: Rechteeinräumung und Rechtefluß” by Jürgen Becker in Recht im Wandel seines sozialen und technologischen Umfeldes: Festschrift für Manfred Rehbinder (München: C.H. Beck, 2002, pp. 187–198).
For an experiment involving both acoustical and MIDI data, the German pianist Armin Fuchs made an uninterrupted recording of Satie’s Vexations, fulfilling the composer’s apparent indication that the piece should be repeated 840 times; the performance lasted nearly 28 hours.
Tempo and loudness remained stable over the first 14 hours of alertness; after 15 hours a state of trance ensued, resulting in a destabilization of tempo followed by uncontrolled deviations in loudness.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
