(Sorry for the radio silence, I have been away for the first half of May on travels to East Asia, and the last two weeks in April were rather packed.)

There were many interesting projects that I encountered, each in my mind contained great implications and lessons learned for the future music information landscape. What they all have in common, is a musical community. Where they differ is the context with which such communities exists, and are engaged. I am sharing a few highlights below, in no particular order or for particular reasons. They reflect the diversity of nationalities and research interest that was present at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

Heather Maclaughlan studied the Copy-Tachin musicians of Burma, which is essentially the music of emulating western pop artists, the more accurately, the better. I’m curious to learn of how this phenomenon is influenced by the existing Burmanese government. In particular, the lengths with which these musicians go to smuggle instructional videos on how to play guitar, the parts to make their own electronic instruments, and the way they did it prior to the availability of the internet and after sounds like a wonderful and untold story. It’s not only a great example of the creativity with which individuals confront the digital divide, but a case with which to study the impact of evolving information policy and access.

Kiku Day practices and teaches Shakuhachi (Japanese flute). More interestingly, she conducts lessons via skype. YouTube has been all the rage along with all the other public forms of social media. Yet the private forms are perhaps harder to perceive. Skype was not a major part of her presentation, and was mentioned in passing. However, it has inspired a lot of thinking on my part about public and private information spaces online, and the implications for my own research design.

Noel Lobley, presented at a session that consisted of librarians and archivists. That being an interesting session aside, Noel shared with us the account of the archive bringing a part of their recording collection to a local community — the recording themselves are actually of the same community published in 1972 by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey — not 15 minutes away. In addition to being an illuminating case on the impact and limits of intellectual property, the most salient point was that archives (and libraries) are institutions that are foreign to many communities that may in fact benefit from their use. The answer is not to ‘show them’ how to use the collection. The answer is to turn the idea of the archive and library on its head, look at the purpose of such institutions, and work towards realizing those objectives instead. There were some very moving videos of people spontaneous jumping into dance, talking about the rituals and rites at which such music was performed, and older members of community overcome with happiness as well as sadness.

Thomas Solomon presented a paper on the value of looking at badly played music, based on the experience he had in the field where he did not consider such performances to have any value for research. I actually missed this talk, but I remember that was the initial excitement and inspiration to the master’s thesis work I am doing. Watching someone going from being totally tone deaf and unable to distinguish the difference between E major and E minor chords, or the ability to execute the hand-eye-brain coordination, to playing the opening of Für Elise beautifully on a guitar, was and continues to be a great learning experience. In the context of information science, there was no concept of ‘bad’ musicians, as information behaviour is studied without value judgement of the information itself. It was wonderful to see the same approach contextualized within ethnomusicology.

Nicholas Tsaftaridis studies the communities of practice in Greek instrument making, drawing heavily from Lave and Wenger’s work. It’s a large-scale project, with 10 case studies that he is following. The findings are fascinating, and the fact that it is an ongoing project means that there is perhaps a niche community that I simply have yet to find or define. Finding such a project was highly encouraging, as perhaps I am getting closer to finding other individuals who are on a trajectory that is closer to mine.

There were many other attendees with whom I had the chance to meet. Those chance encounters were perhaps the most memorable, hearing about projects and ideas at various stages of development, music libraries and archives that they use for research purposes, and also the challenges to knowledge preservation, dissemination and access that they have to deal with on a daily basis.