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Posts Tagged ‘ethnomusicology’

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Music Knowledge Conference I

In music-esque, My Work on April 8, 2010 at 5:31 pm

For those who missed my Oxford presentation at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, I have uploaded my slides and talking notes from my Oxford presentation.

Today was the first day of the conference, and I was participating in the “Online Exchanges” panel, one of many concurrent panels that kick started the conference. My panel mates were Thomas Brett from New York’s Bard High School Early College, and Fiorella Montero-Diaz from the UK. Both presenters addressed issues that I have an interest it. The sharing of knowledge in the culture of electronic music, as well as issues of identity and power with indigenous cultures both highlighted the need for ethnomusicologists to engage in more collaborative work with specialists in other social science fields, information science being one of them.

The planetary session was absolutely wonderful. As each speaker as well as the chair shared their thoughts on “Ethnomusicology, Musical Knowledge & Theory”, I got progressively excited as each of them touched on topics that I could relate back to information science directly. This music knowledge conference may mark the beginning of my dedicated efforts (now that most of my course work is over) on my master’s thesis work on music knowledge.

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Flamenco, we meet again.

In music-esque, My Work on October 19, 2009 at 4:33 pm

Perhaps I should not be surprised, now that I have secured my “informant” for my ethnographic class, who is a flamenco guitar performer and teacher from a rich and unique musical heritage, that I am finding myself formulating the research program around the same theme. Narrowing down to a particular case study for the purpose of studying much broader concepts is both exciting and nerve wrecking, especially in preparation for a grant, as the nature of ethnographic work is that you don’t know what you’ll get. Not only that, the nature of logging descriptive data, if not focused by something like a user-centered design approach, could become quite unruly. I have already found myself sliding into ethnomusicology mode during field research without realizing it. (At least, I think I am.) In any case, this course is providing me an opportunity to flex my ethographic research muscles from the perspective of information research, and work out exactly this kind of kinks before I dive into my thesis work in May, whatever form that might take. For now, meeting the SSHRC Grant deadline is the priority.

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Ethno what?

In My Work on October 8, 2009 at 11:33 pm

One of my most challenging and enjoyable class in my undergraduate year was a special seminar on ethnomusicology. The special seminar on 20th century music was fun in its own way, as was putting on my medieval hat to wrap my head around ancient europe’s landscape, but getting a taste of the type of work that the ethnomusicologists that I had come to admire engage in, was an eye opener.

Having just completed two out of the three classes devoted to learning ethnographic methods in Hartel’s course, I am getting the same feeling. Except this time, I’m not excited about studying a particular manifestation of music and culture, rather I am going to study the information seeking and use behaviour of musically inclined individuals. Well, ok, the scope is more specific than that, but I don’t want your preconceive notions of what a “musician” or a “musical” person is to affect the way you understand the rest of this post.

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