Welcome, I am a musicologist but am constantly inspired by other disciplines, perhaps more of a free-range thinker selecting from quality nuggets of information. Sound and music though, is a topic of sustained attention: humans are immersed in a sound environment that is well-used but not well understood or studied. The works below are my beginning.
We know about the stunning visual appearance of the Temple, but what did it sound like? Surviving documents suggest sonic qualities of this tenth century building so essential to aural peoples for its authority. Could this be the beginning of serious western music?
The author proposes a new approach to music transcription. Consider that music has three habitats: Habitat Two is indoor-oriented and Habitat Three is electronic. Both musics are readily transcribed into print with standard notation. It is Habitat One, outdoor-oriented song, that defies representation with western print. I propose a methodology to replace reductionist assumptions of western transcription with the holistic sound (named fama) of Habitat One. From each particular fama of the planet’s many sonic habitats, categories of transcription devolve. My conclusion applies this holistic approach to enrich archived music.
In storytelling events the sound is built in. In contrast, when written, the sounds are gone. We seek ways to reveal the sound potential in existing written versions of oral narratives: one of the most important experiences of many cultures.
An investigation of vocables as archaeological artifacts that shed light on difficult-to-document evolution of human vocalization.
The Three Habitats thesis of Whidden and Shore’s book, Environment Matters, suggest a new interdisciplinary method for analysis and archiving of music.
Whidden and co-author Paul Shore provide an example from the liturgy of the Eastern Christian Church for the influence of the environment.
Was Cromwell’s use of hymns on the battlefield of Dunbar the beginning of the strident, nasal timbre that was carried around the world by the British?
