The Effects of Place on Music, and Vice Versa

Lori and I were looking at places to visit while in India, and boy are there a lot to look at. The state of Karnataka, which houses our little refugee community, is a tropical and cultural paradise. The place is incredibly green, and incredibly full of temples, shrines, and people (though, thankfully, Bylakuppe is spared from the denseness of population of, say, another refugee settlement like Dharamshala.). Nothing could be more different from the place the refugees have come from - the cold, expansive desert of the "roof of the world."

Hampi, in Karnataka

Tibet!

The interrelationship of environment and music has just recently become a topic of serious inquiry in scholarly circles, particularly among those who call themselves "human" or "cultural" geographers. Topics as wide as the use of music to forward industry in failing communities to the musical habits of geriatric groups in small towns have produced in-depth studies, and the cultural geography community, as well as those who benefit from their research, are taking a closer listen to the human family. Looking at these pictures of different landscapes got me thinking - how has the transition from the Tibetan highlands to the Indian lowlands affected the production of music in Bylakuppe? Tibetan monastic music, as well as folk music (particularly shepherd song), is definitely a product of the acoustic phenomena present in the Himalaya, just as much as Gregorian chant is a product of the long reverberation times of large cathedrals (but, after the genesis of the chant, the interplay between music and cathedral building is hard to follow - did the cathedrals get bigger so reverb times could grow, or did the composers write in response to increased church size?). The huge horns, loud cymbals, and large drums of Tibet are instruments designed to travel across the vast plains and echo off the never-ending white-capped walls of the eternal mountains. On the folk side, the plaintive song of the shepherd immediately directs the imagination in the direction of the lone protector of the flock leading his livelihood through mountain passes. What happens to these songs when translated into the densely attenuated echo-space produced by thick forests and tropical rain?

Looking at music this way, perhaps singing the traditional songs of the homeland is a way to travel there for a few moments, to relive and recapture the freedom of wide-open spaces and the safety of living nestled between mountain-sentinels. And perhaps the new musics being produced by youth represent not only the shrinking world village and crosstalk of cultures enabled by internet and a new physical location, but also reflect the polarity of the green environment they have grown up in compared with their parents' white ancestral home. In a conversation with a classmate who has lived in a Tibetan community, I found that the longer a Tibetan family has been in India, the more they shift their culinary preferences toward ingredients readily found in India, and drink less butter-tea and eat less tsampa. Are the Himalayan horns and cacophonous drums being traded for nagaswaram and mridangam? Or for drum sets and electric guitars? And what of Tibetan music is persistent, responding little or not at all to the changed physical and cultural climate? 

These questions, I insist in accord with a main premise of ethnomusicology, are important for not only artistic purposes but for the wider and grander purpose of coming to a greater understanding of identity, for it is in the artistic expression of a people that the finer ineffable points of what it means to be human, and what it means to be a human in a particular time and place, begin to surface.

There is, of course, the problem of defining what exactly "Tibetan-ness" is, but that remains for another time.

Write Yourself a Manual

Inspiration comes from unexpected places.

I went to BYU's Acoustics Research Group (ARG) meeting this morning. For those of you who aren't familiar with all the weird things I'm into, I spent a large portion of last year conducting acoustics research on the Nigerian Udu clay pot drum, culminating in a presentation at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego in the fall. We are still working on finishing the paper and publishing it (look in all your upcoming acoustics journals for "Equivalent circuit modeling and vibrometry analysis of the Udu Utar Nigerian drum!"), though progress has slowed a bit due to my professor taking a post at Los Alamos National Laboratory and me having, as always, a rather busy schedule. Anywho, I like to go to the meetings for the free food and the friends I have made, as well as to look for more opportunities for research on weird and obscure instruments. Hopefully I will get to do an analysis of Gamelan instrument tuning, but that probably won't happen until after India comes and goes.

The meeting focused on proper and thorough documentation of one's work. A big problem, especially at university labs, is the high turnover rate of researchers. People graduate, switch majors, get married, etc., etc. Large and small projects often have to be set aside for months or years. When new folks come along and see a half-completed project, they jump on board only to find that they basically have to start from ground zero because all the last researcher left behind were results of experiments without any notation as to how the experiment was set up, what the 239th line of code does, what the names of their files mean (ttl2Version1.8? What is that?! The person who wrote the file name probably forgot too.), ad nauseum. This problem also occurs when time comes for thesis defenses, dissertations, or graduation boards.

"What protocol did you use to obtain these results?"
Trying to remember, thinking back four years...
"Umm... Seven?"

To avoid problems like this in the future, the presenter said, it's a good idea - a great idea - to write yourself a manual as you go along. Include things like:

Research methods
Motivations
Findings
Purchase orders
Equipment and settings
Plans

I can't tell you how many times I've worked through half of a math or physics problem, set it down to get a drink of water, and come back wondering, "now why in the heck did I do that? I'm sure I was going somewhere with that derivation..." and had to start over. There's a mindset that occurs when in the middle of hard work that has to be recaptured when work is resumed, and methinks something like a manual would help with speedifying the recapture process. The idea is to not trust your brain, and to leave notes detailed enough so that someone else could easily pick up where you left off.

I don't know about you, but I don't trust my brain. My plan is to keep more detailed notes, including the items above and probably adding in more things as trial and error works its magic. This will help with the field study. It will probably also help with whatever else I end up doing with my life.

On a closing note, there is also a bit of sick pleasure I get from knowing I will leave behind notebooks upon notebooks of mostly useless information for my great-grandkids to dig through when they're doing family history. Buahaha. Beau Hilton VII, you just try to find the touching anecdotes. I dare you.