Attending to the Nightingale: On a Multispecies Ethnomusicology

Silvers, Michael B

doi:10.5406/ethnomusicology.64.2.0199

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…These results also point to potential benefits for cross-cultural studies on music to follow the “non-human turn” already taken by ethnomusicology and specialized fields, such as ecomusicology and zoomusicology. In a recent paper, Michael Silvers (2020) listed several ways in which attending to the agency of animals has indeed improved (or could improve) our understanding of human musicality. The following element could be added to his list: attending to non-humans may at least unsettle some interpretative habits in cross-cultural studies and assess whether universals may be easy answers covering potentially more interesting, “interrelational” processes (Despret, 2016, p. 32).…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The problem of universals in cross-cultural studies: Insights from Sámi animal melodies (yoik)

Aubinet

2021

Psychology of Music

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This article offers a critique of the notion of “universals” in cross-cultural studies on music and emotions based on empirical observations and philosophical arguments. The empirical material comes from experiments with songs evoking animals and belonging to the Indigenous Sámi “yoik” tradition. Participants from the Belgian Ardenne untrained to the yoik ( N = 114, age 4–79) listened to recordings and tried to guess which animal was evoked. While their scores were significantly above chance level, additional data about their own environment and relationships to animals illustrate that interpretations in terms of “universals” would obscure the interrelational processes and (productive or unproductive) “misrecognitions” at work during the experiments. By analogy, this illustrates the need for a down-to-earth approach in cross-cultural studies on music that acknowledges the creative role of experimental designs and laboratory conditions in the production of universals. This approach may imply a move away from the nature/culture divide and a renewed attention to experimental subjects in a postcolonial context, with the aim of informing us on the entanglement of human musicality in “relational places” and the productive biases these offer to relate across different environments.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The problem of universals in cross-cultural studies: Insights from Sámi animal melodies (yoik)

Aubinet

2021

Psychology of Music

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“…Introductions to zoomusicology as a field include texts and online resources by Mâche (1997), Martinelli (2001), Taylor (2012a,b), Keller (2012), and Doolittle and Gingras (2015). Related research may also sometimes be described as "biomusicology" (Wallin et al, 1999), "ecomusicology" (Allen, 2011), or "multispecies ethnomusicology" (Silvers, 2020), or conducted under the auspices of more traditional academic fields.…”

Section: Zoomusicologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Hearken to the Hermit-Thrush”1: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening

Doolittle

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Birdsong is widely analysed and discussed by people coming from both musical and scientific backgrounds. Both approaches provide valuable insight, but I argue that it is only through combining musical and scientific points of view, as well as perspectives from more tangentially related fields, that we can obtain the best possible understanding of birdsong. In this paper, I discuss how my own training as a musician, and in particular as a composer, affects how I listen to and parse birdsong. I identify nine areas of overlap between human music and birdsong, which may serve as starting points both for musical and scientific analysis, as well as for interdisciplinary analysis as practiced in the developing field of “zoomusicology.” Using the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) as an example, I discuss how the song of a single species has been described by writers from a variety of disciplines, including music, literature, and the sciences, as well as how we can contextualise these varied perspectives in terms of broader cultural thought trends. I end with discussion of how combining approaches from multiple fields can help us to figure out new questions to ask, can help us identify how our own cultural biases may affect how we hear birdsong, and ultimately can help us develop richer and more nuanced understandings of the songs themselves.

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Sound and More-than-Human Sociality in Catherine Clover’sOh! Ah ah pree trra trra

Browning

2021

Org. Sound

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This article transposes questions about socially engaged sound practices into a more-than-human register, turning an ear to the sounds of interspecies encounters. It takes its impetus from a workshop aimed at forming a ‘cross-species choir’ by the artist Catherine Clover, in which participants tried to sing like, with and to birds in a London woodland. I describe how Clover’s speculative choir was informed by theoretical models drawn both from sound studies and from environmental humanities, as well as a down-to-earth, humorous sensitivity towards the limitations and absurdities of artistic practice. Where much theory associated with sound art and experimental music sees sound as what Ochoa Gautier has critiqued as an ontological suture for repairing the fractured relationship between humans and nature, Clover’s practice offers a more ambivalent and, I argue, therefore more generative means of conceptualising the role of sound within more-than-human social worlds. In particular, it uses sound to draw attention to the apprehension of humans by other creatures and to various dynamics of evasion, non-encounter and undecidability in our relationships with the more-than-human world. By amplifying this alternative way of understanding sound and listening, this article seeks to recast projects of social engagement through sound in more speculative and expansive terms.

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Attending to the Nightingale: On a Multispecies Ethnomusicology

Cited by 8 publications

References 99 publications

The problem of universals in cross-cultural studies: Insights from Sámi animal melodies (yoik)

The problem of universals in cross-cultural studies: Insights from Sámi animal melodies (yoik)

“Hearken to the Hermit-Thrush”1: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening

Sound and More-than-Human Sociality in Catherine Clover’sOh! Ah ah pree trra trra

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