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Just click on the ‘ethnomusicology’ category near the top of the left-hand column to find out why! Long-standing visitors to this blog will remember when I did a couple of ethnomusicology courses in Germany. Click here and here for a reminder of those. Over the past three weeks, I’ve been taking Module III of the ethno course, which is entitled: GENERATIVE ANALYSIS OF NON-WESTERN MUSIC Wow! There’s a mouthful! Basically, it means we’ve been learning how to analyse a foreign music system in terms of intervals, frequency of pitches etc. For this, we listened to music by the Urubu-Kaapor people of Brazil. We then had to transcribe the music – tricky when the intervals are unlikely to match those of a western scale. To help us do this, we used melograms, courtesy of speech analyser. Here’s what one looks like:
Our final task was to compose a song in the same style as the music we had analysed. Here’s a wee clip of one of the Urubu-Kaapor songs: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. And here (just so you can have a laugh) is my attempt at replicating not only the melody and rhythmic patterns, but also the vocal quality: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Thanks to Neil for that recording. Unfortunately, my singing sounds more like Louis Armstrong than native Brazilian!!! Here are the motley crew who took the course this time, taken at pie night at the nearby Blue Flag pub:
Thanks for reading. I’m delighted – at last – to have something happen in the UK which is vaguely interesting to blog about. The only other choice would be the weather!!! |
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