All posts by cag204@nyu.edu

Thank you, Safeya Alblooshi!!

November 24, 2024Honors & Grants, Newscag204@nyu.edu

It is with sadness but with our hearts full of gratitude that we announce that Safeya Alblooshi terminated her appointment as a Kawader research fellow at MaSC. This fixed-term three-year appointment has come to an end, and we could not be more grateful to Safeya (Saf) for her great contributions.

Saf started with MaSC in Fall 2021 and has operated substantial improvements in our group’s modus operandi. In the support to the most visible side of our activity, she designed and thoroughly maintained our beautiful website and she was responsible for MaSC’s presence in social media (Instagram and Facebook). Behind the scenes, Saf provided support to our extensive field recording sessions, by setting up the equipment, doing the recordings, and making sure that everything was properly stored and archived. She diligently worked with the NYUAD library to create our new perpetual archive of Taarab music from Zanzibar, which will soon be made available.

As a researcher, Safeya Alblooshi pursued her interests on urban soundscape analysis and its creative manipulations by expanding the work she did in her capstone project Narrated Liquid Contaminants (2021). This culminated in a sound installation and a research paper, “Sounding-Out Mina Zayed,” where she explores the evolution of the soundscape at Port Zayed in Abu Dhabi by investigating the sonic metaphors within the socio-cultural landscape, using the concept of “sounding-out” to define and envision the past, present, and future of this location and reflect on its evolving identity through created soundscapes.

As an artist, Saf’s creative collaboration in our two installations Music of Crafts and Formation of Soofcontributed to their extensive success in the presentations at Qasr al Hosn, COP 28, London Design Biennale, and Dubai Design Week. During her tenure at MaSC she also evolved as an emerging Emirati sound artist with presentations at Forum IRCAM in New York, Alserkal Avenue, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Festival X, Sharjah Art Foundation, and she successfully curated last year’s ElectroFest, a festival of electronic music at NYUAD.

Finally, Saf always had the best chocolate available at her desk to make the group’s long working sessions more pleasant.

For all this, we are extremely grateful to Safeya Alblooshi and wish the best of luck for the future!

Safeya Alblooshi to present work at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival

June 29, 2022Events, NewsSafeya Alblooshi, Soundscape, UAEcag204@nyu.edu

As part of this years featured programming at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, United Arab Emirates: Living Landscape | Living Memory, Safeya Alblooshi, MaSC’s research assistant, will present some of her field recordings from around the UAE as part of a sound installation at the National Mall in Washington DC. Working in a team of six and led by sound artist Diana Chester, the group created various soundscapes that tie to the theme of ‘Living Landscape, Living Memory’, with her work mainly focusing on Landscapes where she contributed to create multi-track soundscapes that were later spatialized and presented as sound narratives that portray the cultural, urban, and natural sonic environments of the UAE.

New students join MaSC for the summer in the PPTP program!

June 20, 2022NewsPPTP, Studentscag204@nyu.edu

New students join MaSC for the summer in the Post-Graduation Practical Training (PPTP) Program.

A few students from the class of 2022 recently joined MaSC to conduct research over the summer. Aaron Marcus-Willers (Music) , Enid Mollel (Music) , Gauri Kedia (Interactive Media and Visual Arts), and Prajjwal Bhattarai (Computer Science and Mathematics) will be workin on different projects as part of MaSC’s research agenda.

Aaron Marcus-Willers is mixing, improving, and decoding ambisonic recordings for MaSC’s ever-growing archive of taarab from Zanzibar and pearl diving music from Kuwait

Enid Mollel is working on the Volume III of the Eisenberg collection and in generating metadata for the Basalama collection of recordings of compositions by Zanzibari composer Ally Salim Basalama.

Gauri Kedia is designing the interface for the Virtual-Reality browser of MaSC’s digital compendium of music from the Western Indian Ocean

Prajjwal Bhattarai is working on the use of Transformers and deep learning in the generation of Carnatic-style rhythmic sequences.

You can check more about their profiles on the website’s people page!

MaSC at the Maritime Heritage Festival

March 20, 2022Field Work, Newscag204@nyu.edu

MaSC started a partnership with the Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) at the first Abu Dhabi Maritime Heritage Festival (MHF) that took place at Abu Dhabi’s Corniche between March 18 and 27. This partnership entails supporting the DCT in recording and recovering the traditional songs from the maritime traditions of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. In the festival, members from the research team (Safeya Alblooshi, Juan Sierra, Carlos Guedes) and cinematographer Waleed Al Madani recorded performances of the Nahma and Ahalla as well as interviews with musicians and organizers.

Group of musicians getting ready to perform the Nahma

Exploring the musical traditions of the Shihuh

January 17, 2022Field Work, NewsShihuh, Traditional music, UAEcag204@nyu.edu

Members of the MaSC team (Safeya Alblooshi, Maryam AlShehhi, Carlos Guedes) together with filmmaker Amna Alnowais cinematographer Waleed Al Madani were in Ras Al Khaimah doing field work with members of the Shihuh Tribe on January 15 and 16. This work consisted in recording the Shihuh traditional styles such as the nadbah, the razeef al Shihuh, and the rawah, as well as traditional work songs and lullabies sang by women. This is part of project “Exploring the Musical Traditions of the Shihuh” (PI Carlos Guedes) partially funded by a faculty research grant from the Sheikh Saud Bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research (35,000 AED) and will focus essentially on doing field recordings of the music of the Shihuh. The recordings took place at the Shihuh Cultural and Heritage Society, and at the Lehmoudi house in Ras Al Khaimah.

It is expected that this data collection will subsequently be used by the MaSC research team for the computational analysis of the music, and to perform similarity comparisons to other regional styles. The project has three interrelated components: (1) the audiovisual recording and focus group interviews about the music styles to be recorded; (2) a short ethnographic video documentary; and (3) the publication of a scholarly paper in a relevant peer-reviewed journal reporting the entire project and its results.

women and drums — Women performing wedding music

MaSC at Al Burda Festival

December 21, 2021Conferencescag204@nyu.edu

MaSC director Carlos Guedes participated in panel “Sounds of Islamic Culture” at the Al Burda Festival. This panel included H.E. Huda I. Alkhamis-Kanoo, founder of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, Eddy Maroun, co-founder and CEO of Anghami, and was hosted by Mickey Muhanna, Founder and Executive Director of Afikra. In this panel, Guedes gave an overview of MaSC’s mission and vision and its efforts in disseminating traditional music from the Gulf region.

Panel “Sounds of Islamic Culture” (top to bottom): Carlos Guedes, Mickey Muhanna, HE Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo, and Eddie Maroun.

Welcome Safeya Alblooshi!!

November 21, 2021Newscag204@nyu.edu

Safeya Alblooshi will started an appointment as Research Assistant at the Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) Research Group on November 21 for a period of three years

Safeya Alblooshi is an Emirati Russian practicing sound artist based in the Emirates. She holds a BA in Music and a Minor in Interactive Media from the New York University Abu Dhabi. Her work includes sound for interactive performance, live scoring, soundwalks, and audio-visual installation pieces, through which she engages with topics of conceptual narrative, environmental listening, and interactivity in performance.

In her three-year appointment, Safeya will work at different levels in the group as web developer, music annotator and data manager, maintain and update the Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) website, develop specialized websites to conduct experiments and to host specialized content (e.g. demos of MaSC software and musical applications that run on web browsers). She will also do annotations of features of the music in specialized software (like Sonic Visualizer) and create specialized metadata tags specifying musical features to assist on the computational analysis, work on digitization and digital transfer of music from the region according to the NYUAD Library standards for digital preservation.

Safeya earned this position through a competitive search via the Kawader program.