The Formation of Soon travels to this year’s edition of the Dubai Design Week opening on the 5th of November and will be on view through the 10th, at the Dubai Design District, in collaboration with the House or Artisans and Qasr Al Hosn.
Congratulations to Andrew Eisenberg on the release of his new book “Sounds of Other Shores: The Musical Poetics of Identity on Kenya’s Swahili Coast”
The book, an ethnographic study of transoceanic musical appropriation and Swahili ethnic subjectivity on the Kenyan coast, has already achieved much praise and can be purchased via the following platforms:
Wesleyan University Press
Amazon
Congratulations to NYUAD Alumna and MaSC intern Gopika Krishnan on her acceptance to the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Artificial Intelligence.
We are proud to announce that Gopika Krishnan has been accepted into the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Artificial Intelligence (EMAI), securing the highly competitive Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. This distinguished two-year program spans four leading European universities, including Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Radboud University, each offering specialized AI training. Gopika will represent our community brilliantly as she embarks on this exciting educational journey. Join us in celebrating Gopika’s outstanding achievement!
We’re thrilled to announce that our MaSC team was involved in the ambisonic recording of “Ramadaniyyat: The Boom Diwaniya,” in partnership with the NYUAD Music Program. This event connected Arabian Gulf and Swahili Coastal communities through a celebration of their shared musical traditions.
Held as a musical salon, “The Boom Diwaniya” featured performances by traditional groups such as The Hamad Bin Hussein Ensemble and The Mayouf Mejally Ensemble, alongside guest artists like violinist Layth Sidiq and multi-instrumentalist Mbarak Ali Haji. The evening was a vibrant homage to the cultural heritage of the Western Indian Ocean, highlighting the traditional sea arts and the Kuwaiti diwaniya.
Congratulations to everyone involved in this unique and culturally rich recording experience!
MaSC continues to collaborate as partners with the Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) for the third edition of the Abu Dhabi Maritime Heritage Festival. In this year’s edition, MaSC have recorded new repertoire including the Tohoraeb (kind of Nahma), and bahri songs, as well an in-depth interview with Mustafa Al Fardan, a pearl trader and the 6th generation of pearl traders in his family.
The Formation of Soof was displayed at Expo City as part of this year’s celebration of Union Day earlier this month. The work was presented in collaboration with the House of Artisans.
NYUAD Alumna Gopika Krishnan presented her PPTP work with MaSC on Mridangam strokes at ISMIR in Milan this Month!
MaSC has published a paper titled “A Multimodal Methodology for Music Field Recording and Archival” for the DLfM 2023 (10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology), a satellite event of the ISMIR conference that will take place on the 10th of November, 2023, in Milan, Italy.
The Formation of Soof installation, as part of the Abu Dhabi Pavilion at the London Design Biennale, is the winner of this year’s London Design Biennale Theme Medal!
The London Design Biennale jury chose three pavilions which demonstrated creativity and innovation in response to this year’s theme of ‘The Global Game — Remapping Collaborations’, and the Abu Dhabi pavilion was awarded for the most “inspiring interpretation of the theme.”
We are happy to announce that “The Formation of Soof” is currently being showcased at the London Design Biennale. The immersive installation pays tribute to the core materials and tools of the Al-Sadu craft which is the wool (Soof) & the spinner/ spindle (Maghzal or Ghazal).
Spinning the wool is a traditional technique used to create the raw wool into yarn balls, the process of spinning is one that is time consuming but also very intimate and hypnotic in it’s formation process; this experience celebrates the importance of the technique and the flow of the movement that allows for the transformation from a raw soft material into the Sadu textile that is architecturally fundamental to the building of traditional tent structures.
The experience utilises creative audio and visual videos as part of its interactive installation.
The Abu Dhabi Pavilion the “Formation Of Soof” is showing until June 25th in Somerset House at the Biennale site.
This work is in collaboration with Qasr Al Hosn, the House of Artisans, and NYUAD Outreach.
