At the Maritime Heritage Festival this year, we had the chance to collaboratively develop the sound installation “A Journey Across Emirati Values” — a 360° immersive walkthrough that connects heritage to the present through sound, stories, and symbolism.
We also conducted field recordings of traditional music heritage, capturing authentic sonic memories across generations.
Honored to help bring these sounds and stories to life on the shoreline.
This week at the Digital Heritage Forum, the session “Hearing History: Reimagining Cultural Heritage Preservation through Creative Sound Experiences” explored how soundscapes, music, and voice reconnect communities with heritage. Dr. Carlos Guedes shared insights from his and MaSC’s work archiving traditional Emirati music, underscoring the value of preserving sensory traditions and showing how sound bridges past and present.
MaSC Director Carlos Guedes, together with other general chairs Kaustuv Ganguli and Gus Xia, officially announced the upcoming 27th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2026) at this year’s ISMIR at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea.
Last week, Carlos Guedes took part in the expert module “Cultural Heritage & Knowledge Development: Fostering a Culture of Integrated Protection,” organized by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi.
The four-day program brought together professionals from across the UAE and GCC to explore how culture, creativity, and heritage can intersect to shape sustainable development. Through a mix of seminars, workshops, and site-based exercises, participants engaged in hands-on exchanges on cultural policy, creative economies, and heritage protection.
Together with Khadija El Bennaoui, he co-led the session “Abu Dhabi Creative City and Its Cooperation with Other Cities.”
MaSC members Juan Sierra and Rose Chen were invited to present at the Abu Dhabi Mangrove Initiative (ADMI) Partners Meeting 2025, hosted by the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi.
Their presentation, “Mangrove Moment — The Music of Mangroves,” highlighted MaSC’s ongoing exploration of soundscapes in mangrove ecosystems. They shared insights from previous work on Sir Bani Yas Island and introduced the group’s most recent involvement at Mirfa Mangrove Park, demonstrating the ways in which sound recording and analysis can illuminate the ecological and cultural significance of mangroves.
Last Friday, the MaSC team explored Marawah Marine Biosphere Reserve 🌊🌿 with @environmentabudhabi to capture field recordings of the mangrove ecosystem and its soundscapes. From the rustle of the mangrove leaves to the calls of the birds, the reserve was alive with sound.
The Shihuh (plural for Al Shehhi) is an Arab tribe that currently resides in the United Arab Emirates and Oman, dominating the territory of Ru’us al-Jibal and the Musandam peninsula. Through a series of evocative video documentaries, MaSC’s research project “Exploring the Musical Traditions of the Shihuh” captures and preserves musical genres that have long accompanied the rhythms of daily life, social customs, communal labor, and collective identity. The latest additions – directed by Emirati filmmaker Amna Alnowais – highlight the musical traditions of the Shihuh women, featuring songs such as the coffee grinding song, bridal henna songs, and lullaby.
Click here to view the full videos on YouTube and discover detailed introductions into each performance.
Carlos Guedes, Co-Founder of the Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) research group, presented “Transcultural Sonic Intersections,” a commission by the Abu Dhabi UNESCO Creative City of Music at the Abu Dhabi Culture Summit 2025, on April 28.
This was the first music commission by Abu Dhabi UNESCO Creative City of Music aiming to explore transcultural intersections between different genres of music. This particular commission involved two musicians from the Gnawa tradition from Essaouria in Morocco (Houssam Gania and Mohammed Hamdoun), two Jazz musicians from Mannheim in Germany (Alexandra Lehmler and Antoine Spranger), and two musicians from the UAE (Adel Zarai and Khalid Hassan Shah) specializing in musical traditions from the Arabian Gulf.
The work directed by Guedes explored the intersection between Jazz, electronic music, and music from the traditions of the Arabian Gulf and North Africa in a groundbreaking performance celebrating the International Jazz Day where these intersections were explored and exposed as the culmination of an artistic residency at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Performance of Transcultural Sonic Interactions at the Culture Summit
From Left to Right: Alexandra Lehmler, Dr. Matthias Rauch (Head of Culture Innovation, Mannheim), Antoine Spranger, Khalid Shah, Houssam Gania, Khadija El Bennaoui (Head of Abu Dhabi UNESCO Creative City of Music), Carlos Guedes, Mohammed Hamdoun, and Adel Zarai
In February, as part of his 19 Washington Square North Fellowship project with Professor Elizabeth Hoffman (FAS Music), Andrew Eisenberg, co-founder of the MaSC, led a four-day collaborative songwriting experiment on campus with five musician-poets from different parts of the western Indian Ocean region: Mbaraka Ali Haji (Kenya coast), Mwanate Kibwana (Kenya coast), Zayed University Professor and MaSC affiliate Kaustuv Kanti Ganguli (India), Nandini Roy Choudhury (India), and NYUAD Professor and MaSC affiliate Ghazi Faisal Al Mulaifi (Kuwait). Professor Clarissa Vierke (University of Bayreuth) directed the translation process; NYUAD PhD student and MaSC affiliate Juan Sierra ran the audio production; and Abu Dhabi-based filmmaker and MaSC affiliate Waleed Al Madani documented the process along with New York-based artist Marshall Weber.
In April, Eisenberg and Hoffman concluded their 19 Washington Square North Fellowship with a premiere of Sonic Intimacies of the Western Indian Ocean, a work of ethnographic media art uses that uses materials from the collaborative songwriting experiment held in February. Documenting and reflecting on the processes of composing, translating, and performing that took place in Abu Dhabi, the work explores the materiality of language, the im/possibilities of translation, and the joys of cultural sharing and appropriation in the porous contact zones of the Indian Ocean world. It was presented to a public audience at 19 Washington Square North under the auspices of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute in New York.
Professor Andrew Eisenberg (Left) and Professor Elizabeth Hoffman (Right) presenting Sonic Intimacies of the Western Indian Ocean
Four-day collaborative songwriting experiment, NYUAD (Image source: Andrew Eisenberg)
NYUAD alumna and MaSC researcher Gopika Krishnan, NYUAD alumna and MaSC researcher Julia Drabek, together with Associate Professor of Music Carlos Guedes, Dr. Kaustuv Ganguli (Associate Professor of Computational Sciences at Zayed University) and Akhsay Anantapadmanabhan (independent musician) presented two papers at workshops from the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2025, on April 6.
Paper “Investigating Temporal Convolution Networks for Automated Stroke Transcription in the Mridangam” (Krishnan, Anantapdmanabhan, Ganguli & Guedes, 2025), introduced a novel approach to mridangam stroke detection using Temporal Convolution Network (TCNs). Paper “Closing The Loop on Speech-to-music Translation: Automatically Generating Synthetic Percussive Sequences on the Mridangam from Konnakol” (Krishnan, Drabek, Anantapadmanabhan, Ganguli & Guedes, 2025) explores the direct translation from Konnakol, a vocalization style of rhythms in Carnatic music used to memorize percussive sequences, to its equivalent strokes on the mridangam, a double-headed percussion instrument used in Carnatic music.
NYUAD alumna Gopika Krishnan and Dr. Kaustuv Ganguli at the poster presentation of “Investigating Temporal Convolution Networks for Automated Stroke Transcription” at ICASSP 2025
NYUAD alumna Gopika Krishnan presenting paper “Investigating Temporal Convolution Networks for Automated Stroke Transcription” at ICASSP 2025
NYUAD alumna Gopika Krishnan at the poster presentation of “Closing The Loop on Speech-to-music Translation” at ICASSP 2025