This Tuesday, members of the MaSC team spoke at the inaugural session of Dialogues At Al Hosn, a panel discussion with the curators and content developers of the Music of Crafts exhibition.
Thank you to Qasr Al Hosn for the fruitful collaboration and to NYUAD Community Outreach for opening the dialogue with us.
The Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) Group has released four short documentaries about the musical traditions of the Shihuh.
The MaSC team spent two days recording sounds of traditional crafts which include the Sadu, Talli, and Khoos weaving at the House of Artisans in Qasr Al Hosn, along with student volunteers Maitha Alriyami and Diana Donatella. The recordings will later be featured in an auditory installation experience at the Qasr Al Hosn next year.
Members of the MaSC team joined by collaborator and cinematographer Waleed Al Madani along with visiting scholar and filmmaker Amna Alnowais were in Ras Al Khaimah doing further recordings of the musical traditions of the Shihuh tribe as part of the project “Exploring the Musical Traditions of the Shihuh” (PI Carlos Guedes).
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 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 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.
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.
