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.
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.
