CELEBRATING SALUANG: ADVANCING THE ARTS THROUGH THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Jennifer A. Fraser

Abstract


In this paper, I suggest a new ethnomusicological method for advancing the vitality of the arts: Digital Humanities. Song in the Sumatran Highlands, the digital project that I am in the process of building, draws on more than twenty years of ethnographic research to celebrate the Minangkabau vocal genre known as saluang for the flute that accompanies the vocalists. Using the platform Scalar, the interactive, user-friendly site is designed to be rich in multimedia (images, audios, and video), multimodal (multiple ways of experiencing and navigating the material), collaborative and responsive to interests of the saluang community. It does so by documenting the repertoire—the songs number in the hundreds—and mapping the sonic manifestations of place through tagging song titles, landmarks referenced in song texts, performers, and performances with geospatial metadata. I argue that this project helps reimagine the ways ethnomusicologists share research by moving beyond texts and closer to local sonic, visual, and spatial epistemologies and the sensorial worlds of performance. Key to the design of the project is representing ethnomusicological knowledge in formats more accessible to the public.

Keywords : saluang, Minangkabau, ethnomusicology, ethnography, Digital Humanities


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26742/pib.v1i1.1468

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