This chapter considers how video game music developed and cultural and ethical challenges in creating gameworlds with music.

Introduction

Two Case Studies

Video Game Music

Trance is a pillar of religion and traditional medicine in Morocco and the Maghreb. Embraced with fervor by its many followers, dismissed with scorn or disdain by its critics, and approached with curiosity by tourists, trance has long been a socially 

 Trance has become embedded in a range of cultural domains, as it gathers Moroccans from all walks of life and faiths, including 

 Many Moroccans regard trance as a healing remedy capable of freeing those afflicted by malevolent spirits that cause all types of physical and psychological ailments. Trance is also a fixture in the gatherings of many Sufi brotherhoods, where it is used to communicate with the deity.

Sufism is a “mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God.”

 Through a variety of mystical paths, Sufis aim to ascertain the nature of God and bring its presence to the world. As the numbers of followers of Sufi teachers (

) grew in the beginning of the 12th century, they began to form larger groups known as brotherhoods who saw their leaders as saints. Saints are related by kinship to the Prophet Muhammad and are revered for their austerity, generosity, and good deeds. A 

, seen in a colonial-era image in Figure 1, is a ceremony that uses ritual dance and animal sacrifice to bestow 

 (godly grace, blessing) upon those suffering from physical or mental ailments (Witulski 2019, 84–99; Kapchan 2007; Becker 2020, 123–56).

Despite enjoying wide popularity, trance in Morocco has often been the object of fear, misunderstanding, dismissal, or even scorn. Behind these different responses there has been a good degree of misinformation, affecting particularly the views of foreigners and outsiders to the practice. But ignorance or cultural estrangement alone do not explain the adverse feelings that trance has provoked since at least the late 19th century, and one must look at religious and political factors for an answer. Sufi trance in colonial Morocco (1912-1956) developed under the scrutiny and control of the French, Spanish and Moroccan authorities, and military personnel. It was also treated as a subject of study within a highly racialized system of knowledge that considered trance a characteristic manifestation of the “psychology” of certain ethnic groups –and by “psychology” I mean a preconceived set of mostly negative traits established through (pseudo)scholarly practice. Colonial scholars did not observe and study trance to learn about a cultural practice unknown to them thus far—or at least not only—but rather mostly to confirm their preconceived notions about Moroccans of different ethnic subgroups and classes.

 or godly grace upon those suffering from a particular ailment. It involves the recitation of religious and secular texts alongside music and bodily movement to cast away the spirits that inhabit the sufferer and cause different kinds of physical and psychological ailments. The only accounts of the 

 from this period that are available today were written by external observers, usually colonial Europeans. Their writings on trance were published as part of training manuals for the military officials or within collections of anthropological or musicological studies. These texts aimed to satisfy a growing curiosity about then-unknown practices while presenting ethnographic evidence for their authors’ views that western culture and knowledge were superior to those of non-European lands. This racist intellectual project supported the notion that Morocco needed to be conquered and civilized. 

Their accounts are thus colored by a rhetoric and ideology suited to their pragmatic and oppressive agendas.

In the last few decades, a few scholars have made up for the shortcomings of this problematic legacy of knowledge by sharing their personal experience of a 

 through self-reflective accounts grounded on more self-reflective contemporary anthropology (Kapchan 2007; Jankowsky 2021; Witulski 2019; Becker 2020). Their insights on today’s practices cannot be used to describe a 

 from the early twentieth century without discussion though, because any attempt to extrapolate from them would imply that Sufi ritual trance has remained static and unchanging. In the light of all these caveats, describing a 

 from the colonial period is necessarily an exercise in abstraction that risks offering an incomplete or distorted image of the past.

Using a combination of primary sources from the colonial period and recent fieldwork, I suggest that the following conclusions can be established regarding how the 

 was performed during the colonial era. A 

 can vary in length, lasting up to eight hours. It can be a standalone ritual or take place as part of a seasonal pilgrimage. 

It is a structured ritual in which each stage is defined by specific textual and musical materials and by the use of various recitation techniques and musical textures.

 Testimonies by colonial writers rarely if ever discussed any details of this complex structure. A 

 usually ends with an intensification of pace which may lead one or several participants into 

, the state of trance that captured the attention of most colonial writers and photographers (Figure 2). The music contributes to this increase in pace through repeated musical motives, the addition of instruments, increasing complexity of the repeated patterns, and a gradual increase in volume. Bodily movements that accompany these sounds are closely connected to the recitation and intonation of chants. As a result, the 

 could be considered a kinesthetically-enhanced form of recitation, rather than a “dance.” 

The writings of colonial settlers or personnel read this body language in political terms, attributing meanings of defiance to certain gestures.

Moroccan Trance in the Colonial Imagination

The study of changes in Sufi ritual across time and place raises important questions about the relationship of ritual trance with its historical, social, and political context. This was a period of strife where intense rivalry between the brotherhoods combined with efforts to maintain themselves despite the pressures put on them by the French and Spanish colonial authorities. One of the most pressing questions is the extent to which Sufi trance in colonial Morocco functioned as a political act. The most comprehensive study of music published in colonial Morocco, 

 by the Algeria-born French musicologist Alexis Chottin lays out a taxonomy of music in Morocco (1939). Chottin places the Arab dance music categorically opposite that of Amazigh communities who had been in the region before earlier Arab expansion. Although he does not delve explicitly into political questions, this opposition is closely aligned with the French authorities’ implementation of policies that segregate these two groups in order to weaken a growing Moroccan nationalism (Wyrtzen 2016). The most detailed study of Morocco’s rural dances by a Spanish scholar, Emilio Blanco Izaga’s 

 similarly avoids religious or political questions and limits itself to describing the participants’ bodily movements and the structure of the dances (Blanco Izaga 1946a, 1946b, 1946c). However, the ways in which he depicts Amazigh communities as “primitive” people untainted by civilization, no matter how well-intentioned, evokes the trope of the “noble savage” that had been central in propaganda supporting colonialism since the Early Modern era.

The question of whether the brotherhoods used trance politically is impossible to answer given the lack of unbiased scholarship from the period. Because most writings from the colonial period were written by military personnel who were concerned with security, they generally conflate religious practice and politics as they describe trance dancing as demonic, anti-Christian, and anti-European. Furthermore, they depict trance as fake—a superstition with no proper place in Islam—and a dubious remedy that deprived Moroccans of the benefits of European biomedicine (Padilla 1930, 8; García Figueras 1953, 317). The soldier and scholar Eduardo Maldonado Vázquez’s claim that “superstition and the lack of culture attributes curative power to dance” (Maldonado Vázquez 1932, 41) was representative of the general state of mind among the Spanish and the French. Scholars and the military regarded biomedicine both as a rational counterweight to the frenzy caused by trance among the Moroccan population and as a weapon against anti-colonial resistance. Manuel Nido y Torres’s manual for officials argued that the Spanish doctors in Morocco should not restrict themselves to curing the “ailments of the body,” but should treat those of the “soul” too, in order to cast away any “superstitious practices,” “attract the rebels,” and carry out a “pacific penetration” of the country (Nido y Torres 1925, 187).

The writings of protectorate scholars and military personnel deployed these and similar strategies, emptying trance of religious meaning and political legitimacy. Sufi trance featured recurrently in Spanish scholarship as a stunning activity that numbed the senses of the practitioners and interfered with their perception mechanism. The Spanish described trance as a state that impaired the participants’ cognitive capacities, and in which a wide range of overwhelmingly intense stimuli saturated their senses, reducing the dancers to a half-conscious, unresponsive state. The following examples show that the Spanish in Morocco used their own notions of sonic harmony as indexes of modernity and —as did Europeans (Boutin 2015; Llano 2018a, 2018b)—to formulate ideas of the colonial order that the “noisy” dances threatened to destabilize. Maldonado Vázquez described the 

 as a true cacophony, in which “The noise of cymbals, drums, tabors, and flutes,” mixes with the “stomping of the feet on the floor,” the “shrieks,” and “the smell of incense and sweat,” reducing the participants to a “state of torpor,” in which they “say all sorts of stupid things”’ (Maldonado Vázquez 1932, 18). Enrique Arqués described the 

 as a “loud, barbaric music” whose effect is comparable to “the roaring of a tempest falling upon us” (Arqués 1946, 68).

Such descriptions echo many other comparisons of non-western music with “noise” that are commonplace in European writings about their colonial subjects. Consider however the specific religious connotations of these testimonies, particularly the denial of spiritual depth implicit in portraying trance as chaos—Maldonado Vázquez attributed to “ignorance” the participants’ belief that “they get closer to the Deity” (1932, 18). A condemnatory tone prevailed even in testimonies that did not discuss or dismiss religious aspects and focused instead on formal questions, such as the use of repetition. Blanco Izaga, one of Amazigh culture’s greatest champions, described Rifian dances as an “amorphous mass,” because they “end in the same way that they begin,” and because “there is not a single theme in them to be developed” (1946b).

The scholarship and reports produced by the Spanish military and administration simultaneously blurred and affirmed the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the body and the mind, and the physical and the spiritual. This interplay with boundaries was designed to create epistemological confusion and make it harder to refute views of curative trance as anything other than a superstition that defiled sacred religious beliefs. The interpretation of trance by the Spanish is problematic on at least two counts. First, the brotherhoods do not inhabit a religious realm that is separate from the secular as described by western conventional medicine. For them, all is embedded into a single system of beliefs and practices (Crapanzano 1973, 131). Second, the presence of supernatural images such as “six-legged horses” (Mitjana 1905, 120) in Spanish descriptions of Sufi pilgrimages compromise the veracity of these testimonies, undermining claims that trance was pure superstition.

The skepticism of the Spanish was symptomatic of their inability to understand the nature and purpose of “medicine” in Morocco.

 Morocco’s system of healing draws from a range of traditions, including prophetic medicine, which searches for answers in the Quran; humoral medicine, which is inspired in classic Arab medicine; the knowledge of seers, who use magic; the management of sanctuaries, which administer 

; and biomedicine, which was introduced by Europeans in Morocco from the early twentieth century (Dieste 2010, 171). These different traditions do not exclude each other, but rather coexist within the same medical system, even within the same treatments. European scholars attributed this multiplicity to what they judged to be a lack of systematic thinking in Moroccan society. Europeans failed to appreciate the structural complexity of both the ritual and the music of Sufi trance. Curative trance is a system of therapy that is “a structured set of procedures for the rehabilitation of an incapacitated individual” (Crapanzano 1973, 4). The discharge of tension taking place during trance “is not merely an emotional outburst [...] but a highly structured process” (Crapanzano 1973, 6). Europeans underestimated the complex meaning of repetition in Sufi trance, dismissing it as a manifestation of a “primitive” mentality. Repetition in Sufi trance generates stability and motion at the same time, because the melodic and rhythmic motives that are repeated are not fixed, but rather subject to constant variation and shifting degrees of intensity during the 

The colonial history of Sufi trance in Morocco reveals important details about the ways in which the brotherhoods used dance to negotiate their identity at a critical moment of their history. 

The examples discussed above show that trance was a site of struggle and a tool of identity construction in the face of colonial oppression and persecution.

 The study of trance’s colonial history helps to complicate the genealogy of this cultural practice by casting its colonial and postcolonial history through the lens of shifting encounters with power. The medical history of trance is the history of the body conceived as a site of struggle that has yet to be written into the history of Moroccan trance.

In what ways do you imagine music contributing to the healing of physical and psychological suffering? Consider your own listening experiences. Have you ever felt that music had a physical impact upon your well-being?

Why do you think European colonizers regarded Moroccan trance as a “superstition”? Do you believe they simply misinterpreted the practice, or do you think there could be additional reasons for labeling trance as “superstition”?

In what ways might Moroccan trance be considered a “political” practice? What might the study of Moroccan trance teach us about the relationship between music and politics? In your discussion consider whether “political” has a simple and fixed meaning, or one that is complex and contingent on the circumstances in which we define it.

The only sources that we have documenting earlier practices of Moroccan trance are the testimonies left by Europeans. Considering the degree to which they are biased and rife with prejudice, to what extent do you think they are worthy of our attention? Are there any lessons to be drawn from their study? Why do you think it might be important to consider the history of Moroccan trance during the colonial period rather than focus only on current practices and meanings?

This research was made possible by funding from the European Research Council (ERC), as part of the project "Past and Present Musical Encounters Across the Strait of Gibraltar" (MESG-758221).

Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the colonial encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

. Edited by Etnografía y Prehistoria Sociedad Española de Antropología. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Antropología, Etnografía y Prehistoria.

Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity Through Music and Visual Culture

. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Blanco Izaga, Emilio. 1946c. “Las Danzas Rifeñas. I: Preámbulo.” 

———. 1946b. “Las Danzas Rifeñas. II: Su Interpretación.” 

———. 1946a. “Las Danzas Rifeñas. III.” 

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The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry

. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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García Figueras, Tomás. 1953. “Música y Danza En Marruecos.” In 

Miscelánea de Estudios Varios Sobre Marruecos

, edited by Tomás García Figueras, 313–30. Tetuán: Editoria Marroquí.

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Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form

. First edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts

Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace

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Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850-1930

———. 2018b. “Mapping Street Sounds in the Nineteenth-Century City: A Listener’s Guide to Social Engineering.” 

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. Tetuán: Alta Comisaría de la República Española en Marruecos.

Apuntes Para El Oficial de Intervención Y de Tropas Coloniales

Cofradías Religiosas en el Rif y Diversas Taifas de Xorfas. Zauias Y Santuarios

. Tetuán: Alta Comisaría de España en Marruecos.

Somer, Eli, and Meir Saadon. 2000. “Stambali: Dissociative Possession and Trance in a Tunisian Healing Dance.” 

Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Making Morocco: Colonial intervention and the politics of identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016.

Sufi trance in colonial Morocco developed under strict colonial scrutiny and control and has been the object of fear, misunderstanding, dismissal, and even scorn. This article considers colonialism's impact on the production and perpetuation of negative stereotypes about trance.

Moroccan Trance: Unruly Bodies and the Colonial Imagination

In the village of Leweton on the tropical island of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, a community is rallying together to revitalise and share its cultural and environmental knowledge across generations. Its people come from the smaller, more remote northern islands of Merelava and Gaua, two of the 83 islands in the archipelago that comprises the Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Over time, these people relocated to Leweton, partly to access education, employment, healthcare and other services available on Espiritu Santo, but also as a result of the difficulties the rapidly changing climate presented to lives and livelihoods (Hayward 2014; Grant 2019).

Throughout Vanuatu, the climate crisis is wreaking environmental havoc. Cyclones in 2015 and 2020 were the two strongest ever recorded in the nation, each leaving a good proportion of the population in need of humanitarian assistance (United Nations Children's Fund 2016; World Vision 2020). Natural disasters like these are increasing in frequency and severity due to the climate crisis (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021). They threaten traditional ways of life in Vanuatu and disrupt time-honoured cultural practices.

The Leweton community recognises, however, that the treasured cultural practices of their home islands are a way of both understanding and responding to changes in the climate. One such practice is 

, known in English as the Vanuatu Women’s Water Music. 

 is a sonically and visually striking performance tradition with deep interconnections to the natural world. Standing in a circle or semi-circle in waist-deep water, the women rhythmically slap the surface of the water using a variety of hand techniques that create a surprising diversity of sounds. These sounds reflect those in the natural local environment – the call of a particular species of bird; an oncoming cyclone; or waves over the reef at low tide (Dick 2014).

 performances often comprise a handful of “pieces” each lasting a minute or two, resulting in a diverse set of around five or ten minutes (though this depends on performance context and function). Typically, each piece features a distinct rhythm (or set of rhythms) accompanied by a simple chanted or intoned melodic phrase. Video 1 shows the women and girls of Leweton performing one such piece in the coastal shallows near their village; with their words, they call for rain, and (in the words) the rain comes.

 becomes a message passing through the air and water, simultaneously reflecting and shaping the space around it. For the Leweton community, 

 is an ‘acoustemology:’ a sonic way of knowing and interacting with the natural world, and a means to strengthen and celebrate the deep relationship between nature and culture (Feld 2012). In the words of cultural leader Sandy Sur:

The sound weaves through the ocean and the land, weaving our stories as it goes. Our stories are told through the water like a book [...] When the women are performing the Water Music, they’re telling us our story through nature. (Interview with Catherine Grant, November 2017)

 is a medium that allows the people of Leweton to collaboratively acknowledge, reflect on, and respond to the environmental and climate changes they are experiencing. Performer Cecelia Lolonun says,

The sounds of Water Music are still the same, but the meaning of Water Music is different now, because of climate change. Water gives us the sounds of things that are happening now [...] Climate change changes everything about nature and us. We have to keep on teaching traditional ways of looking after things. If we keep these ways strong, we can keep our nature alive. (Interview with Catherine Grant, November 2017)

 is also a way for Leweton villagers to share their cultural and environmental knowledge with tourists, and to educate them about the local impacts of environmental and climate change. From nearby Luganville port, a popular stop for cruise ships, tourists make the short trip to Leweton to participate in the activities of Leweton Cultural Village, an initiative Sandy Sur founded in the mid-2000s to support local livelihoods and “kastom” (traditional or heritage) cultural practices.

is the signature cultural practice that the villagers showcase for tourists.

In recent years, as the international profile of 

has grown, the women of Leweton have been invited to perform around the world (Dick 2014; Hayward 2014). In this way, 

 has enabled their participation in global climate discussions. The women proudly showcase their unique cultural practice as a way to generate wider awareness about the ramifications of climate change for Indigenous and island communities around the world (Grant 2019). In an era where calls for urgent climate action are often accused of being hyperbolic, 

 is a strikingly unique and powerful way to educate and rally for climate action.

The following film (Video 2) is an outcome of long-term and ongoing partnerships between three Brisbane-based Australian creative arts researchers – documentary filmmaker Ashley Burgess, director Maeve McKenna, and music researcher Catherine Grant – and the members of the Leweton community, including our primary contact and co-author Leweton cultural leader Sandy Sur. Catherine Grant had previously collaborated with Sandy and the women of Leweton on a project that explored the relationship of 

to issues of climate justice (2017-2018, reported in Grant 2019).

The film was recorded in 2019 during Ashley’s and Maeve’s trip to Leweton, during which they were leading an international study abroad tour for students at their university. Ashley and Maeve consulted with community members in advance about the topic and content of the film. Most of those they consulted considered 

to be a defining part of their village identity and an important part of their culture, and wanted to celebrate and share its deeper meaning.

All three of us Australian researchers (Ashley, Maeve, and Catherine) continue our collaboration with Sandy Sur and the people of Leweton at the time of writing (late 2022). According to Sandy, research, creative, and educational collaborations like these leverage the efforts of the Leweton community. They help the story of Leweton’s cultural and natural richness reach a wide international audience. They help people learn about how meaningful and important these interconnections are for the people of Leweton. They also help other people understand how deeply water, nature, and culture are interconnected, not only for Indigenous peoples in Vanuatu, but for everyone around the world.

Ashley Burgess and Maeve McKenna’s 2019 field trip to Leweton on which this film was made was funded by a grant of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan. Catherine Grant’s field trip in 2017 was funded by a research grant from Griffith University. The authors wish to thank all members of the Leweton community for sharing their unique cultural practices and knowledge with the wider world. 

The women performers who feature in this film are Denilla Frazer, Melinda Frazer, Jerolyn Frazer, Beverley Frazer, Cecilia Tingris, Cicilia Wari, Marie Sur, Sonrin Sur, Trisha Sur, and Margaret Tingris.

Apart from cyclones, what other challenges might the climate crisis be generating for the people of small-island communities like Leweton? What impacts might those challenges be having on water, reefs, land, food, tourism, health, housing, employment, cultural practices, and other aspects of life?

The video uses the phrase “Water is life.” What could this mean for the people of Leweton? What social and cultural functions of water does this idea suggest for the Leweton community?

is a gendered practice. From the video, what roles might 

play in the lives of women and girls of Leweton?

help the people of Leweton advocate for local, national, and international environmental or climate action? What are some of the possibilities of drawing on 

as a cultural resource in this way? What are some limitations? Are there any risks involved for the community?

Can you think of any other music genres, especially near where you live, that carry environmental knowledge, or that play a role in advocating for environmental care or action? What roles are they playing, and how?

The video represents a collaboration between people from the Leweton community and “outsider” researchers. What might have been some advantages and challenges of such a collaboration for the community? What about for the researchers? How might the challenges be overcome?

Dick, Thomas. 2014. “Vanuatu Water Music and the Mwerlap Diaspora: Music, Migration, Tradition, and Tourism.” 

AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples

Grant, Catherine. 2019. “Climate Justice and Cultural Sustainability: The Case of Etëtung (Vanuatu Women’s Water Music).” 

Hayward, P. 2014. “Sounding the Aquapelago: The Cultural-Environmental Context of Ni-Vanuatu Women's Liquid Percussion Performance.” 

Cole, Tim (director), Sur, Sandy (story), Wavales, Hilda (story), Leweton Cultural Group (performers). 2014. 

[film]. Port Vila: Further Arts. Available on Kanopy database.

 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hayward, Philip. 2014. “Sounding the Aquapelago: The Cultural-Environmental Context of ni-Vanuatu Women's Liquid Percussion Performance.” 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2021. 

“AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.”

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

“Cyclone Harold Leaves 160,000 Homeless: CAT II Disaster Declared.”

The women of Leweton have been performing Water Music for international audiences since the founding of the Leweton Cultural Village in 2008, and have been practising this tradition for as long as they remember.

Ol Woman Blong Wota (The Women of the Water)

Permanently valuable collections of records and the buildings and/or institutions that hold them. “Permanently valuable records” can include letters, reports, manuscripts, photographs, audio and video recordings, and digital-born materials.

Archival science points to archival origins in the 1789-1799 French Revolution. Prior to the Revolution, “archive” referred almost exclusively to documents providing legal or economic privileges to the state, church, nobility, or merchant class. In essence, European privileged classes created safe places for the documents that helped maintain their positions and privilege. The French Revolution began to alter this construction. In keeping with their slogan of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the revolutionaries redefined archives as a bulwark of citizens’ rights, ensuring that every citizen could access archival records to protect their rights and freedom (Jimerson 2009).

Archives have been many things to many people. Some have described them as temples, in which records of human activity achieve the semblance of authority and immortality. Referencing the security and protection typically present at an archive, others refer to them as prisons. Still others depict archives as restaurants, where those who are hungry for truth and knowledge seek metaphoric nourishment (Jimerson 2009). More accurately, they contain the very stuff that makes us who we are: evidence of our human life, ideas, truths, failures, and social memory (Kaplan 2000). At their best, archives can function as storehouses containing the tools for self-determination (Seeger 2004). Since materials in archives derive from our everyday lives, they provide us with important perspectives on our pasts/presents to help us decide what we want to do in our futures.

The history of sound and music being included in, or “accessioned” into, archives dates to the invention of sound recording equipment. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, a device that records sound by etching patterns formed by sound waves onto wax cylinders or discs. Soon after, in 1890, U.S. anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850-1930) traveled to Maine to the Passamaquoddy Tribe to test this brand-new technology. Over the course of three days and using 35 wax cylinders, he recorded several tribal elders singing songs and speaking vocabulary, numbers, and important cultural narratives. These recordings are the first “field recordings” – recordings made outside of a recording studio – and are now stored at the American Folklife Center at the U.S. Library of Congress.

A few years later, the first sound archives were founded in Europe: the Phonogrammarchiv in the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1899, and the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin in 1900. Importantly, the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv was directed by Erich von Hornbostel (1877-1935), a pioneering scholar in the discipline now known as “ethnomusicology,” the study of music/sound as culturally meaningful phenomena. At its foundation, ethnomusicology is a discipline based on recordings, and the invention of sound recording technology and the founding of sound archives provided academics with the necessary tools and institutional support to create and develop this new scholarly discipline (Topp-Fargion 2008). Improvements to sound recording technology expanded the discipline. By the 1950s, portable, magnetic recording devices had largely replaced the cumbersome, delicate, and technically demanding phonograph. Suddenly, it was easier and cheaper for field researchers to make high quality recordings. They had soon traveled across the world, recording a vast array of diverse cultures, often placing their field recordings in archives located in Europe and the U.S. In addition to field recordings, sound archives today can contain commercial recordings, radio broadcasts, and materials connected to these recordings, such as personal papers, liner notes, field notes, letters, reports, and release forms.

Today, archivists ensure appropriate care for the collections housed in their repositories so that people can access them. They appraise and select materials of permanent value from donations, store and preserve them in a stable environment, and then arrange them and publish descriptions so that people can find and use them. Preservation typically presents many challenges. Perhaps surprisingly, the archival format with the greatest longevity is paper. However, today many archival materials are digital-born. Digital materials – which include an ever-increasing number of audio and video recordings – are very delicate and exist only as long as the media carrier – like a video tape – containing them. As media and computer hard drives age or break, the files they hold are lost. One solution is to back up materials in triplicate in different locations, which some archival cloud services offer as a standard feature. Nevertheless, digital archivists continue to work towards longer-term solutions to improve our abilities to preserve digital-born materials.

Once perceived as “neutral” caretakers of archives, archivists actually hold substantial power over the archive. And the archive as an institution can itself hold great power within its cultural context. Archival records have been used to define legitimacy, authenticity, and even prove or disprove people’s very existence. Some scholars suggest that events do not necessarily enter into the archive because they are pivotal, but rather that events become pivotal by virtue of being placed in an archive, thereby entering history (Taylor 2006). The archival function of appraisal, in which an archivist chooses some records as having “permanent value” and discards others, determines what people in the future will know about the past: whose voices will be maintained and whose will be silenced. In these regards, archivists co-create the archive (Cook 2011). In a very real sense, even the ways archivists define an “archival format” can be restrictive. In some Polynesian cultures, tattoos are archives (Wright 2009); and in some Caribbean cultures, Carnival performances are archives (Bastian 2009). Yet, body ornamentation and live performances are typically not considered archives by Euro-American archival science and are therefore excluded, disenfranchising these communities.

Repatriation – the return of cultural materials to the country or people who created them – continues to be a simultaneously vital and fraught discussion across cultural memory institutions, including archives. Europe- and U.S.-based ethnomusicologists conducting research in Africa, South and Central America, Australia, Asia, and elsewhere, typically placed their field research materials in archives in Europe and the U.S. It can be prohibitively expensive for source community members to access the holding institutions. For example, the prolific German field recordist Klaus Wachsmann (1907-1984) recorded over 1500 recordings between 1949 and 1957 in Uganda, eventually depositing them at the British Library Sound Archive in the U.K. The people featured in the recordings and their heirs were unable to access them until 2009, when Ugandan ethnomusicologist Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza administered a project to facilitate digital repatriation of accessible copies of Wachsmann’s recordings to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda’s capital (Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub 2012). But digital repatriation of copies is not the same thing as repatriating the originals – the repatriating archive does not cede control of the materials. As such, these archives retain control of the cultural heritage materials – and therefore of the cultures – represented in their collections.

Fueled by decolonization and reconciliation movements, some archivists are creating new ways for their repositories to relate with source communities, such as “shared stewardship,” championed by the U.S.-based Smithsonian Institution. This framework recognizes the rights of source communities to control their own cultural heritage. Archivists consult with community members to ensure culturally-appropriate care and description, and share authority, expertise, and responsibility with source communities (Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage 2019). Another toolkit that is increasingly used to promote culturally-appropriate and ethical archival practices, especially in Indigenous communities, is Mukurtu CMS. This free content management system facilitates the creation of community-specific databases and access protocols, for example, by controlling access by time of year, clan, family, age group, sex, etc., using locally meaningful definitions (Christen, Merrill and Wynne 2017).

In summary, archivists around the world work towards the goal of preserving historically meaningful materials – including music and sound – for future generations to access in ethical and meaningful ways. As they do so, they continue to wrestle with the outcomes of colonial and Empire-based histories that their institutions helped construct. Ensuring that the people represented in archives can access the material depicting them means that archives can continue to be useful storehouses of the tools of self-determination.

What sounds do you encounter on a regular basis, and how could you go about capturing them so that future generations might be able to hear them, too?

What memories and knowledge do you and your communities consider worth saving so that future generations might access them? What format (video, paper, etc.) do they take?

How might an archive be useful to the communities in which you are embedded?

Jimerson, Randall. “Introduction: Embracing the Power of Archives.” In 

Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice

, 1-23. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009.

Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia, and Andrew Weintraub. “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in Uganda.” 

Review the websites and collections of these institutions, which are among some of the best-known sound archives in the world.

American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

Founded in 1976, the Center cares for an archive established in 1928. It is one of the largest ethnographic archives in the world, with millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation recorded from the 19th century to the present.

This sound archive is attached to one of the largest and oldest ethnomusicology graduate programs in the world, and continues to play a vital role in the discipline.

Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution

Staff at the Ralph Rinzler Archives created the collaborative collections management framework “shared stewardship” in 2019. Soon after, this framework was adopted by all Smithsonian repositories. In addition to a variety of field recordings, this sound archive includes collections from the Smithsonian Folkways record label, including record labels acquired by Folkways over the years.

The first national public museum in the world, the British Museum was established in 1753. The Sound Archive features one of the largest collections of sound recordings in the world.

Makerere University Klaus Wachsmann Music Archive

An excellent example of digital return, or repatriation, this archive, founded in 2009, localizes Ugandan recordings made by Klaus Wachsmann in the mid-1900s in Uganda’s capital.

Bastian, Jeannette A. “‘Play mas’: carnival in the archives and the archives in carnival: records and community identity in the US Virgin Islands.” 

Christen, Kimberly, Alex Merrill, and Michael Wynne. “A Community of Relations: Mukurtu Hubs and Spokes.” 

Cook, Terry. “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape.”

Dempsey, Lorcan. “Scientific, Industrial, and Cultural Heritage: a Shared Approach.” 

22 (2000). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/dempsey/

 Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009.

Kaplan, Elizabeth. “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity.”

Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia, and Andrew Weintraub. “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in Uganda.”

Seeger, Anthony. “New Technology Requires New Collaborations: Changing Ourselves to Better Shape the Future.”

Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage, Shared Stewardship of Collections (July 2019): https://folklife-media.si.edu/docs/folklife/Shared-Stewardship.pdf.

Taylor, Diana. “Performance and/As History.” 

Topp-Fargion, Janet. “Recordings in Context: The Place of Ethnomusicology Archives in the 21st Century.” 

Wright, Kirsten. “Recording ‘A Very Particular Custom’: Tattoos and the Archive.” 

This article provides an overview of critical issues regarding music in archives.

Music and Archives

 is a new collaborative effort to create a free and broadly accessible resource for the general public, educators, students, and researchers alike. Its open collections of scholarly, peer-reviewed writing and multimedia materials focus on increasing access to underrepresented voices, writing styles, and audiences, all with undergraduate students and a broad readership in mind.

An online and open resource for teaching and learning ethnomusicology and musicology 

World Music

Textbook

We are pleased to share that we have been able to increase the honorarium funding available to authors who submit and publish on the World Music Textbook to $500 per piece. Our hope is that this will boost our submissions and fuel our growth as the project enters a new era. See the 

 and contact us at editors@worldmusictextbook.org with any ideas for contributions!

Increased Honorarium Funding Available

We are pleased to share the launch of our updated and streamlined website. Improvements include better functionality for phones and other devices, as well as a new look as we bring our project out of its fledgling state. 

 project, we have been focused on exploring best practices while carving a pathway toward sustainability. We knew that we wanted more flexibility than what most platforms offer, so we started building the site from scratch using familiar technologies that let us get running quickly. The site we are launching today is brand new, another build from scratch, but one that uses modern tooling and provides us with extraordinary flexibility to grow.

A blog-like news section that makes online sharing and social media updates more consistent and cohesive;

And a hosted server—which we can use for improved control of our content, mailing lists, and other things that you don't necessarily see—that we can expand in the future for potential features like custom 

The site is built on open technologies and run using free services. All are standards in modern web development and well documented. The rest of this post includes technical details about our change for anyone who might be interested or considering a similar open project.

In building a fully custom site that does what we need, we made use of a host of technologies. With so many options, it can be difficult to know where to start. As we move to version 2, here is an outline of what we are using. If you have questions or want to talk about how these (or other) approaches can help make your project idea happen, reach out to us at 

Knowing that websites can come and go, we wanted to ensure that contributions to this one are properly archived and accessible forever. The standard way to handle this is using DOI records, but these can require expensive memberships. To keep everything free (an important part of project sustainability), we host our PDF files through 

Bowling Green State University's library system

. With the push toward open educational resources, many libraries can offer use of their DOI access, it is worth asking library staff about potential options.

We wanted full control over what our site could be and do, which meant that standard no- or low-code site generators like WordPress were not flexible enough for our needs. Many also charge fees for hosting and ad-free sites. We opted to build the site using standard web development tools. Our first version used 

, which serves the purpose well. It builds 

 from easy-to-edit markdown files and allows developers to customize themes more easily than systems like WordPress.

, a library that offers a number of benefits, in part because it is based on React, an industry standard for web development. Among other things like faster load times, Next.js combines the benefits of static site generation with an API system for server-sided work. Right now, we use this to improve our mailing list signup and other simple tasks, but it opens possibilities related to site users being able to log in and save their work. Think building custom 

 course schedules and reading lists or saving online course content and integrating it with resources from within and outside of this project.

All of these are free and open code libraries. We store our code in open repositories at 

. Each of these has free or free-for-education tiers. Most importantly for our goal of sustainability, however, is that if the pricing were to change, this is all just code with no vendor lock in: we can change services with minimal trouble. On the downside, this kind of distributed system requires a great deal more web development knowledge than fully integrated services like WordPress.

One reason for our recent change from Jekyll to Next.js is content management. We previously had to hand-code and update any new material. The new site integrates into a content management system (CMS) called 

. This is another open source project with a free community tier and it allows for any of our editors to easily add and edit any of the text on the site. It's also impressively customizable and has been a pleasure to learn and use so far.

That's all on the digital side. We use Pandoc with LaTeX to create print journal-quality PDF files of every contribution. 

You can see our templates and processes in this repository on GitLab.

Other stuff that we're trying out includes 

 for educators for our own internal record keeping; 

 for very basic analytics that don't collect any identifiable personal data; and Discord for communication and custom bots that notify us when you sign up for the mailing list, suggest a resource, and so on.

Taken together, this collection of tools and services has afforded us a free, open, flexible, and powerful way to collaborate and build a dependable and sustainable 

. If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions—or you are considering creating an open resource and just want to toss some ideas around—let us know! And, of course, if you want to be a part of this work, 

Some notes about our new and improved look

World Music
Textbook

Recently published chapters

Video Game Music

Moroccan Trance: Unruly Bodies and the Colonial Imagination

Ol Woman Blong Wota (The Women of the Water)

Music and Archives

News and Updates

Increased Honorarium Funding Available

Website redesign

Summer 2022 Update

Music notes: Overviews for the classroom

World MusicTextbook

Recently published chapters

Video Game Music

Moroccan Trance: Unruly Bodies and the Colonial Imagination

Ol Woman Blong Wota (The Women of the Water)

Music and Archives

News and Updates

Increased Honorarium Funding Available

Website redesign

Summer 2022 Update

Music notes: Overviews for the classroom

World Music
Textbook