The Sound of a Person

Konggap, sung melodic motifs that last only a few seconds embody the acoustic representation of a person among the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea and are a unique phenomenon in the Pacific. The konggap forms a very complex system of personal identification and expression of social relationships; at the same time it connects the singer to the ancestral world. Every person in Yupno society possesses his or her own konggap, and Yupno people are able to identify a large number of konggap, some men even up to three hundred. Nobody would sing his or her own konggap during the day. When crossing Yupno land, a person has to sing the konggap of the respective landowner to identify himself as an insider, a local person ? unlike strangers (and possible enemies) who remain silent. But at nightly dances each dancer sings his own konggap and during mourning at funerals groups of women simultaneously sing the konggap of the deceased person. An interdisciplinary ethnographic‐musicological‐cognitive fieldwork study was conducted in order to find out how it is possible that the Yupno are able to identify and distinguish between this staggering amount of very short sung motifs.     

Ethnographic sound collections and Australian Aboriginal Heritage: Kaytetye song traditions remembered

ABSTRACT

Song was one of the principal methods of transmitting knowledge in the fundamentally oral societies of Indigenous Australia. As the breadth of song traditions has greatly diminished over the past 200 years, archival recordings of song now form a significant resource of intangible cultural heritage for Australia’s Indigenous people. The song performances recorded in the past are now being rediscovered, remembered and in some cases revived. This paper presents findings from a recent project involving the return of a set of poorly documented recordings of songs to Kaytetye people in central Australia. These newly discovered recordings, the earliest ever made of Kaytetye singing, are shown to be an important heritage resource for these communities. Working collaboratively with senior song experts in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and cultural significance of various songs, I document the how this discussion of audio material generated important social-histories and memories, reinforced local understandings of rights in cultural heritage, and revealed both continuities and changes in Kaytetye ceremonial and song practice.     

Melanesians and Music on the Move: South Sea Island Shipboard and Plantation Performance in Queensland, 1860s–1906

Taking a historical ethnomusicological approach, this article argues that shipboard and plantation music and dance practices cast new light on the ways South Sea Islanders (SSI) acted out agency and asserted new identities as they became tangled up in the dynamics of colonial encounters. Trading ships started to operate in Melanesia in the 1840s and island men were quickly attracted to the nautical life. Contact with the West brought opportunity but also exploitation when in 1863 the recruitment of Islanders for farm and plantation work in Queensland began. As they ventured into the unknown on recruiting ships, Islanders engaged in performance in order to establish cross-societal bonds with villagers from islands other than their own, and also with European sailors and settlers. Experimenting with any and all modes of sound making, SSI looked to music as a source of enjoyment and a means of individual and collective self-advancement. They took instruments, repertoire items, and gramophones back to their home islands as evidence of their familiarity with the wider world, and as creative resources to employ in the changing times ahead of them. Those who remained in Queensland at the beginning of the 20th century faced the challenge of how to integrate and indigenize the new musical ideas, and transform them into life – and community-sustaining expressions.     

Sound recordings and cultural heritage: the Fonck Museum,the Felbermayer collection,and its relevance to contemporary Easter Island culture

Sound recording plays a prominent role in cultural heritage work in the Pacific region, supported by sound archives and institutional collections that serve to preserve this intangible cultural heritage. While it has long been a standard practice for field recordings to be lodged in institutions of learning, recent developments in Pacific research have emphasised the ethical and social benefits that can result from the repatriation of sound recordings to their communities of origin, and from the development of field recording practices in which cultural stakeholders are more directly involved. Meanwhile, the digitisation of historical sound recordings and the use of digital domains for dissemination have become matters of theoretical and methodological inquiry in their own right. This article seeks to contribute to the discourse surrounding the repatriation of historical field recordings through the presentation of findings from a recent Chilean government-funded digitisation and repatriation project involving previously undocumented recordings of Easter Island (Rapanui) music from the Fonck Museum, Viña del Mar. It will explain the circumstances under which the project developed, the strategies pursued in bringing it to fruition, and the reception of the project by the Rapanui community.