Eyes on Music: Visual Ethnomusicology Projects

Coordinated by Marco Lutzu and Simone Tarsitani

“Due to the anti Covid regulations we had to cancel the workshop as we had assumed it, face-to-face. However, the opportunity to work online gives us a unique opportunity to do, in an even more thorough and participatory way, one of the fundamental activities we had planned for the workshop, that is to work together with the winners of the Carpitella scholarship of the past years, discovering details of their ethnomusicological projects, looking at materials, discussing research perspectives, difficulties in the various stages of production, and, in the case of Christopher Ballengee, the final results of an annual work path.”

Marco Lutzu, Simone Tarsitani

In ethnomusicological studies, audiovisual recordings are becoming preponderant in fieldwork as well as in the production of documents and their diffusion. The camera has now replaced the tape-recorder in most documentation activities and digital technology has made high-quality audiovisual documents accessible for archiving, analysis and publication purposes. Films are used by ethnomusicologists not only for the production of documentaries, but also for popularising, teaching, and the creation of multimedia archives. This great proliferation of audiovisual technologies has not been accompanied, however, by adequate training of researchers. In the universities, the small number of teachers and few resources means that, in most cases, it is not possible to teach fieldwork and procedures for the documentation, analysis and editing of audiovisual products in a satisfactory way.

The edition of the workshop 2020 is being staged in collaboration with ARCHiVE, Durham University Department of Music and the University of Cagliari Department of Literature, Languages and Cultural Heritage.