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Using Tests of Sound Perception in Fieldwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

John Baily
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Extract

One of the crucial lessons that anthropology has taught ethnomusicology is the importance of trying to understand things from the inside, to explore the emic view, the folk view, actor's view, evaluation, explanation, model, representation; there are lots of terms for it. The point was made clearly many years ago by Alan Merriam in The Anthropology of Music, in the contrast between what he termed the folk evaluation and the analytical evaluation (Merriam 1964:31-32). Like other authors, Merriam emphasised the need for the researcher to find out how people define music and distinguish music from non-music:

One of the most important of such concepts is the distinction, implied or real, made between music on the one hand, and noise, or non-music, on the other; this is basic to the understanding of music in any society … If one group accepts the sound of the wind in the trees as music and another does not, or if one group accepts the croaking of frogs and the other denies it as music, it is evident that the concepts of what music is or is not must differ widely and must distinctively shape music sound (ibid. 63).

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 28 , 1996 , pp. 147 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 By The International Council for Traditional Music

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Footnotes

1.

This research was funded by the Social Science Research Council of the UK under their Conversion Fellowship Scheme, 1975-78. An early version of this paper was read in the Departmental Seminar of the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University of Belfast on 4 March 1980, under the title “Classification of Sounds: A Problem in Research Technique.” I am grateful to Dieter Christensen for encouraging me to re-write the paper for publication in this issue of YTM.

References

References Cited

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