Final Project Ideas

Music 512 – Winter 2010
Sound Archiving in Ethnomusicology

Final Project Ideas

1) Historical topic –
a. Oral history (significant individual in local audio world)
b. Impact of the change from acoustic to electric recordings on field recording
c. Are there any historical sound recording trends or topics that are being replayed today?

2) Theoretical topic
a. Rationale for ethnographic sound archives in a post-modern context
b. Should the discipline of ethnomusicology be doing more to promote the use and support of archives?
c. Changing expectations of users of sound/multimedia archives (if it’s not there, it doesn’t exist!)
d. What environmental and sustainability issues need to be considered for the future archive, i.e., what does it take to make a green sound archive?
e. Invent a sound archive!
f. Are sound archives prisons or parishes, or something in between?
g. Design a curriculum for a graduate degree program in sound archiving.

3) Archival practice
a. Critique of a real-life archive (organization, practices, policies, use of technology, etc.)
b. The role of sound archives in Native American language revival
c. Design of an archive for an organization (i.e., the “Pink Martini” archive; NW Folklife)
d. Collection assessment (for example, Kearney Barton’s collection).

4) Description/Access
a. Classification systems – Folksonomies (social tagging)
b. Broadcast WAVE format (BWAV) for archival metadata
c. Survey of approaches to audio presentation on archives’ websites (i.e., Southern Folklife Collection, UNC; ILAM; Comhaltas Traditional Music Archive; UCLA: UWEA).

5) Databases
a. Personal music collection software (comparison, evaluation, etc.)
b. Design of a database for a body of recordings (i.e., commercial Chicano pop music of the 1960s; shoebox of recordings you made during your trip to Bali)
c. Critique a database (.e.g. UW Library catalogs): what’s good about it? What’s missing?

6) Documentation
a. Design of a personal/family archival website (interviews, old family recordings, photos, etc.)
b. Design an online portal for an existing or imaginary sound archive.
c. Is the era of the lone ethnomusicologist/field recorder collecting for his/her dissertation over? In other words, should ethnomusicology instead be empowering communities to make their own recordings?

7) Preservation
a. Digital video file formats – why is there no archival standard?
b. Digital audio archiving standards (critique)
c. Comparison of sound editing programs