I love the way this photograph of a Bayaka woman who lives in the interior Congo rain forest in Central Africa, is surrounded by a digital audio file. In order to understand the interdisciplinary fusion of anthropology, music and the meaning behind this image, anthropology students and I attended the ‘Inside Sound’ event at the Pitt Rivers Ethnographic Museum, Oxford on Friday 22nd Nov 2013, and returned again in Feb 2014. This excellent workshop highlighted the importance of ‘ ethnomusicology’, which explores the relationship between culture and music through a case study of the rainforest soundscapes expressed by the Bayaka tribe. Check out the Pitt Rivers blog spot to listen to the tribal women’s’ early morning camp songs, and how this indigenous group beats water and trees to imitate drums.
Thanks to the ethnographic recordings of Dr Nathaniel Mann and Dr Louis Sarno’s Sound archive ‘Real to Real’, music as an expression of culture doesn’t get any more remarkable than this. http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/reel2real/
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