Signals of Change and Continuity: Coahoma County and Bissingen
Text: Heikki Uimonen Twenty years ago, in my ethnomusicological dissertation on sonic environments, I quoted Alan Lomax. Lomax writes that the musical history of Coahoma County, Mississippi had three periods, each signalled by a characteristic sound: a steamboat blowing for a landing, a locomotive whistling on a three-mile grade, and a Greyhound bus blaring down […]
Sensory Experience of Glass and Brass
Text: Heikki Uimonen Sensing individuals are affected by their culture and personal history. Nevertheless, cultures are not just filters of sensory experience, as anthropologist Tim Ingold concludes. People are informed by their senses as they move through particular cultures, which themselves have particular materialities. (Bijsterveld 2000, 14.) So, what is then the cultural study of sound […]
Human soundscape, strange weather, and methodologies
Text: Heikki Uimonen, Anne Tarvainen & Kaj Ahlsved On Friday morning, the Someco research team sat down for a coffee at the Peppes Café in Lessebo to wait for the train to come and to reflect on the field work. The first thing we noticed was how friendly the people were and how positive they […]
Scholars on the beat: qualitative and quantitative sensory perception
Text: Heikki Uimonen The 24-hour field recording combined with the traffic count started on Friday at 6 am on Storgatan and Gamla vägen. Samples of 10 minutes were recorded every full hour. The method differed from the listening walk presented here on 5 February in that it was stationary and headphone-based. The first three rounds were […]
Visiting the Folklore Archives
Meri Kytö Last week, we visited the Acoustic Environments in Change project archive at the Folklore Archives (Tampere University, Finland). Helmi Järviluoma, who led the 2000 project, came to our aid to make sure everything was in the right place. For me (Meri) and Heikki, the material was familiar, but for Anne and Kaj, there […]
Heading to the Field
Heikki Uimonen — Dear all This is to let you all know that the Someco research team is packing their fieldwork bags and preparations are well underway. Collecting recording equipment and related documentation tools, filling in the necessary research forms, contacting villagers, etc. is slowly but surely being done. We’re familiarising ourselves with the existing […]