A Digital Humanities Project: Song in the Sumatran Highlands

FAIN: FT-270779-20

Jennifer Anne Fraser
Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH 44074-1057)

Preparation for digital publication of a multi-media resource about the music and culture of saluang, a song tradition from West Sumatra, Indonesia.

Song in the Sumatran Highlands is a digital humanities project that reimagines the ways ethnomusicologists share research and moves us closer to the sensorial worlds of performance. I will build an interactive website that is rich in multimedia, explanatory and interpretive text, annotated song texts, visualizations, and maps in order to model the sonic, visual, and spatial epistemologies of saluang, a West Sumatran vocal genre. It will map, for example, the sonic manifestations of place through tagging song titles, landmarks referenced in song texts, performers, and performances with geospatial metadata. Key to the design of the project is representing ethnomusicological knowledge in formats more accessible to the public, including the later creation of a parallel site in Indonesian. This grant will allow me to construct the structural and technical scaffolding of the site, including creating pages for each song, performer, and place.

Associated Products

CELEBRATING SALUANG: ADVANCING THE ARTS THROUGH THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: CELEBRATING SALUANG: ADVANCING THE ARTS THROUGH THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Author: Jennifer Fraser
Abstract: In this paper, I suggest a new ethnomusicological method for advancing the vitality of the arts: Digital Humanities. Song in the Sumatran Highlands, the digital project that I am in the process of building, draws on more than twenty years of ethnographic research to celebrate the Minangkabau vocal genre known as saluang for the flute that accompanies the vocalists. Using the platform Scalar, the interactive, user-friendly site is designed to be rich in multimedia (images, audios, and video), multimodal (multiple ways of experiencing and navigating the material), collaborative and responsive to interests of the saluang community. It does so by documenting the repertoire—the songs number in the hundreds—and mapping the sonic manifestations of place through tagging song titles, landmarks referenced in song texts, performers, and performances with geospatial metadata. I argue that this project helps reimagine the ways ethnomusicologists share research by moving beyond texts and closer to local sonic, visual, and spatial epistemologies and the sensorial worlds of performance. Key to the design of the project is representing ethnomusicological knowledge in formats more accessible to the public.
Date: 09/29/2020
Conference Name: The 52nd DIES NATALIS ISBI [Institut Seni Budaya Indonesia] BANDUNG: REPOSITION OF THE ART AND CULTURAL HERITAGE AFTER PANDEMIC ERA

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