Music-Archaeological Experimentation and Aural Heritage: Human Perspectives on Sonic Experience

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human interactions with archaeological materials and settings facilitate responsive explorations of things and places in use. In my Andean fieldwork at Chavín and Huánuco Pampa, music-archaeological experiments and ethno-archaeomusicological performance studies of artifact instruments and their replica proxies have revealed functional affordances of materials and settings. Beyond contributing materially representative data to the archaeological record that ground-truths archaeological hypotheses, this methodology offers novel processual products. Sonic experimentation as performance study and also as an aural heritage engagement serves complementary purposes. In situ performance reconstructions enable interactive analyses of setting-contextualized soundmaking, “performance soundscape science” that explores how acoustical and haptic feedback from sonic/musical instruments, architecture, and setting influence human performers' soundmaking. “Aural heritage” is a developing term for the human communicative and perceptual implications of culturally contextualized material acoustics, inclusive of all sound-sensing modalities. Experiments activate aural heritage, directly engaging performers and observers while enabling documentation for preservation. Pivotal to these explorations are human perspectives on physical experience, which, though malleable, stem from an ancient physiology common to humans across time and geography. Therefore, acoustical-performance affordances of archaeological materials and settings produce aural heritage data and engagements of an “archaeological possibility space” that emphasizes archaeological plausibility and present engagement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32733