ETHNODIGITAL SONICS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

RICHARD CULLEN RATH

I raised my hand, uncertain but determined. The professor, Africanist John Thornton, had asked if anyone knew music. I hesitated. It was 1988 and I was an adult scholar newly returned to school to pursue my BA. I was uncertain whether I was qualified for anything at that point. I had been playing guitar for about fifteen years and had a basic understanding of music theory, but I was not formally trained. But I thought, "I'm paying my tuition, so ..." I raised my hand, narrowly beating out another student who later told me she hesitated a moment longer than I had. The decision set off a chain of events that profoundly affected my trajectory through life and career.

The document Thornton gave me was just three or four photocopied pages from an old book that he had found on a research trip. The book was Hans Sloane's Voyage to the Islands (1707), a natural history of the islands off the west coast of Africa and in the Caribbean, where he focused most of his attention on Jamaica. The pages in question contained a paragraph or so of text describing the music and dance taking place at a gathering of enslaved Africans on a Jamaican plantation in 1688; an engraving of a pair of stringed instruments and some vines used to clean teeth (and perhaps used as strings); and two pages of music described and transcribed by Sloane and his musician friend Baptiste that fell under three headings — Angola, Papa, and Koromanti.

Over the course of the next two-going-on-three decades, my interest in ethnographic history and the emerging field of sound studies was transformed by the introduction of digital sound to personal computers. This article traces that trajectory and its evolution into what I am calling "ethnodigital sonics," a term that emerged from a conversation with David A. M. Goldberg at the University of Hawai'i Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative over what it was exactly that I did with sound in my research and my music as well as in our collaborative work in the initiative.

"Ethno" refers to the expanded interdisciplinary approaches that ethnohistorians and ethnomusicologists follow to understand histories and musics that are otherwise somewhat incomprehensible through traditional single-disciplinary approaches. In this case, I have drawn on linguistics, history, anthropology, and musicology to arrive at conclusions not available had I taken any single approach in isolation. In contexts other than the one used in this chapter, I have employed this "ethno" approach to western subjects, so the label describes the approach, not who or what is studied. Uncertainty is inherent to this project, given that in this sort of work, the sum of the source material still adds up — according to ethnohistorian Patricia Galloway — to fragmentary, multiply biased, partially understood glimpses. By making the "ethno" prefix characterize the method rather than the object of the study, I hope to bypass the justifiable criticism that ethnohistory replicates colonial power relations by offering different types of history for colonial actors than are offered for their "others." I think the methodological innovations of the approach are too substantial to warrant simply jettisoning the term. It shares this ecumenical approach with cultural studies and its related fields, so perhaps the prefix will end up being irrecoverable. I don't want to lean too heavily on it when the thing can be named in other ways.

While much ink has been spilled and many bits flipped on the subject of method in ethnomusicology, my reading has always been specific and goal-oriented: understanding a fragment of music or a snatch of transcription in the context of a particular time and place. For the African music in Jamaica project, my key sources from ethnomusicology are the foundational work of J. H. Kwabena Nketia on the music of Africa and Ken Bilby's groundbreaking work on the music of Maroons in Jamaica. Although I am aware of the many limitations inherent in Western musical transcription, the fact remains that in history the fragmented glimpse is often all we get. I cannot, as one ethnomusicologist suggested, "go back out into the field" for more. Galloway's warnings to interpret cautiously and suspiciously and the historian's stance of uncertainty are the talismans here, since the questions do not vanish just because the methods are inadequate.

As for the "digital" component of the term, digital audio was slowly emerging as an accessible technology in the 1990s. The Musical Instrument Digital Interface standard (MIDI, introduced in the previous decade) became available, for better or worse, on every personal computer with a sound card, and it opened up new music-making opportunities along with the cheesy game tunes. By the mid-1990s relatively inexpensive full duplex sound cards came to market that brought the recording of CD-quality digital audio within reach on personal computers. Macs became the tool of choice for musicians, but I could never quite afford one, and PCs — first running Windows and then much later Linux — slowly caught up while offering more choice, complexity, and ways to go wrong at a cheaper price. Somewhat reluctantly, I became caught up in the latter two systems. By the end of the decade, audio-file compression made the storage and exchange of music feasible for professional sound artists and musicians, with the unintended side effect of setting off a revolution of sorts on the consuming end when the algorithms broke free. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, digital synthesis and recording moved seriously into the realm of the personal computer with the maturing of consumer-priced digital audio workstations (DAWs) and...