Digital environments of Indigenous song

Digital environments of Indigenous song

Dr Sally Treloyn

3 October 2018

Dr Sally Treloyn presented the “Digital environments of Indigenous song” as a part of the Digital Heritage seminar in 2018.

Streamed live as part of the Digital Heritage Seminars series on 3 October 2018

In Australia, repatriation of song records from archives to communities-of-origin has emerged as key intervention used to support the social production and transmission of song knowledge. In repatriating and disseminating data it is essential that we consider the complex musical, social, economic and political issues to which legacy records, and the new digital technologies used to disseminate them, give rise. While our attention to musical resilience and vitality in contexts of socio-cultural, linguistic, economic and political change is growing, we are yet to consider how musical traditions are responding to this brave new world, and it is essential that we turn our attention to the technologies that we are using to sustain them. Using data from projects funded by the Australian Research Council investigating music sustainability, this seminar explored markers of musical resilience and vitality in Junba from the north-central Kimberley and Tabi from the west Pilbara. It considered how resilience and vitality in these songs interacts with the changing digital environments – both technologies indigenous to communities of practitioners, and those introduced by researchers and archives.