SOUNDS IN TRANSLATION: intersections of music, technology and society SOUNDS IN TRANSLATION: intersections of music, technology and society EDITED BY AMY CHAN & ALISTAIR NOBLE Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/sounds_translation_citation.html National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Sounds in translation : intersections of music, technology and society / editor, Amy Chan, Alistair Noble. ISBN: 9781921536540 (pbk.) 9781921536557 (pdf.) Subjects: Sound. Music--Acoustics and physics. Other Authors/Contributors: Chan, Amy. Noble, Alistair. Dewey Number: 534 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design by ANU E Press Printed by University Printing Services, ANU This edition © 2009 ANU E Press Table of Contents Acknowledgments vii Contributors ix Introduction 1 Amy Chan 1. ‘soundAFFECTs’: translation, writing, new media, affect 9 Hazel Smith 2. Edible Audience: what about this gastronomic performance 25 translated as sound art? Alistair Riddell 3. Translating the musical image: case studies of expert musicians 41 Freya Bailes 4. Translating the tradition: the many lives of Green Bushes 61 Jennifer Gall 5. Ancient and modern footprints: music and the mysteries of 79 Lake Mungo Adam Shoemaker 6. Translating the shigu from the streets to the stage 91 Amy Chan 7. Domesticating the foreign: singing salvation through translation 111 in the Australian Catholic Chinese community Nicholas Ng 8. Singing the syllables: translating spelling into music in Tibetan 145 spelling chant Phil Rose 9. Voice-scapes: transl(oc)ating the performed voice in 169 ethnomusicology Henry Johnson Acknowledgments The editors would like to express their thanks and appreciation: firstly, to each of the contributors. We are grateful for their generosity in sharing their ideas, expertise and experience at the conference and later in this book, and for their patience during its production. We are particularly appreciative that they entrusted us with their works. We would also like to thank the ANU Faculty of Arts for funding the conference that this book is based on, and the ANU School of Music for providing resources for both the conference and the book. We are grateful to the referees for their invaluable comments and feedback on the manuscript. Lastly, we thank the ANU E Press, and especially Duncan Beard for the fantastic editorial work, advice and patience. A. Chan and A. Noble Canberra, 2009 vii Contributors Freya Bailes Freya Bailes is a postdoctoral fellow at MARCS Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney, where she combines her background in music and psychology using experimental techniques to investigate listeners' perceptions and emotional responses to music. Her principal research interests lie in the field of musical imagery, the imagined auditory experience of music. Her work has been presented in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. She has published in book chapters and interdisciplinary journals including Musicae Scientiae, Music Perception, Journal of New Music Research and Organised Sound. Freya is an oboist who continues to perform whenever she can. Amy Chan Amy Chan received her PhD from The Australian National University, working on inter-cultural music and identity politics, with a focus on music from Malaysia and Singapore. Her research interests are in Western music in Asia, inter-culturalism and music, and world popular music. She lectures and teaches across a range of courses in performing arts and Asian studies. She currently holds a Visiting Fellowship at the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at the The Australian National University. She co-convened the Sounds in Translation conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts at The Australian National University in 2005. Jennifer Gall Jennifer Gall holds a PhD from the School of Music, The Australian National University. The topic of her dissertation is `Redefining the tradition: the role of women in the transmission and evolution of Australian folk music'. In 2006, she released the CD Cantara, which was based on her doctoral research. Gall has been involved with folk music as a performer, a collector, as a folk music consultant to the National Library of Australia and as guest lecturer for the ANU Folk and World Music courses. She currently holds the National Library of Australia and the National Folk Festival Fellowship for 2008±09. With Alistair Noble and Amy Chan, she was co-organiser of the 2005 Sounds in Translation conference. Henry Johnson Henry Johnson is Professor in the Department of Music, University of Otago. His teaching and research interests are in the field of ethnomusicology, particularly the music of Japan, Indonesia and India. His recent publications include The Koto (2004, Hotei), Asia in the Making of New Zealand (2006, Auckland University Press), which he co-edited with Brian Moloughney, and Performing Japan (2008, Global Oriental), which was co-edited with Jerry Jaffe. ix Sounds in Translation Nicholas Ng Nicholas Ng is a composer/performer/researcher based at the Queensland Conservatory at Griffith University. His doctoral dissertation, `Celestial roots: the music of Sydney's Chinese, 1954±2004', integrated the disciplines of ethnomusicology and composition in the study of Australian Chinese sacred music in Sydney. Nicholas plays the erhu (Chinese `violin') and has performed at venues including The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Yat-Sen Memorial Hall (Taipei) and Merkin Concert Hall (New York City), and is currently touring in William Yang's production China. As a composer, Nicholas has been commissioned by ensembles such as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Foundation for Universal Sacred Music, The Song Company, The Australian Voices, United Nations Association of Australia, Australian Choreographic Centre, Tugpindulayaw Theatre, Sydney-Asia Pacific Film Festival and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Published by Orpheus Music, his compositions have been broadcast on ABC Classic FM and awarded prizes such as the Orpheus Publications Composition Prize 2005. Alistair Noble Alistair Noble is a composer, pianist and musicologist based at The Australian National University. His music has been performed in Australia and America and notably recorded by Rotraud Schneider, Renata Turrini and Colin Noble. His current research includes study of Morton Feldman's compositional sketches. In 2005, he was co-convener of the conference Sounds in Translation, hosted by the Faculty of Arts, The Australian National University. Alistair Riddell Alistair Riddell studied music and computer science at La Trobe University in Australia and holds a PhD in music composition from Princeton University in the United States. He was a postdoctoral fellow at La Trobe University (1995±96) and president of the Australasian Computer Music Association (1994±96). His computer music works have been performed in New York, Brazil, London, Delphi, Berlin and Hong Kong. More recently, Alistair has been involved in interactive music performance and the development of kinetic installation art. He is currently a lecturer in sound art and physical computing in the School of Art at The Australian National University. Phil Rose Phil Rose is reader in phonetics and Chinese linguistics at The Australian National University and British Academy Visiting Professor at the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning at the University of Edinburgh. He conducts research into forensic speaker recognition and tones in Chinese dialects. He also undertakes FRS casework as a forensic phonetic consultant. His works have been published in journals such as Journal of Chinese Linguistics and x Contributors Australian Journal of Linguistics and in books, The Technical Comparison of Forensic Voice Samples and Forensic Speaker Identification. Adam Shoemaker Adam Shoemaker began at Monash University as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) in September 2007. Before this appointment, he was Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences at The Australian National University and foundation director of the ANU Research School of Humanities. He holds a doctorate from The Australian National University. His sustained research interest is in Indigenous Australian history, literature, culture and politics, and he has been published extensively in these areas. He is currently co-writing a study of international Indigenous cultural flows called Authenticity? Indigenous Culture and Globalisation. Adam is active in community engagement and has held a variety of national and international appointments, most notably as chair of the Brisbane Writers Festival, president of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ) and president of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH). Hazel Smith Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: Strategies for innovative creative writing (2005, Allen and Unwin) and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: Difference, homosexuality, topography (2000, Liverpool University Press), and co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia