Making and Learning with Environmental Sound: Maker Culture, Ecomusicology, and the Digital Humanities in Music History Pedagogy

Abstract

The digital humanities continue to be astonishingly silent. Gradually, soundwork is seeping into digital humanities training and scholarship. It is particularly constructive to begin a discussion of sound-based digital humanities with the integration of environmental soundwork into digital humanities conversations. Digital environmental humanities provide alternative vehicles to mobilize
knowledge and enhance understanding of, and practical solutions for, pressing environment and sustainability issues, particularly those issues related to interactions among environment, society, and culture. As students increasingly question how their work in the classroom can impact the everyday world and conceive of education as a form of social activism, and as communities of scholars question how they can make their research more readily accessible to others, the digital humanities is working towards revising existing platforms for knowledge creation and developing new platforms that support collaborative and social forms of knowledge creation.  In this essay I detail some of the possible applications of digital humanities practice and theory in musicologies pedagogy when engaging the intersections of music, sound, culture, and environmental and energy issues. The objective of the following article is two fold: to engage with the practice and process of integrating digital literacy and digital humanities methods and values into musicologies pedagogy through research-creation projects; to illustrate what the digital humanities have to offer musicologies teaching and research as we move as a community of scholars and learners toward the development of digital musicology. Using examples of iterative practice-based approaches to scholarly creation through the “making†of ecomusicology digital objects, this paper advocates for an exploratory and collaborative practice and politics of sound. One where scholars, and the sounding communities they study remediate, display, and archive the environments and soundscapes of our research for both academic and general audiences.