20.06. Listening for Drought, Hearing Water: Soundscape Research for “Dry Signals,” a Digital Ethnographic Sound Diorama

Listening for Drought, Hearing Water: Soundscape Research for “Dry Signals,” a Digital Ethnographic Sound Diorama - Michael Silvers

In this lecture, I explore the significance of sounds I recorded around the Brazilian state of Ceará in a year of intense drought for an interactive website I describe as a digital ethnographic sound diorama. In my lecture, I problematize my method and explore the potential of the digital ethnographic sound diorama as a kind of collaborative, interpretive, experiential ethnographic presentation that emphasizes both play and sound in environmental storytelling.

Michael Silvers is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of _Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil_ (University of Illinois Press, 2018). His work has been supported by prestigious fellowships from Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. His current research concerns Brazil and the materials and aesthetics of globally circulating bows for Western string instruments and of Brazilian fiddles called rabecas. At Illinois, he teaches courses on music and animals and theory and method in ethnomusicology, among other topics.