Sounding Decolonial Futures: Decentering Ethnomusicology's Colonialist Legacies

Technologies

Early ethnologists and amateur collectors engaged a series of technologies by which to document, record, fix and thus "know" Indigenous sonic practices. Each of these technologies are forms of extraction, wresting the ephemeral sonic practices from original contexts and cultural bearers and fixing them in forms for dissemination, circulation, and eventual appropriation by White settlers. 

Chronologically, the first "technology" was the transcription by hand from live performance or utterance, a technology greatly enhanced by the development of the phonograph which allowed a fixed recording and repetition. Both these technologies then allowed the use of materials for materials for composition. 

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