Dialogues with the Archives: Arrarrkpi Responses to Recordings as Part of the Living Song Tradition of Manyardi

This article explores the role of legacy recordings of song for a family of Arrarrkpi (Mawng-speaking people), who are contemporary singers and dancers of manyardi, a public ceremonial performance of western Arnhem Land, in their collaborative work with a team of Balanda (Euro-diasporic) researchers. Drawing inspiration from the dialogical approach of the Yolŋu ceremonial leader and scholar Joe Gumbula, the article reflects on various dialogues that inform the research, practice and archival recording of manyardi. We demonstrate how legacy recordings reinvigorate contemporary performance practice in collective settings, rather than serving as canonical or ideal versions of song sets to be replicated by an individual singer. We suggest that maintaining the linking and organisation of enriched song metadata from this community to the archival collection will enable future song inheritors to maintain dialogues with archives that hold recordings of manyardi.

The People, Yes

This chapter focuses on Beyer's compositions for voice—songs and choral works—between 1933 and 1937. Her three single songs and two three-song sets make use of her own poetry and that of two other writers. Beyer's manuscripts of Sky-Pieces (1933) are accompanied by four different cover pages, three of which reproduce Carl Sandburg's quirky poem about fedoras, slouch and panama hats, derbies, and sombreros. Perhaps due to her acquaintance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra principle clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo, Beyer then wrote a total of four songs for soprano and clarinet in 1934. Also composed in 1934, Beyer's Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet are settings of Beyer's own poetry. Two of the poems (“Total Eclipse” and “Universal-Local”) had been written in 1932, and the third (“To Be”) was dated December 1934. Additionally, between 1935 and 1937, Beyer wrote five choral works.

Using Fuzzy Song Sets in Music Warehouses

The emergence of music recommendation systems calls for the development of new data management technologies able to query vast music collections. In this chapter, the authors present a music warehouse prototype able to perform efficient nearest neighbor searches in an arbitrary song similarity space. Using fuzzy songs sets, the music warehouse offers a practical solution to three concrete musical data management scenarios: user musical preferences, user feedback, and song similarities. The authors investigate three practical approaches to tackle the storage issues of fuzzy song sets: tables, arrays, and compressed bitmaps. They confront theoretical estimates with practical implementation results and prove that, from a storage point of view, arrays and compressed bitmaps are both effective data structure solutions. With respect to speed, the authors show that operations on compressed bitmap offer a significant grain in performances for fuzzy song sets comprising a large number of songs. Finally, the authors argue that the presented results are not limited to music recommendations system but can be applied to other domains.

2GB's Midnight Matchmaker: Commercialism and Community Service Hand in Hand

It's 11 pm and 2GB's Brian Wiltshire begins his weeknight program Midnight Matchmaker with a slow, melancholic song about a boy looking for ‘a girl with no face, no name, no number’. The song sets the mood for the next hour in which Sydney's lonely and unattached men and women are offered an opportunity to find love and companionship. Blatantly sentimental as the song may be, it's a truthful reflection of the growing problem of human isolation and loneliness that has been precipitated by the replacement of traditional, small, close-knit communities with large, inherently mobile cities.