Musical organics: a heterarchical approach to digital organology

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of new musical technologies is fraught with difficulties. The digital materials from which they are formed are of such diverse origins and nature, that they do not match traditional organological classifications. This article traces the history of musical instrument classifications relevant to the understanding of new instruments, and proposes an alternative approach to the centuries-old tree-structure of downwards divisions. The proposed musical organics is a multi-dimensional, heterarchical, and organic approach to the analysis and classification of both traditional and new musical instruments that suits the rhizomatic nature of their material design and technical origins. Outlines of a hypothetical organological informatics retrieval system are also presented

Addressing human-tiger conflict using socio-ecological information on tolerance and risk

Tigers are critically endangered due to deforestation and persecution. Yet in places, Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae) continue to coexist with people, offering insights for managing wildlife elsewhere. Here, we couple spatial models of encounter risk with information on tolerance from 2,386 Sumatrans to reveal drivers of human-tiger conflict. Risk of encountering tigers was greater around populated villages that neighbored forest or rivers connecting tiger habitat; geographic profiles refined these predictions to three core areas. People’s tolerance for tigers was related to underlying attitudes, emotions, norms and spiritual beliefs. Combining this information into socio-ecological models yielded predictions of tolerance that were 32 times better than models based on social predictors alone. Pre-emptive intervention based on these socio-ecological predictions could have averted up to 51% of attacks on livestock and people, saving 15 tigers from the wild. Our work provides further evidence of the benefits of interdisciplinary research on conservation conflicts

The migration of musical instruments: on the socio-technological conditions of musical evolution

Music technologies reflect the most advanced human technologies in most historical periods. Examples range from 40 thousand years old bone flutes found in caves in the Swabian Jura, through ancient Greek water organs or medieval Arabic musical automata, to today’s electronic and digital instruments with deep learning. Music technologies incorporate the musical ideas of a time and place and they disseminate those ideas when adopted by other musical cultures. This article explores how contemporary music technologies are culturally conditioned and applies the concept of ethno-organology to describe the nature of migration of instruments between musical cultures

Singing maternity through autoethnography: Making visible the musical world of myself as a mother

There is perhaps no image more maternal and musical than that of a young mother cradling a child to her breast as she softly sings a sweet lullaby. Yet the way that a mother experiences, relates to and renders meaningful the social and musical moment of singing to her children remains silent and hidden in popular and academic discourse. In this paper, I will explore how music becomes mothering; that is, the way that women sing maternity and use music to mother; what music brings to their thoughts, feelings and identities as mothers; and, what kinds of interactions and interrelationships are created with their children through music as play and performance of mothering. Through auto-ethnographic processes of reflection and research about my own experiences as the mother of two sons, and engagement with a wide array of discourses about mothering; the voices and perspectives of women take centre stage in this paper. My main concern is to make visible the musical worlds of mothers and children and make known the power of maternal song in creating places of excitement, empowerment, love and peace in the home for mothers and children