Everyone's a Curator: Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority Music Sustainability in China

Project Information

ECura

Grant agreement ID: 101039864

DOI

10.3030/101039864

EC signature date 31 May 2022

Start date 1 June 2022

End date 31 May 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 885,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 885,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK - NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ECura (Everyone's a Curator: Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority Music Sustainability in China)

Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2024-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Researchers have recognized that culture bearers need to be more centrally involved in music sustainability, both for these programmes to prove practically effective and because it is ethically essential that community members determine what music might be shared with others, if any, and under what conditions. ECura innovatively designs an interactive and inclusive research framework for applied ethnomusicology (and related areas) that capitalizes on newly emergent possibilities for sustaining intangible culture arising from the rising participation of ethnic minority members in digital social media platforms. ECura has the potential to transform the ways ethnomusicologists, folklorists and others work with communities to sustain endangered cultural heritage: similar situations of cultural imperialism, the vanishing of indigenous culture, and the disempowering of the underprivileged in managing their own culture, occur worldwide.

The project focuses on three Indigenous villages in Yunnan, China’s multi-ethnic Southwest, allowing the acquisition of a deeply contextualized understandings of contrasting cultural heritage settings and development of carefully shaped solutions to the challenges detected. The research team is seeking out ways to empower community members to take up new digital technologies to become active collectors and curators of their own traditional music and dance. Its approach is thus to transform culture bearers into the culture-creators, -sustainers and -curators—protagonists for their own digital materials. The research includes the development of a spoken language-oriented database and its social media platform program dedicated to their music and dance artistry and an associated software program that can be used on digital social media platforms, enabling villagers to readily record, share and locate their own songs and other musical heritage digitally without having to work indirectly through written Chinese (which not all have learnt well enough to read and write).

ECura is designed to rest upon balanced interdependence between the communities and their members and between communities and various categories of external supporters, including the “virtual”. Scholarship is undertaken to document each stage of the work, so that best practices can be shared.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first 2 years, ECura team has carried out 4 fieldwork trips (each trip lasting from 1 month to 5 months) among ethnic minority communities in SW China. Official collaborative agreements were signed with 3 ethnic minority communities, with each community identifying their specific developmental goals according to their own unique cultural heritage settings. In the Yi Mayou village, cooperative projects have resulted in five chapters of English translation of the Yi people’s epic “The Origin of Meige” and around 20 English translation to the videos the villagers made. Interactive cooperation has also produced over 10 singable English version of Yi lullabies sung by the children in the village with online teaching delivered by ECura team every Saturday. In collaborative efforts toward cultural dissemination, folk musicians in the village have gained a considerable amount of public attention. During 2023 to 2024, Mayou village musicians have been invited to perform and talk in multiple public media occasions, including on national China Central Television (CCTV) programs including “China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Annual Gala”, “China in the Intangible Cultural Heritage” and “Children’s Voices in Song”. Meanwhile, in the Bai Qifeng village where the main collaborators are the senior villagers in their 60s to 80s, collaborative effort led to the broadcasting of village’s Bai people’s Agriculture Festival on China Central Television in 2024. Finally, in the Miao Xiaohai village main work undertaken includes that ECura supported community leaders to acquire various music related digital skills such as commanding software of making musical sheet, adding subtitles, and using digital synthesizers.

ECura team is documenting this works to share the best practice with a broader circle of researchers and practitioners worldwide. In doing so, ECura has built up a project website ‘Everyone is a Curator: Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority Music Sustainability in China’ (ecura.ie) as an open accessible dataset. Meanwhile, the project team is actively sharing this work at various international conferences and seminars. So far, 7 conferences papers were presented in the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology (North American based), British Forum for Ethnomusicology (UK based), International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (Globally based), and Chinese Music Europe (Europe based). In addition, 2 seminars and 2 practice-based papers were presented respectively in Ireland. So far, 3 peer-reviewed articles from ECura team have been published or accepted.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

After many deep conversations with the local musicians from multiple ethnic minority communities and based on ECura team’s own careful observations in the last 2 years, the main barrier that stops local musicians from increasing their impact nationally and globally is the language barrier. As with many other languages used by ethnic minority groups cross the world, Yi, Bai and Miao are low- (or under-) resourced languages. This barrier has become even more obvious in the digital world.

The ECura project sets up a Corpus platform ‘Multilingual Parallel Corpus of Yunnan Ethnic Minority Music’ and its social media platform program, aiming to utilize modern information technologies such as multimodal data storage, multilingual corpus retrieval and analysis, and natural language processing. The online database collects commonly used words which in Yi, Bai and Miao language that refer to music and dance genres and activities. The project team is using the existing audio/video recordings of traditional songs and related materials as a central point, connecting the terms used in these recordings to one another and organizing corresponding written scripts (using Chinese, English and International Phonetic Alphabet), along with related annotations, images, performance videos, and other multimodal content. The goal of the corpus platform is to establish a multimodal, multilingual parallel corpus centred around the theme of traditional songs among ethnic minority communities which mainly exist in oral tradition. Users from those language groups could then access and browse materials through entering terms orally in their Indigenous languages, rather than having to use a foreign text-based language. Meanwhile, external viewers interested in these traditions can still access materials via English, Chinese or IPA. (This approach has great potential for employment with other ethnic minority groups).

The ECura project goes beyond the state of the arts by taking the audio-form (the pronunciation of words and their singing examples) of ethnic minority languages as its initial point and connecting this audio sound to their translations into two high-resourced languages (Chinese and English). It is an innovative method in preserving indigenous musics that have survived in oral tradition. It is also ethically important to take indigenous ways of thinking as a central point when connecting with other commonly used languages and cultures.

ECura project YouTube Banner

PI Lijuan Qian signed official agreement for co-work with Yi Mayou village musicians

ECura collaborative Bai village

Postdoc Keyi Liu with communities in Qifeng

ECura collaborative Yi village

PI Lijuan Qian with Yi Children Meige transmission group

ECura Collaborative Miao village