Philip V. Bohlman
Philip V. Bohlman
Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music and the Humanities in the College; Associate Faculty, Divinity School
University of Chicago
Research Project
Audio Cultures of India: New Approaches to the Performance Archive
Project Team:
2013 – 2014
Project Summary
Deploying data-mining and pattern-analysis techniques common to the physical and biological sciences, an interdisciplinary group of investigators from across the University worked to produce a sonic history of modern India.
An exploration of how the methods of “big science” might elucidate and facilitate the humanistic understanding of music, speech, and other audio expressions, the one-year Audio Cultures of India project deployed data mining and computational pattern analysis techniques common to the physical and biological sciences to produce a sonic history of modern India. Drawing on vast digital corpora already hosted at the University of Chicago Library, this project brought together faculty and students from Music, Anthropology, the Computation Institute, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Library to identify and experiment with new methods for using scientific technologies to process large digital humanities databases. The dense performative culture that characterizes India received special attention in an attempt to develop a comparative framework for understanding historical interrelations in the aural world – a sound history of modern India.
Research Team
Kaley Mason
James Nye
Laura Ring
Laura Ring
Metadata Librarian and Librarian for Southern Asia and Anthropology
The University of Chicago Library
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