Digital Indigenous Cultures of Music and Sound: Impacts and Interventions

Digital technologies are essential to how Indigenous people create and communicate their lives today, as well as for how they plan their lives to be in the future. This research project focuses on how Indigenous people use digital technologies to express contemporary life realities and improve their life situations following colonization.

This study focuses on mediated music and sound. Just as music accompanied almost every activity in Indigenous societies before contact with settlers, today music and sound continue to enable, express and represent current and envisioned socializations of Indigenous peoples. Making sound and music are social acts intended to have social impact; sound and music are used in digital sound recordings as well as multimedia expressions on the Internet and in film, where language is also an essential component.

This project is a pilot and new initiative that, through theorizing digital media interventions on social issues, works to develop a group research project. It builds on scholarly collaborations among researchers at the University of Helsinki, as well as networks in wider scholarly and Indigenous communities through public outreach.