Finnish ElectroAcoustic Research Sources

The FinEARS project concentrates on collecting, studying and preserving the cultural-historical material – research sources – related to Finnish ElectroAcoustic Music – and other closely related art forms, genres, and trends such as underground, avantgarde and happenings. At its first stage, the FinEARS project is a sidetrack of my PhD project which concentrates on the history and analysis electroacoustic music in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s; especially focusing on Erkki Kurenniemi’s electronic musical instrument design, and electronic music produced with his instruments. The home organization of the PhD project is the University of Helsinki Music Research Laboratory.

Later, FinEARS will be expanded into a larger research project discussing the questions and problems faced in the modern version of Digital Humanities, Research Data Management and SSH in general (social sciences and humanities). The project will be set to develop efficient workflows and best practices to solve problems such as legal, copyright, and privacy issues of the research material, among others.

Eventually, the core of FinEARS will be an open repository of research sources, data and material as well as analyses and analytical materials of electroacoustic music. An excellent example of a repository for analyses and analytical materials see: OREMA – The Online Repository for Electroacoustic Music Analysis. The FinEARS project aims to bring together different actors in the field of electroacoustic music research.

Information, research material and data related to electroacoustic music are scattered around institutional archives, private collections and other miscellaneous locations. In some cases collectors may not be aware of either significance of his or her set of material or of possibility to deposit material in a repository maintained by a responsible organization. Significant collections have already been destroyed due to lack of sufficient archive space among private collectors. The project is calling upon research and memory organizations as well as private actors (researchers, composers, musicians, engineers, among others) to participate and open their collections. Only digitised copies of documents or native digital files can be archived within this project – not physical artifacts or documents. However, as a side product of the project, links between responsible organizations and private actors may be produced also to facilitate the preservation of physical material.

The project has a multifaceted goal: to facilitate ongoing research, to produce new research, to enable interdisciplinary connections and to strengthen pedagogical expertise.

Facilitate ongoing and future research:
– the development of research tools
– history and analysis (theory and methods)

Review of prior research (history of the discipline):
– the review of the former methods
– annotated bibliographies of prior research literature

Pedagogy:
– to facilitate teaching both the history and analysis of electroacoustic music as well as the best practices of research data management

Research Data and Material:
– ATT (Open Science and Research OSR) and RDM (Research Data Management) principles considered and met