General resources for Field Methods in Ethnomusicology
Library resources
Equipment for loan: https://library.ualberta.ca/services/technology/multimedia-equipment
Digital scholarship centre: https://dsc.library.ualberta.ca/
Digital preservation: https://www.library.ualberta.ca/digital-initiatives/preservation
Fieldwork and Ethnography - general
https://www.ethnomusicology.org/general/custom.asp?page=EthicsStatement
https://www.ethnomusicology.org/store/viewproduct.aspx?ID=1237833 (20 years old but still useful and only $6.00!)
MOOCS: https://www.coursera.org/learn/qualitative-methods https://www.coursera.org/lecture/qualitative-methods/2-1-ethnography-KnkHh
Other courses: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/science-technology-and-society/sts-360-ethnography-spring-2003/
Equipment and tools for recording, editing, and analysis (hardware and software)
Ethnographic fieldwork is perforce very much a DIY enterprise, and for this reason I advocate use of free or inexpensive available tools whenever possible. However some investments (e.g. a good camera or audio recorder) are certainly justified and worthwhile, especially prior to embarking on long-term fieldwork.
Expensive items that hold their value are the signal collectors and transducers - lenses and microphones and speakers - everything else has a limited shelf-life.
Hardware
Software for ethnomusicology
Multimedia (audio, image, video): editing, analysis, transcription
Multimedia editing and analysis software
Transcription (text)
For transcription, there are a number of tools available. Some are free, others are not. Some are manual, while others automate the process as AI-powered speech recognition, which has become highly accurate for English, at least when spoken by native speakers. The main features for a manual tool are the ability to slow down the recording, and to jump back a few seconds, in order to catch something you missed.
For a simple free tool of this type, try Otranscribe. See also f4transkript. You can also use any audio playback software (Quicktime on the Mac lets you slow the speed). Audacity can slow a recording down.
Three AI-powered tools are Transcribe, Dragon, and Otter. Google also has a new cloud service that offers speech to text, among many other services.
But there are also many free options for speech recognition transcription. Zoom provides this service (conduct your interview on Zoom and you can receive a transcript), as does Android's Recorder app, and even YouTube. Try converting your audio file to video (using Adapter or another tool), uploading to YouTube, and let YouTube provide an automatic transcription. It will usually provide a quite good rough draft, and you can download and adjust it from there.
Sometimes a micro transcription, providing precise timing and pronunciation information, is called for.
For time-stamped transcriptions (when you want to tag every phrase, word or even syllable with a time), you can use Audacity, which allows you to transcribe in "labels", with very precise temporal coordinates. For phonetic-level transcriptions, use a dedicated linguistic software tool like Praat or Speech Analyzer.
Transcription (musical)
Benetos, E., Dixon, S., Duan, Z., & Ewert, S. (2019). Automatic music transcription: An overview. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 36(1), 20–30. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2018.2869928 (non-paywalled link: https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~simond/pub/2019/BenetosDixonDuanEwert-IEEE-SPM-2019.pdf)
Fieldnote software
A number of apps enable handy note-taking on your smartphone as well as computer or tablet, syncing across platforms. Some of them have many features, enabling photos, drawing, audio recording, and sharing in a team:
- Evernote: all hardware platforms; very elaborate.
- Keep: all hardware platforms; simpler, less capabilities than Evernote
- Apple notes: works only on Apple devices
- Onenote: for Windows
Score notation software
See Audio - Scorewriters.
Qualitative research analysis
Qualitative data - which is mostly what you'll be collecting in ethnographic fieldwork - requires a different sort of data analysis than quantitative data. This isn't so much because it's not numeric (though usually it's not) as because it's not systematic (which quantitative data is, even when not numeric).
You'll have fieldnotes and interviews, stored on paper or in digital files. And you'll have audio and video recordings, and still images. Perhaps scores as well! How to make sense of it all? The key is coding. Codes serve an intermediary function, between the richness of the data itself, and its use in your paper or thesis. You can code by hand, or you can use software to do the job more efficiently and to enable quick retrieval and search.
For the qualitative data analysis unit, we'll use the trial version of Atlas.ti, which is adequate for this course (the full version or equivalent may be necessary for your dissertation project).
Some of the other popular packages are the following (but can be pricey!):
- NVivo
- Atlas.ti (we'll use the free version in class)
- maxqda
- Hyperresearch (though it doesn't seem to have kept up with advances in operating systems - not working on my Mac at present)
Here is a thorough package comparison on Wikipedia. There are a number of free packages, though I haven't tried them. Not all of them can handle images, and AV recordings however - and for ethnomusicology you'll probably want that capability. Some are not multiplatform. Transana looks like it might be a good compromise - inexpensive, and handles multiple media types and platforms. I haven't tried it though.
Annotation of audio and video recordings is also possible via ELAN software.
Equipment and tools for recording, editing, and analysis (hardware and software)
Ethnographic fieldwork is perforce very much a DIY enterprise, and for this reason I advocate use of free or inexpensive available tools whenever possible. However some investments (e.g. a good camera or audio recorder) are certainly justified and worthwhile, especially prior to embarking on long-term fieldwork.
Expensive items that hold their value are the signal collectors and transducers - lenses and microphones and speakers - everything else has a limited shelf-life.
Quantitative analysis
Software for social network analysis: see lists at http://bit.ly/mcsn19 (the last time I taught this course).
Programming languages
Programming environments that are easy to learn and may be useful: R, Excel formulas and macros
Hardware
Software for ethnomusicology
Multimedia (audio, image, video): editing, analysis, transcription
Multimedia editing and analysis software
Transcription (text)
For transcription, see Transcriva and f4transkript or Transcribe. Another possibility is Dragon, though accuracy is limited, depending on language and clarity.
Online: http://otranscribe.com/
Fieldnote software
A number of apps enable handy note-taking on your smartphone as well as computer or tablet, syncing across platforms. Some of them have many features, enabling photos, drawing, audio recording, and sharing in a team:
- Evernote: all hardware platforms; very elaborate.
- Keep: all hardware platforms; simpler, less capabilities than Evernote
- Apple notes: works only on Apple devices
- Onenote: for Windows
Score notation software
See Audio - Scorewriters.
Qualitative research analysis
Qualitative data - which is mostly what you'll be collecting in ethnographic fieldwork - requires a different sort of data analysis than quantitative data. This isn't so much because it's not numeric (though usually it's not) as because it's not systematic (which quantitative data is, even when not numeric).
You'll have fieldnotes and interviews, stored on paper or in digital files. And you'll have audio and video recordings, and still images. Perhaps scores as well! How to make sense of it all? The key is coding. Codes serve an intermediary function, between the richness of the data itself, and its use in your paper or thesis. You can code by hand, or you can use software to do the job more efficiently and to enable quick retrieval and search.
For the qualitative data analysis unit, we'll use the trial version of Hyperresearch, which is adequate for this course (the full version or equivalent may be necessary for your dissertation project).
Some of the other popular packages are: