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- At the dawn of the age of silent movies, one of the first highly
popular genres was the so-called "phantom ride," a type
of adventure film shot by a camera mounted on the nose of a speeding
train. It was exhilarating! No one (save train conductors) had
ever seen what it looked like to barrel through a tunnel and emerge
on the other side. The "I-am-a-train" type of movie
was revolutionary for its day, but it didn’t last long, and
for good reason: once people had seen a few dozen of them, and
became used to seeing the world from the vantage point of the
locomotive, the novelty wore off, interest waned, and filmmakers
were forced to dream up more engaging genres.
- The current state of CD-ROM technology is compellingly similar
to the state of film in the "phantom ride" era. Just
as at the turn of the last century, we are confronted with technological
possibilities that have largely outpaced our imaginations. We
have enormous
computer capabilities at our fingertips, but we (read: "we
academics") haven’t quite figured out how to exploit
them fully. An interesting case in point is the educational CD-ROM
under review, Five Windows into Africa, a collaborative
work produced by four professors at Indiana University, Bloomington;
one from Indiana State; and IUB’s "Teaching and Learning
Technologies Laboratory." This grand and grandly-flawed multimedia
project manages—to a great extent—to fulfill its press
release’s promise of "vividly capturing the vitality
and immediacy of life in contemporary Africa." But, like
the phantom ride, it captures equally vividly a transitional phase
in technology, somewhere shortly after that first dramatic leap
to a new medium, but before the golden age of art and scholarship
that (one hopes) inevitably follows. Situating Five Windows
within this phase is the objective of this review. After a description
of the substance of the ethnographies, I will focus on evaluating
its effectiveness as a CD-ROM.
- Five Windows gives its user interactive access to five
ethnographies, each focused on a discrete event or locale. Patrick
McNaughton, a professor of African art history at IUB, introduces
us to "Kono
Don: A Bird Dance Near Saturday City" in Mali; John H.
Hanson, an associate professor of history and Director of IUB’s
African Studies Program, looks at the role played by Islam in
a Ghanaian town in "Friday
Prayers;" in "This
Is Lagos," dele jegede, a professor of art history at
ISU, provides a glimpse of the hectic life in his home city of
Lagos, Nigeria; ethnomusicologist Ruth M. Stone documents the
repatriation and funeral of a Liberian dissident politician in
"Gbarbea
Funeral"; and N. Brian Winchester, director of IUB’s
Center for the Study of Global Change, analyzes the events surrounding
the negotiation to the end of Zimbabwe’s war of national
liberation, which took place in London during the Constitutional
Conference at "Lancaster
House." For a project engaging such diverse issues and
regions, Five Windows is remarkably cohesive. The aggregate
effect of the CD-ROM supports the currently popular view that
several scattered, "deep" ethnographies are more valuable
(and do less violence) than a single "shallow" work
attempting to provide blanket coverage of a large region. The
authors also make a forceful case for truly interdisciplinary
scholarship. Of the five "windows," only one (Stone’s)
focuses explicitly on music, yet four of the five (all but Winchester’s)
explore music as part of the web of cultural production in their
areas. Moreover, the CD-ROM can be navigated either by ethnography
(e.g., exploring "Gbarbea Funeral" in its entirety before
moving on to "Lancaster House"), or by one of five cross-cultural
"topics": spirituality, power, aesthetics, entrepreneurship,
individuals, and community. Users are encouraged to delve into
each "window" in its totality first, and then to explore
the topics across the studies, scooting directly from the applicable
section of one window to the related section of the next.
- Of the five studies, I was particularly impressed with Patrick
McNaughton’s "Kono Don." His exhaustive event analysis
of a single performance by Mande bird masquerader Sidi Ballo is
divided into twenty-two short chapters, each of which he narrates.
This level of detail, along with the sound recordings, interviews
with local experts, and dozens of photographs, presents a vivid
image of a richly polysemic performance. In addition to his description
of the dance itself, McNaughton folds in a large number of supplementary
essays designed to provide a glimpse into the complex set of dynamic
interrelationships that connect art to life and vice versa. The
essays touch on a broad range of topics, including: the topography
of the village; how the village was named; the ethnic groups that
make up the population; local architecture and painting; musicians;
spiritual life; ecology; herbal medicine; hunting; and blacksmithing,
among others. He gives much emphasis to native terminology, especially
the term nyama, which he describes as the "energy
of action." McNaughton laudably stresses the ability
of the dance to yield multiple interpretations, and he describes
two conflicting interpretations in detail. McNaughton is among
the most thoroughly reflexive of the Indiana group, describing
how he conducted his research and musing on the ways in which
his presence at the bird dance was exploited by the performer
to dramatic and humorous effect.
- Only one of the windows, "This is Lagos," was created
by an African scholar. dele jegede’s piece employs music
extensively, using multiple popular genres as a soundtrack to
the exploration of Africa’s most populous city. He also provides
thumbnail sketches of juju and highlife music, as well as an essay
on pan-Africanist pop icon Fela Kuti. John Hanson’s window
on Islam discusses the muezzin’s call-to-prayer (while deftly
avoiding the quicksand question of whether it makes sense to regard
it as "music") and its role in structuring Islamic experience.
Ruth Stone’s documentation of the Liberian funeral emphasizes
the role music plays in "the society, the politics, the religion,
and the life of these people." Stone includes an enhanced
version of her field notes in her ethnography, with relevant sound
recordings and photographs added in at the appropriate moments.
Thus, when she mentions that she came upon a group of Nigerian
drummers as she was walking down the road, you both see their
photograph and hear her recording of their drumming. While
less dramatic than the narrated movies and slick animations that
are foregrounded throughout Five Windows, these multimedia
notes are quietly effective; Stone uses them to buttress her primary
text, and in doing so, contributes to the rehabilitation of a
genre that most readers (who don’t have access to the musty
box of field notes in the author’s closet) never get to see.
- All things told, "Gbarbea Funeral" may be the most
useful propaedeutic for ethnomusicologists, as it explicitly discusses
the relationship between music and social issues, a relationship
that every student of ethnomusicology studies in an introductory
course. In general, however, Five Windows is designed for
laypeople, and its ideal audience would probably consist of inquisitive
high school students and
first-year undergraduates. While older scholars may find the bibliographies
useful, the overall tone of the project (which studiously avoids
theoretical discussion and frequently employs image-based emotional
shorthand and cartoonish
animation) will be more likely to engage teens.
- Despite the basic unity of their organization, the five
windows vary in their degree of reflexivity, their methodology,
the amount of critical distance between researcher and informants,
and their tolerance for openly editorial comments. In this respect,
Five Windows is no different than your average print anthology.
But this is not your average print anthology; it is billed as
a twenty-first-century product, transcending the limitations of
print and video, handing over to the user the power of narration,
interpretation, and selection of data, facilitating a conversation
among the users, their African counterparts, and the Indianan
researchers. Is it all these things? Well, almost. As useful as
Five Windows is, the CD-ROM is plagued with minor
glitches and shortcomings that conspire to reduce its impact as
a scholarly tool.
- The most serious drawbacks include the following:
- The interactive element, the freedom to jump from one page
to the next in whatever order you choose, is of limited use
here. In most cases, there is only one logical order—the
chronological order of traditional, fixed narrative. The most
obvious effect of your "freedom" is the added work
involved in clicking each individual bite-sized narrative
chunk into action.
- In spite of my suspicion that the author’s order is
always the best one, it is often impossible to discern the
logical succession of the pages, and equally impossible to
make sure that you have seen all that there is to be seen.
The product doesn’t have a comprehensive site map, and
there is no index. Many of the pages feature tiny photo-icons
in a field called "related topics." By rolling over
the icon, a pop-up description lets you know whither you will
be transported if you click. Unfortunately, these descriptions
are often so mysterious in nature (in one case, rolling over
the icon actually causes the word "MYSTERY" to appear)
that you have to click on them to find out where they lead.
Once you’ve been sent to the "related topic,"
you are confronted with another set of "related topic"
icons with equally bewildering labels. This infrastructure
bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dungeons and Dragons games
I played as a kid ("There are two small doors on the
left wall. A damp breeze emanates from one; muffled screams
from the other. What do you do?")
- Once you have started up Five Windows, you cannot
minimize it in order to access another file. This fact, combined
with the utter lack of interactive fields (places where you
can engage in the cyber-equivalent of writing in the margins)
in the Five Windows structure itself, means that it
is impossible to take notes on your computer as you read,
impossible to underline or annotate text. There is a bookmarking
function, making it relatively easy to return to pages you
find interesting, but even this marginal utility is compromised
by the fact that, in order to get to your bookmarks, you have
to sit through one of the three-minute introductory films
that serve as each window’s prelude.
- So far as I understand, it is impossible to print anything
from the CD-ROM. You cannot select, cut or paste any of the
text into a word processing program, and there is no print
function within Five Windows. This makes the otherwise
exciting bibliographies exceedingly difficult to use.
- Since none of the pages are numbered in the traditional
manner, citing a particular moment of Five Windows
in one’s own work is a cumbersome and confusing exercise.
- While the sound quality is quite good throughout, the videos
(most of which take place on a 2x3 inch screen) are often
migraine inducing. After a half-hour or so of squinting at
the matchbox screen of hazy pixilated images, I found myself
longing for the luxury of VHS (or, even better, print).
- These shortcomings notwithstanding, I can see several advantages
in the authors’ decision to release Five Windows as
a CD-ROM rather than as a book with an attached video. They include
increased salience resulting from the novelty that CD-ROMs still
enjoy, and the advantage of size, a double CD being smaller, easier
to ship and to store than a book and VHS cassette. More importantly,
however, there are several things CD-ROMs can do elegantly that
books and videos cannot. The ease and speed of click-navigating
through the text (versus the cumbersome and time-consuming process
of rewinding and fast-forwarding a video to find the right excerpt)
is a major advantage. The ability to "illustrate" text
with sounds as well as images is another. Throughout Five Windows,
the authors bring music into their text, an act that is so valuable
to music scholarship that it alone should make the CD-ROM and
the internet our media of choice.
- The next logical step, I would argue—the truly revolutionary
step that we as music scholars should begin exploring—is
to bring text into our music. CD-ROM technology gives us the unprecedented
opportunity to provide multi-layered, navigable annotation to
a piece of music, thus hitching our insights to the notes themselves.
In foreign-language songs, for example, we can restore a sense
of temporality to the act of translation, creating word-mappings
that unfold in real time along with the music. Creative projects
like Five Windows should challenge us to go further, to
use interactive technology to present music in a fundamentally
different way than was previously possible. Just as the early
cinematographers quickly figured out that the possibilities for
filmic fantasy reached beyond the limits of the phantom ride,
scholars will inevitably begin to exploit interactive technology
to change the way people listen to and write about music. The
time has come to untie the camera from the train.
I would like to express my thanks to Brian Schrag for
the insightful comments he gave me as I wrote this review.
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