Across the Sonorous Desert: Sounding Migration in El Mar la Mar

Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki’s El Mar La Mar (2017), an experimental documentary on the migrant trail across the Mexico–US border, features a striking audiovisual assemblage that gives equal weight to sights and sounds, allowing the viewer to contemplate the history of not only the cinema of migration but also the various traditions that engage with field recordings. This chapter investigates the ways in which the film challenges our expectations of what a migrant geography feels like, with special attention to the film’s soundtrack, from its contact mic-enabled drone sounds to disembodied audio testimonials, and the broader acoustic ecology that the film construes (influenced by musique concrète and post-Pierre Schaeffer anecdotal sound, in the work of Luc Ferrari).

An American Singing Heritage

This edition brings together representative transcriptions of folk songs and ballads in the British-Irish-American oral tradition that have enjoyed widespread familiarity throughout twentieth-century America. Within are the one hundred folk songs that most frequently occurred in a methodical survey of Roud's Folk Song Index, catalogues of commercial early country (or “hillbilly”) recordings, and relevant archival collections. The editors selected sources for transcriptions in a broad range of singing styles and representing many regions of the United States. The selections attempt to avoid the biases of previous collections and provide a fresh group of examples, many heretofore unseen in print. The sources for the transcriptions are recordings of traditional musicians from the 1920s through the early 1940s drawn from (1) commercial recordings of “hillbilly” musicians, and (2) field recordings in the collection of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, now part of the Archive of Folk Culture. Each transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing essay discussing the song's history and influence, recording and performance information (whenever available), and an examination of the tune. The edition begins with a substantive essay about the history of folk song recordings and folk song scholarship, and the nature of traditional vocal music in the United States.

The Instrumental Component of the Epic Genres of the Carpathian Tradition

If the context of the performance of ritual and dance music is described in detail in a number of monographs at the beginning and middle of the last century, then with descriptions of the existence of epic genres the situation is somewhat different. Most collections of epic songs contain verbal and musical texts, however, the context of the performance, the number of performers, and the instrumental component are not always described. The article is devoted to the epic genres of folklore of the Ukrainians of the Carpathians. The article examines the modern existence of such epic genres of Ukrainian Carpathian folklore as psalm, song-chronicle, ballad. The aim of the study is to show the epic genres of folklore of the Ukrainian Carpathians in the context of its modern existence in the Carpathian village and in connection with the instrumental tradition of the region. The study covers Eastern Galicia (Halychyna), in particular Galician Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttia (Pokucie), where the author's fieldwork took place. Modern field recordings of psalms, which were previously carried by itinerant lyre players, indicate that the works of this genre in some places have survived to this day due to their inclusion in the calendar tradition. Some of them are preserved as Christmas and Lenten songs. So, in the village Stary Lisets of the Tysmenytsa district of IvanoFrankivsk region, the psalm «About Stratenska Virgin Mary» about the siege of the monastery by the Tatars became a carol. In the Kosiv and Verkhovyna districts of Ivano-Frankivsk region (Galician Hutsulshchyna), songs-chronicles («novyny») continue to exist. This genre of Ukrainian folklore appeared in the 17th century. Songs-chronicles reflect historical events from the time of the opryshky movement to the present day and family and household dramas. In the village Khymchyn of the Kosiv region, the author of these lines was lucky to record two songs-chronicles – about Dovbush and about the First World War. The performer alternated singing with playing on a sopilka-dencivka. The author finds out ideas of the bearers of the tradition about the correct performance of songs-chronicles. The classical performance of chronicle songs is predominantly solo (one singer and one accompanist-instrumentalist). Folk ballads that exist in the modern Carpathian region can be divided into local and late ones, a significant part of which came from the Central regions of Ukraine in the 20th century. At the same time, part of the late ballads comes from the ancient ones that arose on the territory of the Ukrainian Carpathians in the 17th–18th centuries. Evidence of the 20th century and the records of modern collectors of Carpathian folklore show that the performance of ancient Carpathian ballads is close to the performance of songs-chronicles. Old Carpathian ballads are characterized by a declamatory manner of singing accompanied by a violin, hurdy-gurdy or sopilka-flute and a narrow ambitus. Old ballads are associated with individual performance and folk-professional instrumentalism. Nowadays they can be heard less often than late ballads associated with collective choral singing. To get a complete picture of the context of the existence of the ancient Carpathian ballads, it is necessary to interview the inhabitants of the villages where they were recorded in the XX – at the beginning of the XXI century – Kornych, Myshyn, Cherni Oslavy, Velykyi Klyuchiv and Kosmach.

Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida

These compositions reconstruct the sonic environment of the seventeenth-century Mission San Luis de Talimali. These “soundscapes” draw on musicology, geography, archaeological data, historical research, and field recordings to help Mission San Luis’s visitors and scholars better understand the lived, sensory experiences of the Apalachee and Spanish people at La Florida’s paramount mission community.

Flight rapidly modulates body temperature in freely behaving bats

Background Bats are remarkable in their dynamic control over body temperature, showing both hypothermia with torpor and hyperthermia during flight. Despite considerable research in understanding bats’ thermoregulation mechanisms, knowledge on the relationship between flight and body temperature in bats remains limited, possibly due to technological restraints. Results We used onboard dataloggers including a temperature sensor and an inertial sensor (accelerometers) and continuously recorded the flight behavior and skin temperature (Tsk) subcutaneously of a perch-hunting bat, Hipposideros armiger, both in the laboratory and in the field. We provide evidence that flight increases the body temperature of bats. The median of the maximum increase in the Tsk caused by flight bouts was 3.4 °C (between 1.9 and 5.3 °C for different individuals) in the laboratory. The maximum Tsk for the bats was narrowly centered around 40 °C (between 38.5 and 40.9 °C). Moreover, we found that the faster the Tsk rises, the greater the maximum increase in Tsk. Interestingly, bats can slow down the Tsk rises with intermittent fights, during which they perch after brief flight bouts to allow the body temperature to drop rapidly. Similar data were collected from field recordings in free-ranging bats. Conclusions We suggest that perch-hunting behavior observed in approximately 200 species of bats that results in intermittent flights may function as a thermoregulatory strategy, in addition to optimizing energy efficiency as demonstrated by previous studies.

COLLOQUIAL VOCABULARY OF SOUTHERN BESSARABIA AND MODERN UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE: A COMPARATIVE ASPECT

The study of the dialectal vocabulary of the southern regions of the Dniester and the Danube is still relevant for modern dialectology. This territory is an area of late formation with complex multidirectional and different-time interdialectal and interlingual interactions. The purpose of this article is to compare the names of clothes in the dialect of the village Plakhtiivka (Odessa region) and the nationwide Ukrainian language. The object of research is dialectal names of clothes, and the subject is phonetic and semantic aspects of the specified vocabulary. A descriptive method (to characterize the names of clothes), component analysis (to establish the semantics of the studied vocabulary) and comparative method (to identify common and different in dialect and modern Ukrainian language) were used in the process of studying colloquial vocabulary. The source base of the study contains field recordings of colloquial speech, made on a special questionnaire. The theoretical value of the obtained results lies in the systematization of common and different in phonetic and semantic aspects, and the practical value - in the potential use of the results in classes on dialectology and lexicology and in lexicographic practice. The study describes lexical items of four lexical and semantic groups: "Names of men's clothing", "Names of women's clothing", "Names of men's accessories" and "Names of women's accessories". In a comparative aspect 18 lexical items are considered. At the phonetic and lexical levels a significant number of lexical items different from the modern Ukrainian language have been found. Most of the meanings of the analyzed lexical items coincide with those recorded in the nationwide language. However, there are some differences that constitute the specifics of the dialect. The considered colloquial vocabulary is valuable for enriching the empirical base of Ukrainian dialectology and preserving dialect names in the annals of the Ukrainian language.

Testing the Interspecific Function of Female Common Cuckoo “Bubbling” Call

Female common cuckoo (Cuculus canorous) predator-like “bubbling” calls distract host parental attention and reduce the egg rejection rate. Such “bubbling” calls are also frequently used to attract males and deter territorial rivals in intraspecies contact, and these calls are an ancestral character in many cuckoo species. Although hosts have had sufficient time to become familiar with this call and evolve anti-parasitic strategies, why are the hosts fooled by this “bubbling” call? We propose two hypotheses. The first hypothesis proposes that call variation reduces the opportunity for host species to correctly assess cuckoo tricks. In contrast, the second hypothesis proposes that the cost of behavior may prevent the antiparasitic strategy from evolving. In the study, we tested the prerequisites of these hypotheses, by investigating whether cuckoo calls vary during the day and testing whether the predator-like calls suppress bird activities. Based on field recordings from three different areas, we found high overlap in the calls generated during different periods. Oriental great reed warblers (Acrocephalus orientalis), a host species, did not show different responses toward the playback of female common cuckoo calls generated before noon or afternoon. Based on bird count data, we found that predator-like call playback is insufficient for suppressing bird activities. Therefore, none of the prerequisites were supported by our field data. We discuss the potential reasons for our findings and hope to inspire more research examining female cuckoo vocalizations.