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This paper summarises some of the issues that have arisen for me in my collaborations with linguists in documentation of song in Australian Aboriginal communities. It provides pointers for recording techniques and guidelines about some of the things that musicologists would like to know about musical performance, especially for musical traditions and practices transmitted orally within small language groups (as is typically the case for documentation of musical traditions in endangered languages). This paper, intended for an audience of linguists, approaches the question of musical documentation from the perspective of what is needed on a practical level in order for collaboration with a musicologist to be most fruitful. Of course, linguists have their own priorities and methodologies in documentation of endangered languages, but many find themselves recording song and instrumental music as part of a broadly-based linguistic documentation project. Recognising that research funding often precludes having a musicologist tag along in the original fieldwork, this paper provides a checklist of things that I would like linguistic researchers to record if the opportunity arises to collect songs or instrumental music while you are doing non-musicological fieldwork, especially if you would like a musicologist to help document your recordings at a later..., Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 3 (2005)

More than fifty years after the first recording session and twenty-six years after the original publication of Ronald Berndt’s article ‘Other creatures in human guise’ (Berndt, 1987), this paper presents some contemporary perspectives on his documentation of Marrwakara and Kaddikkaddik songs in Warruwi (Goulburn Island) in 1961 and 1964. Several puzzling features emerge from close attention to the documentation, some of which may now never be fully resolved. The authors (in particular O’Keeffe and Singer) undertook further documentation of these and many other archival songs in the period 2006-2012 as part of a larger research project on Western Arnhem Land song led by Barwick and funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. We situate the Berndt song documentation in the broader context of the public ceremonial dance-song genre (known as manyarti in Mawng, or kun-borrk in Kunwinjku) that was the main focus of our project’s efforts, reflect on the significance of Berndt’s work, and provide re-transcriptions of the song texts, transliterating as relevant into contemporary Mawng orthography, and showing organisation of the text words into lines of verse, usually regularly repeated to form the sung version. Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project MDP0139; University of Sydney

This chapter is intended for linguistic researchers preparing to undertake fieldwork, probably documenting one of the world’s many small or endangered languages. Recognising that linguists have their own priorities and methodologies in language documentation and description, I will advance reasons for including in your corpus the song and/or instrumental music that you are almost certain to encounter in the course of your fieldwork. I start by providing an overview of current thinking about the nature and significance of human musical capacities and the commonly encountered types, context and significance of music, especially in relation to language. Since research funding usually precludes having a musicologist tag along in the original fieldwork, I will suggest some topics for discussion that would be of interest to musicologists, and make some suggestions for what is needed on a practical level to make your recordings useful to musicologists at a later date. I comment on the technical and practical requirements for a good musical documentation and how these might differ from language documentation, and also provide some suggestions on a workflow for field production of musical recordings for community use. Examples taken from my own fieldwork are intended to provide food for thought, and not to imply that music and dance traditions in other societies are necessarily structured in comparable ways. Australian Research Council

PARADISEC (http://www.paradisec.org.au) is a cross-institutional research initiative established in 2003 by the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and the Australian National University, joined in 2004 by the University of New England. Funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Programme, participant institutions and Grangenet, PARADISEC offers a web-enabled facility for collaborative digitisation, management and access to Australian researchers' ethnographic recordings of endangered languages and musics of the Asia Pacific region. The collection is housed in APAC’s store facility, where it is managed by Stuart Hungerford. Since portable field recording equipment became readily available in the 1950s, many thousands of hours of ethnographic recordings have been made by Australian researchers. These unique and irreplaceable records are now in danger of being lost to future generations because of the impending obsolescence of analogue recording formats, deterioration of the original tapes, and orphaning of the collections as their creators retire or die. Before PARADISEC, there was no Australian repository available to salvage recordings made in the Asia-Pacific region. Indexing orphaned collections preparatory to digitisation was an important step in itself: our catalogue of 2400 records currently includes data on 390 languages from 50 countries in our region, previously inaccessible information that is now accessible worldwide via our web catalogue. As well as salvaging old recordings, we provide a facility for deposit and management of current research collections and advice on data creation and management for researchers planning future field trips. Our data collection hosts material recorded as long ago as the early 1950s and as recently as 2005. Australian Research Council Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing

Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age. Australian Research Council

It is widely reported in Australia and elsewhere that songs are considered by culture bearers to be the “crown jewels” of endangered cultural heritages whose knowledge systems have hitherto been maintained without the aid of writing. It is precisely these specialised repertoires of our intangible cultural heritage that are most endangered, even in a comparatively healthy language. Only the older members of the community tend to have full command of the poetics of song, even in cases where the language continues to be spoken by younger people. Taking a number of case studies from Australian repertories of public song (wangga, yawulyu, lirrga, and junba), we explore some of the characteristics of song language and the need to extend language documentation to include musical and other dimensions of song performances. Productive engagements between researchers, performers and communities in documenting songs can lead to revitalisation of interest and their renewed circulation in contemporary media and contexts. Australian Research Council

PARADISEC is a collaborative digital research resource set up by the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University in 2003, with funding from the Australia Research Council's Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities scheme. Conceived and created in cyberspace, the project locates its digitisation equipment at the University of Sydney, its website at ANU, and metadata database at the University of Melbourne, with researcher contributions from all three Universities. Current planning issues concern provision of appropriate levels of digital rights management and access for the many stakeholder communities located throughout the Asia-Pacific region. This presentation outlines the principles that have guided us in planning and implementation of PARADISEC. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Australian Research Council