Investigates the significance of a range of digital technologies in contemporary Indigenous musical performance, exploring interdisciplinary issues of music production, representation, and transmission.

Investigates the significance of a range of digital technologies in contemporary Indigenous musical performance, exploring interdisciplinary issues of music production, representation, and transmission.


The essays in this volume offer rich and diverse perspectives on the encounter between Indigenous music and digital technologies. They explore how digital media -- whether on CD, VCD, the Internet, mobile technology, or in the studio -- have transformed and become part of the fabric of Indigenous cultural expression across the globe. Communication technologies have long been tools for nation building and imperial expansion, but these studies reveal how over recent decades digital media have become a creative and political resource for Indigenous peoples, often nurturing cultural revival, assisting activism, and complicating earlier hegemonic power structures. Bringing together thework of scholars and musicians across five continents, the volume addresses timely issues of transnationalism and sovereignty, production and consumption, archives and transmission, subjectivity and ownership, and virtuality and the posthuman.


Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media is essential reading for scholars working on topics in ethnomusicology, Indigeneity, and media studies while also offering useful resources for Indigenous musicians and activists. The volume provides new perspectives on Indigenous music, refreshes and extends debates about digital culture, and points to how digital media shape what it means to be Indigenous in the twenty-first century.



Contributors: Linda Barwick, Beverley Diamond, Thomas R. Hilder, Fiorella Montero-Diaz, John-Carlos Perea, Henry Stobart, Shzr Ee Tan, Russell Wallace



Thomas R. Hilder is postdoctoral fellow in musicology at the University of Bergen. Henry Stobart is reader in music at Royal Holloway, University of London. Shzr Ee Tan is senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media: An Introduction

Taiwan's Aboriginal Music on the Internet

Recording Technology, Traditioning, and Urban American Indian Powwow Performance

YouTubing the "Other": Lima's Upper Classes and Andean Imaginaries

An Interview with Russell Wallace

Mixing It Up: A Comparative Approach to Sámi Audio Production

Creative Pragmatism: Competency and Aesthetics in Bolivian Indigenous Music Video (VCD) Production

Keepsakes and Surrogates: Hijacking Music Technology at Wadeye (Northwest Australia)

The Politics of Virtuality: Sámi Cultural Simulation through Digital Musical Media

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index