Hi. My name is David Font-Navarrete. Today I'll be talking to you about a writing process from my particular standpoint in the disciplines covering generally speaking, the Humanities. The first thing, I guess we should talk about is that humanities includes a very broad set of academic disciplines. In my case, I'm a musician, I'm an artist, and I'm also an ethnomusicologist. So, you can see here music, art even philosophy, theology, all of these things come into what I do. A lot of people know exactly what musicians and artists do, but very few people seem to know much about ethnomusicology. Put very simply, ethnomusicology is the study of music and culture. You could also say, it's music as culture or music in culture. Often times ethnomusicologists will study and teach in either university music or anthropology departments, depending on the sort of structural emphasis on music or the culture. In practice most ethnomusicologists typically study music of non-Western cultures. In my case I specialize in studying West African music and Afro-Cuban music. I also studied quite a bit about experimental art music. Those are also the things that I specialize in as an artist. Here you have some images on the left, you see a still from a video I made in West Africa, in the Gambia of some farming music. On the top right, you see one of my mentors and dear friends, Ezequiel Torres who's an Afro-Cuban master drummer and drum maker. And on the bottom right there you see a Dutch artist and colleague of mine [unknown] who's a quite a well-known and interesting experimental music artist. In my case, I, I put music first. Even if what I end up writing about has a lot to do with history or culture even politics, generally speaking, I think they pay more attention to the music and sound. It can also give some really useful insights into writing. If we hear our own writing, for example, by reading it out loud ourselves or asking somebody to read it for us, we often become aware of dimensions that if we're just looking at it on the page can remain pretty obscure. We've become aware of hearing grammar and phrasing in different ways, but we also become aware of rhythms and textures in the writing. Also, I think a lot of what I do is research-based, so something I hear or I see or I read becomes material for something I'll write about later. Of course, if you play music and you're writing about music and studying it, it may come from something that you're studying as a performer or just listening to something. And listening, listening and lots of listening and as writers always I think doing lots and lots of reading is the, the fundamental thing that makes us better writers. I like to then just make note of everything that comes into my head that I think might be useful later. I have lots of notebooks in here. You see a couple of them from over the years and on the right, there was some sketches of musical notation. I also, like a lot of people, use the internet as a pretty indispensable research tool for a lot of things. Here on the left, you see a the YouTube video taken by someone else Mr.Schweitzer on a style of drumming that I've researched myself in West Africa. So, a lot of times one thing I'll do that I find quite useful is making a set of bookmarks related to a particular topic that I'm researching. In this case, this went into a very big folder I have of bookmarks on Bougarabou drumming, which was the subject of my PhD dissertation. Another thing that I do quite a bit in my writing process is interviewing people informally sometimes, but often times, formally, like a journalist or an anthropologist might. This also involve translating quite a bit from one language to another. Transcribing conversations is really time consuming. If, if you listen really closely to how most of us speak though in normal conversation, you'll quickly realize that writing what most people say word for word usually calls for quite a bit of editing and that the transition from a spoken word to a written one involves a set of translation itself. Here in the left-hand side of the screen, you're seeing two of the master drummers that I spent a lot of time with in, in the Gambian West Africa. This is on the left, Modou Tamba and on the right there, Landing Tamba. These are, these are uncle and nephew who are my teachers and friends. Like I said, and a lot of this is research-based, too. And so, I deal with sometimes, hard data. In this case, I'm visualizing the tempo of a performance. How fast or slow it got over given length of time and another type of visualization is on the right there some pretty standard music notation but on the left, a different way of seeing it on, on the page. And here you have a, a screen capture of an article that I did for a peer review journal called Ethnomusicology Review. I, I like very much what Professor Culmer mentions in her video about recursive and over-lapping stages of writing. So, you're always going back to certain things, redoing them in different ways. And the process of writing and rewriting tends to overlap quite a bit. So, it's the idea that things are kind of always a kind of work in progress, I like that very much. When you get into peer review other people evaluating your writing, offering feedback it becomes a type of collaboration and that's another part of the writing process that can be really challenging but is also incredibly valuable and can be a lot of fun. And finally one of the things that I tend to do in my discipline, is, combine different types of media into the writing so it's not just about the text. It's also about audio and visuals of different kinds. At the top of the screen here, you'll see that there's an audio clip that you can play in this article. There's also quotation like you would see in other academic writing and in the bottom, you'll see some of the music notation that I used all of these things to illustrate sort of a point. So, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the video. Take care.
