The Densmore Project

Technical and Scholarly Notes

Musical Materials The musical materials included here have been encoded from various monographs produced by Frances Densmore for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. The principal focus of this site is Densmore's transcriptions of roughly 2,500 traditional Native American songs assembled over a 50-year period from some 30 indigenous groups from the United States, southern Canada and northern Mexico. Like all transcriptions, there are innumerable problems in attempting to render non-Western musics using the traditional Western system for notation. Users of this database are warned: The representation of pitch is only approximate and susceptible to systematic biases arising from Densmore's training as a classical musician. Densmore did mark tones (+) which depart significant from a Western tuning system and these markings are encoded in the corresponding song files. The key signatures added by Densmore were often added to ensure that the pitches conformed to a coherent Western notion of key. Many of Densmore's key signature include sharps or flats which do not appear anywhere in the transcribed song. Consequently, users should be aware that any attempt to infer a "key" from the notated key signature is fanciful. Densmore was not familiar with any of the indigenous languages of her singers. The transcriptions of the musical texts are linguistically crude. In general, note durations are reasonably accurate in Densmore's transcriptions. However, the placement of barlines and the indications of various meter signatures are problematic. Many of the notated transcriptions printed by the Government Printing Office contain obvious errors, such as omitting an augmentation dot, where the context (repetition, etc.) makes it clear that these are oversights rather than intended changes. These minor editorial slips have been corrected in the encoded database, however, each editorial intervention has been explicitly flagged so users can judge the passages for themselves.

While recognizing the interpretive limitations of Densmore's original field transcriptions and notes, Densmore does appear to have been a fairly conscientious and accurate amanuensis. A number of Densmore's transcriptions of Ojibway songs were independently evaluated by Dr. Tom Vennum. However, Pantaleoni (1987) has shown that Densmore misinterpreted drum beats in at least one Dakota song.

For background information regarding Densmore, scholars should consult Alisha Khan's Bibliography of Densmore. A useful Bibliography of Densmore's writings is also available.

Analytic Tools

As noted, the materials can be accessed by cultural region by tribal region or by tribe name, and using the themefinder search engine. In the future, we expect to add geographical mapping tools which may facilitate studies in cultural transmission and cross-cultural influence. The database has been designed to allow future incorporation of other information, including dance/movement notations such as Laban or Benesh.

This web site provides only a limited set of tools for scholarly access and analysis. For more ambitious scholars, the entire database can be downloaded to a local computer. The musical transcriptions are encoded using the Humdrum data format which is extensively documented at various web sites. Specifically, the notated music is represented using the Humdrum kern representation, while the lyrics are represented using the Humdrum text and silbe representations.

Since the database is encoded in the Humdrum format, the full analytic capabilities of the Humdrum tools can be used. This software is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the web. The Humdrum Toolkit provides a wealth of ways of analysing the data. The following questions provide only a suggestive sample:

• Are northwest native cultures more likely to use iambic rhythms?
• Do dancers in Pueblo music turn more frequently than other dancers?
• Are Na-Dene language groups more likely to employ rhyme schemes in their poetic texts?
• Do bi-labial plosives coincide with strong metric positions in warrior songs?
• What features distinguish melodies sung by Nootka women compared with those sung by Nootka men?

An 8-page introduction to Humdrum is available that outlines the capabilities and limitations of Humdrum.