Paresh Parmar

Paresh’s current research project is currently in the process of being prepared for submission to the REF 2021 – UoA33. The Global Sound Movement (GSM) establishes a central repository for the practice research and is a significant contributor to the fields of sonic archiving and ethnomusicology. The website publication disseminates research findings and presents a multitude of ways in which an international audience engages with the many and varied outputs of the GSM. Preserving musical / sonic culture and heritage is paramount to framing our present and determining the future of musical composition. The GSM project has a number of key facets all of which are original to the work; firstly it involved the identification of culturally vulnerable communities globally whose traditional forms and habits of music making, and soundscape environments are threatened by the forces of modernity; it then involved extensive fieldwork making high resolution recordings of the unique musical instruments – which are particular to these communities - being played in their natural environments by indigenous musicians. The third, and arguably most important, strand of this work was that these recordings were not merely archived for posterity as has often been the case in orthodox approaches to the gathering of sound; but the recordings of musical instruments were digitised using industry standard samplers that integrate into music production software and incorporated into an open-access web-based GSM Player; designed and built by the GSM. Allowing users to engage in various depths with the material in line with the Alan Merriam’s classification of ethnomusicological participants, from performers to teachers.