Anti-Racism and Equity Panel: How Can Music Science Be More Socially Just?

ABSTRACT

In August of 2022, the Anti-Racism and Equity Committee of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition held a special session at the biennial meeting of the society, taking place in Portland, Oregon, USA. The goal of this session was to present issues of social justice to the society’s membership for discussion, and in so doing, to normalize discussion of these issues in public fora and provide an opportunity for members to explore how issues of anti-racism and equity affect SMPC members’ work and research. This short report details the organization leading up to the special session and provides an edited transcript of the special session itself. The goal of this report is to inform members and other interested readers about the discussions and decisions that produced the special session, as well as to share more widely the content of the session itself in a permanent citable format.

KEYWORDS:

• music
• science
• anti-racism
• social justice
• equity

Responding to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in the summer of 2020, many academic organizations voiced public support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In June of 2020, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) formed an ad-hoc Anti-Racism Committee which penned an editorial (Baker et al., 2020) proposing eight concrete steps that could be taken in order to make progress on transforming SMPC into a more socially just organization.

The first of these steps was to create a standing Anti-Racism and Equity Committee (AREC) to provide continued structural support for this work within SMPC. Another proposed action was to devote a special session to addressing issues of racism and anti-racism within music cognition and perception at the 2022 SMPC conference. The goal of this session was to present these issues to the SMPC membership for discussion, and in so doing, to normalize discussion of these issues in public fora and provide an opportunity for SMPC members to explore how issues of anti-racism and equity affect SMPC members’ professional work, in ways large and small. The conversation replaced the traditional keynote presentation at its conference held August 4–7, 2020 in Portland, Oregon, USA. The panel took place on 5 August.

In this short report, we (1) detail the organization work leading up to the special session and (2) provide an edited transcript of the special session itself. The goal of this report is to inform SMPC members and other interested readers about the discussions and decisions that produced the special session, as well as to share more widely the content of the session itself in a permanent citable format. The authors of this report consist of two AREC members who organized the session (David J. Baker, AREC chair, and Dominique T. Vuvan, session moderator), as well as the three invited panelists (Juan Eduardo Wolf, Jennifer K. Mendoza, and Open Mike Eagle). We hope that by sharing these materials, SMPC members and other communities that wish to host similar discussions can learn and build from this work.

Interested readers will also benefit from Sauvé et al.’s (2023) recent discussion of anti-colonial strategies in cross-cultural music science research, which converges substantially with issues addressed in the current panel discussion.

Below, we summarize AREC’s preliminary discussions leading up to the special session, provide a brief introduction of our three panelists and moderator, and provide an edited transcript of the special session discussion. A recording of the unedited transcript can be found on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/y5jme/).

Planning Discussions

Choosing Panelists

The AREC had two priorities when considering who to invite to participate in the panel discussion. First, we wanted to invite participants whose perspective came from outside SMPC’s typical community, yet still had a clear connection to issues of race and equity within music cognition and perception research. The rationale behind this priority was that individuals who fit this profile would share less of the philosophical, practical, and ethical assumptions held by SMPC members, while still being able to connect in tangible ways to the scholarly practice of SMPC members. Second, the AREC wanted to invite panelists who had a clear connection to the communities and geography of the conference locale. This second priority was important in the context of ongoing discourse about community-integrated music research paradigms that seek to resist the dominant extractive scientific practices that objectify, exclude, and devalue communities being studied (Jacoby et al., 2020).

The final panel included three individuals: Juan Eduardo Wolf, an ethnomusicologist based at the University of Oregon; Jennifer K. Mendoza, a developmental psychologist who has developed a corpus of everyday music in infancy and currently serves on the Policy, Legislation, and Research team at the Early Learning Division in Oregon’s Department of Education; and Open Mike Eagle, an L.A.-based rapper who has collaborated with cognitive neuroscientists to study freestyle improvisation (Liu et al., 2012). The panel was moderated by Dominique Vuvan, a cognitive neuroscientist and current member of the AREC. The panelists were compensated for their travel and housing for the conference, and were given an honorarium. The panelists are introduced in more detail by the moderator in the transcription that follows.

Format and Scope of Discussion

The format and scope of discussion was decided in collaboration between AREC and the three panelists. In order to cover a variety of topics, limit the amount of preparation required of panelists, and foster open dialogue with attending SMPC members, the organizers decided to present a moderated panel discussion. Prior to the August conference, the organizers met with the panelists twice via video conferencing in order to generate a set of questions that would guide the special session. All parties agreed that panel discussion of these questions should make up the majority (approximately three-quarters) of the hour-long block allotted to the special session. In addition to this guided discussion, the organizing committee also set up infrastructure for audience members to be able to submit questions to the panelists via a submission form. Similar questions were grouped and summarized by a member of AREC (David J. Baker) and then relayed to the panelists in real time by the moderator. This process was chosen over an open Q&A to focus the limited time of our panel on questions of importance to a plurality of SMPC members.

Transcript

Dominique Vuvan

A reminder for everyone as we come into this conversation. These are tough conversations we’re having this session with the goal of challenging ourselves, of transforming the work that we do to be more just and more equitable with every try, which means that it’s difficult. We want to, as we enter this conversation, assume positive intentions from one another, to be collegial, and most important, to listen to one another. Very primarily, this is a journey, and everyone’s sort of in different places on this journey, everyone is learning.

We’re so lucky today to have our panelists here to share their perspectives and their experiences and the lessons that they’ve learned from their travels so far. Today we’re inviting everyone to share in this journey to come into the conversation with humility and openness and hopefully to learn a whole lot together.

As we’re coming into the space together, we’d like to invite everyone to take some deep breaths. Let go of whatever tensions you might be holding as you come into this room. Whether you’re sort of rushing in from lunch or you’re nervous about a presentation or you gave your presentation this morning and you’re still getting the jitters from that, let’s just try to place ourselves here in the present together for this important conversation. Okay – I’m going to introduce our panelists from furthest away from me inwards.

Juan Eduardo “Ed” Wolf is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the School of Music and Dance of the University of Oregon. He is coordinator of the UO World Music Series and serves as a core faculty member in the university’s Folklore and Public Culture Program. After having trained as a chemical engineer, Ed’s main research interests are in how people identify through music, particularly in relation to race in Latin America. He works with Afro descendants in Indigenous musics, religions, and carnival dancing and patron saint festivals, all within the context of the South Central Andes.

Michael W. Eagle II, better known by his stage name, Open Mike Eagle, is an American hip hop artist and comedian. Originally from Chicago, he is now based in Los Angeles, where he’s a member of the hip hop collective Project Blowed. He has also been a member of Thirsty Fish Swim Team and Cavanaugh. He has collaborated with neuroscientists, resulting in co-authorship on the paper “Neural correlates of lyrical improvisation: An fMRI study of freestyle rap” (Liu et al., 2012).

Jennifer Mendoza is a research associate at the University of Oregon, as well as the Research and Evaluation Manager on the Policy, Legislation and Research team at the Early Learning Division in Oregon’s Department of Education. Jenny studies music perception and cognition, exploring questions related to how infants’ everyday musical experiences shape their learning and development. I’d like to welcome you to join me in welcoming our three panelists today. Awesome, okay, let’s start.

To each of you, and I’ll invite you to start from closest to me, so we’ll start with Jenny – We’re interested to just have you introduce yourself to the audience if you can tell us a little bit about your story, who you are, and what your relationship is to music science.

Jennifer Mendoza

Hi, I’m Jenny Mendoza. My pronouns are she and her. I think as I come into conversations like this that are focused on social justice and antiracism and equity, I like to try to share a little bit more about my personal background and not just my professional background, since my identity and all of its complexities really shaped my experiences and my perspective and kind of what I bring to the work that I do. So I identify as a cisgender, able-bodied, fat, queer, Jewish woman of color. I grew up in Colorado, and I was raised by a single mom. I was born in Kolkata, India. I was adopted when I was six months old. So I’m internationally and transracially adopted. My mom is white. She is a retired professor of Education now. And I grew up in kind of the wealthier, whiter side of Colorado Springs. And it’s kind of in the recent couple of years that I’ve really started to think about how that has shaped who I am and how I view the world, the privilege and the power that comes with having access to wealth and proximity to whiteness and a mom in higher education has definitely set me on the path where I am today.

There’s also a lot of grief and loss in my story of being disconnected from my first culture, from my Indian roots and family and tradition and music and culture and ancestry and sort of processing the many, kind of, multiply marginalized aspects of my identity as well. A lot of that drives why I’m in early childhood and why I really want to support children and families so that children of all identities and cultures can have their selves celebrated and recognized and valued and respected and can love their own identities from the moment that they’re very little all through their lives.

I’ve been sort of going through similar processes in my professional thinking, too, recognizing that a lot of my training as a developmental psychologist has been in Western and white dominant methods, empirical senses of what it means to do science. And similarly for my music training, I started piano lessons when I was four, and I took French horn lessons starting in middle school band and kind of continued all the way through. Some love for the horn out there. Yeah, very Western music, lots of classical symphony orchestra kind of music and haven’t been exposed to the kind of wider world [of music] that we know is out there.

My path to music science [started with my interest in studying] infancy. I was working at the child care center on the college campus where I went and just realized how amazing infants are, how much they learn about the world in such a short amount of time, and that led me to developmental psychology. In college, I took a class in Psych, where we read Music, Language and the Brain (Patel, 2010). Thank you, Dr. Patel, if you’re here. And I realized I could combine this piece of myself that had been so core to my existence, but had always been a hobby of music and what I was learning about in my college courses and was seen as my future career, and that brought me to this world. My very first grad school conference was the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition. So I feel like music science was my intellectual and academic home for about a decade before I moved into my current role with the state of Oregon Department of Education. So it’s really nice to be back. Thank you for having me here.

Mike Eagle

I’ve seen a lot of audiences. You guys have really good claps. I go by Open Mike Eagle and I was born in Chicago in the 80s when I grew up, so it was a very weird and dangerous time and environment. And I managed to, because of my wonderful grandparents, lived a sheltered life in the middle of a lot of chaos that was still happening around me. It was very visceral, but they guided me toward studying and allowed me to watch as much television as I wanted, which served to be very good for me. My background in music kind of starts at this time. I feel like my earliest memories of hip hop, it was already very alive, it was, well everywhere around me. The first hip hop song I remember ever hearing, my mom was playing when I got in the car, she was playing Eazy E’s album. And this is not something that children are supposed to hear. But that was the environment that I was raised in. Hip hop was so everywhere for me.

You couldn’t separate it from life. So at some point early in my development, I got bored with it and started listening to college rock and grunge, whatever MTV had to offer. When I was in high school, though, I really engaged with performing in hip hop. And I read this book called Bomb The Suburbs by a guy named Upski who does a lot of activism now (Wimsatt, 2008). But in it he was describing hip hop culture, specifically from the perspective of the South Side of Chicago with the four elements and the way that he defined the culture. You couldn’t just say you were hip hop without doing any of these activities. So that meant if I wanted to identify with this community, I had to participate in breakdancing, rapping, DJing, if you could afford the equipment, and graffiti. So I did everything except DJing and really found a sense of self in that community. So I started rapping in 1996. I think this was the first time I rapped. I went to college and got a degree in psychology and then I moved to LA and was working in education while nurturing music as a hobby and then ultimately a career. I put out my first album in 2010. Being in LA, I was able to do a couple of things where I got to perform in front of comedy audiences, and that ended up being important because that ended up being the pathway to my one tie to music science.

A buddy of mine who was just an astute guy to begin with, he saw that the National Institutes of Health were doing studies on improvisational piano playing in the MRI machine, and he knew what we were doing. Me and my peer group in Los Angeles as freestyle rappers, it’s always been a very important skill set for us that we’ve nurtured over years and years and years. And he sent them a video of me performing at the Upright Citizens Brigade in LA, which is a comedy venue, but we’re freestyling and the improvisers were creating improv off of some of the stuff that I’ve freestyled. And he sent it to them saying that they should maybe consider studying freestyling in an MRI machine and those scientists were keen to the idea. So they flew me and him out. And we did the pilot study, which involved me rapping in a MRI machine for hours [laughter from audience] – trying to hold my mind together. And we started to design the study.

Later, we had a participant group come participate in the official study, and me and the guy whose idea this was, we got to help build the instruments by which the quality of the freestylers were rated. That was a big deal at the time, because that research, when it was published, made the rounds on the internet really fast. And there were a lot of people that had a lot of terrible things to say.

I think part of the interesting thing about me being here is that we’re talking about music science, but I represent a genre that is still struggling to be seen as music. And a lot of the response to the publishing was that “there was nothing in those rappers’ heads” and that sort of sentiment. But that is my connection to music science, and I’m happy to be here to talk about it.

Juan Eduardo Wolf

Hi, everyone. My name is Juan Eduardo Wolf. I go by Ed to most of my English speaking friends. My pronouns are he and him. I currently live in Eugene, Oregon, where I teach at University of Oregon in Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional homelands where Kalapuya have and continue to live. But I was born in Santiago, Chile, and came to the United States as an infant, when my father decided to come and study chemical engineering. Because of the military coup in Chile that happened at the time, my family decided to stay. My dad got a job in Indiana, which is why I speak with a nice, flat Midwest accent. Like many fractional-generation immigrants, especially in my teenage years, listening, playing, and dancing to music became one important way for me to explore my heritage and to come to understand how I identify as a Latino and as a Chilean American. I studied and worked for a few years as a chemical engineer, so I was trained in an applied science thinking sort of way. I followed this career, in part, because of the privilege and opportunities and familial expectations, and, in part, because the institutions I studied at did not structurally value the types of music that I was interested in.

While I had been performing Latin American music throughout my educational career, I did not learn about the discipline of ethnomusicology until graduate school in engineering and then through browsing in bookshops and taking classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. It took a few years, but eventually I studied and earned a doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, one of the few institutions that allow you to enroll in these programs without an undergraduate degree in music.

My doctoral research continued to help me understand how I identify. And I came to the realization that virtually all I had learned about Chilean music overlooked the history and contributions of Black Chilean musicians to these genres. Working with Afro-Chilean and Indigenous activists and teaching as a graduate student in a Latino Studies program also set in motion and continuing at an imperfect process of analyzing my own position as a White Chilean Latino and a role within post-colonial, systemically racist, interlocked set of societies and how I might contribute to creating change within that system and its institutions. My relationship to music science kind of comes through these parallels of music and science and studies in a very different way, perhaps, than you are used to thinking about, or, perhaps, something that sounds very familiar to you.

As an ethnomusicologist, I’m constantly exploring the relationship between music and culture, and I have been trained in and worn the hats of a social scientist and a humanist, each allowing me to get funding from different places. I also have recognized how the discipline itself, ethnomusicology, could make more use of the type of training that applied scientists receive.

My fieldwork training, for example, did little-to-nothing with quantitative analysis, and my engineering background served me very well in the technical readings on a seminar in timbre that I took. Unfortunately, however, ethnomusicologists often find themselves in the role of culture police. The important, but also tiring and seemingly pedantic job of reminding music researchers to check their cultural assumptions that are inherent in their work.

My relation with music science, then, begins with the understanding that music is a dominant, culturally constructed term with ethnocentric roots that trade, cultural exchange, imperialism, and colonialism have spread globally together with a series of associated behaviors and values. And while most humans and many other living species organize sound for a variety of uses, using the term music biases the way scientists and individuals may speak and act with sound in relation to music, their bodies, language, as well as other individuals and environments, both the natural and supernatural.

It’s only good scientific practice to recognize how our assumptions and how we conduct our studies and draw and limit our conclusions appropriately make a difference. Right? When done well, science, with its empirical methods and emphasis on limits and repeatability, becomes an important method for knowledge making and truth telling. The key caveat, however, is that science does not live in a vacuum and culture can enter into its assumptions as well as the way it is recorded. So overlooking context, heritage, and history of study participants and conditions can lead to overreaching scientific claims.

The history of colonialism is rife with such universal claims and then can have serious consequences socially. From an anticolonial and social justice perspective, then, the role of music science should include recognizing the assumptions made about music, expanding the concepts of sound under study, and looking for conclusions that have an impact locally that may have impact in other places too. That’s my opening salvo.

Dominique Vuvan

Well, there’s so much to dig into here, and I wish we had all day, but we’ve got 36 minutes, so let’s do this. As questions come up, please submit them. Mike, we’re going to start with you. I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about your experience collaborating with scientists on the paper that you were talking about.

In particular, do you feel that your identity and your expertise and your values as a performing artist were honored as part of that process? And what would you change about the process if you could go back and do it again?

Mike Eagle

I feel as if my experience, my acumen was honored to the best of those scientists’ ability. I think that there was a healthy reverence for the fact that we were coming from very different worlds and trying to put our heads together on this goal. And they knew that what we were doing was an interesting enough phenomenon to study with the tools that they had at their disposal. I think where it really got, I want to say tricky, but I think it’s a little fraught with the instruments that me and my friend were trying to design to rate quality. And we understood the need for them to do that because they were trying to correlate which brain functions were most active when this thing that we’re describing and forming is being done correctly or incorrectly. So we had to have some definition of what it meant to be doing the thing or not doing the thing. But then you get into trying to make instruments and there’s things that you can measure and then there’s a part to all music that’s immeasurable. But I think specifically, when it comes to rap, because the words, the meaning of them means so much, the context of them means so much, and so much of that is so difficult to measure, especially when someone is literally coming up with this in a moment.

So we measured things like tightness to the rhythm because there was a backing track, so if they’re on beat, that gets rated higher than something that’s not.[We measured things like] simplicity of rhyming words, so if you’re rhyming hat and cat, it’s easier than dimple and simple and so on. So doing syllable counts and that sort of thing. And I think we tried to make some ratings on context and whether or not things could be understood or whether ideas were coming through clearly. But we found ourselves just having a lot of difficulty in figuring out how to say something is more coherent than something else in that space. And what I think it spoke to was just the tools that we had only being able to scratch the surface of what the thing is that we’re doing. And what I would want is just for that line of research to keep going so that the tools can be more sophisticated. I don’t know if there was more research in that realm, and I imagine it probably wasn’t. So I can’t say that I wish anything was done differently. I can just say that I wish more could be done.

Dominique Vuvan

Awesome. Thank you so much. Jenny, I want to turn to you now to ask you about something related to what Mike was talking about. Something that stuck out to me is talking about how we’re just scratching the surface of what we’re able to do because of the limitations of the tools that we bring to the table as music scientists. Jenny, I want to ask you because you have this experience of being sort of on the scientist side of pursuing grant funding, and now working on the governmental side and looking at what to fund and what to prioritize. From your perspective, how is it that we actually decide what questions that we pursue and how we pursue them? Mike talked a little bit about this artist’s perspective. In your experience, what other ways can you imagine us making this prioritization?

Jennifer Mendoza

Yeah, I think this is a really great question to be thinking about and I think not just what the topics are or what the questions are, but as Open Mike Eagle was sharing what the tools are, what the methods are, how you analyze the data – these are all things that we can broaden how we make those decisions. In my current role with the Early Learning Division of our Oregon Department of Education, we’re trying to shift the kinds of work that we do, the research and evaluation work that we do, to use more community-based, participatory research methods and bringing in the folks, the families, the educators who are really the closest to the work and to the challenges that happen and who are the folks that we’re trying to serve with our early learning system in as leaders as part of the process and the research all throughout the way. So I can share an example. We have a program called the Early Childhood Equity Fund, which is administered by our Early Learning Division. It funds community-based organizations to provide culturally specific and culturally responsive early childhood programs and services for families across Oregon.

And it’s a relatively new program and fund. So we are also doing an evaluation of the work and that is in partnership with colleagues at Portland State University who work in the Center for Improvement of Child and Family Services. And they have formed a group of the grantees who are receiving funds through this Equity Fund program to be an Evaluation Leadership Group. So the grantees are the ones who are making decisions about what the research questions should be. They’re helping to develop tools for how to actually evaluate family and child outcomes. They’ll be involved in co-interpreting the data that come from this evaluation. They’ve already been involved in helping to communicate about the whole process and sharing out about the findings. And I think it’s really made the work stronger in that we are hearing from them about what is important in their work, what goals they’re trying to accomplish for children and families that they serve, and is allowing us to think of a broader set of questions that we might not have come up with on our own. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot to build those relationships with community.

A lot of times we’re trying to build trust, trying to repair trust, especially from the state government position. And so it’s kind of a whole mind-set shift to do work that way and to think about how to interrogate: Why am I asking this research question? Why is this important? Who might benefit from answering this question? Who might be left out if we do it in X method versus Y method? Why am I using this tool? Why is it the most commonly used tool in our field? Which communities, hopefully plural, has this tool been validated with? And then I think another thing we can do is just try to be really open about all of those decisions that we make all along the way, to be transparent about what were the factors that we considered and why did we choose the ways that we did, the communities that we studied, the tools that we use. We’ve tried to do this for our music research with Dr. Caitlin Fausey. We have a principles of manual annotation paper in Frontiers [in Psychology] that lays out all of the decisions that we made about how we manually annotated music in daylong recordings of infants’ everyday lives and talked about some of the ways that we created, [and] tried to create a welcoming, inclusive team for our team of research assistants (Mendoza & Fausey, 2021b).

I think that the more we can all be sharing about how we do our work and how we’re trying to change what we do, we can learn from one another that way. And I think at a systems level that having that kind of work and that kind of shift, [we should] be rewarded for doing our work that way. To be taking the time and the resources to make those shifts has to be part of something that’s valued in the field.

Dominique Vuvan

Thank you. Ed, to follow up on what Jenny has just been talking about as she’s enumerated the ways that we have to shift, the questions that we ask, the resources that we bring to bear to ask those questions, the way that we need to reimagine our collaborations with our community partners, I’m wondering how we do that. How do we move ourselves and our colleagues and our collaborators from where we’re at with our default practices to a place where we’re challenging those and trying new things? In your experience, do you have ideas about how education and training might play a role, whether they are limited in the role that they might play, and what else might be important?

Juan Eduardo Wolf

That’s a loaded question. How do we do it? We make mistakes. We try, and recognize that the methods that we have been taught quite often within our curriculum have not been developed to the level that we could do that. I recommend that if you haven’t had a chance to think about Indigenous research methods, for example, to check those books out. These things happen, and we mentioned at least three things that really pop out. So first of all, I congratulate you for being here, which suggests that you have an interest in social justice. Because social justice and doing something about social justice is a choice. There’s nothing – very little – within our systems that sort of suggests to us that we should do it. Sure, we have some things in place, like “Human Subjects” [protocols], but if we’re honest, or maybe we’re being cynical, we could say that those are there for legalistic reasons rather than moral or ethical wise. The real thing to think about is that we have to think of these processes all along the way. We have to learn how to ask: how does that happen? We have to spend time with the community.

That six-month time frame that that grant allows us for that money is not going to buy you a lot of trust. It’s going to take a longer time, and it’s going to extend maybe your grad school time – god forbid tuition should be figured out that way. There’s a lot of things that go against us, but we have to spend the time and we have to start creating incentives for that. One of the reasons that I ended up working in Afro-descendant culture in Latin America was that there was a grant that incentivized that at my university in graduate school. And I had been thinking all that time I wanted to work with Chilean culture. I had originally planned to go somewhere else. This grant was a little bigger. And you know what? Nothing told me in Chile that it would make sense. I went down a skeptic, and I walked into a whole world that I had no clue about. So I wish I could say that I had this great idea, but the funding helped lead the way. So that’s part of it. The institutions have to change. We have to change our curriculum. We have to change the way we do research. We have to think about how we fund it.

And those methods include something that I’m trying to do. I mean, this speaks more directly to your question, is working with the communities not only as subjects of research, but as coauthors. So that this very messy, sticky process of writing with community members is also something we can try. I’ve done it once, but I’ve tried it three times so far in my career. I’ve really been just getting into it. The first one was with an activist who had been around for a while and he had some specific ideas. He changed the way I was thinking about what was important, because he was stressing things that I wasn’t necessarily thinking about in my research. And we had this dialogue going on that I thought was great. But it’s a very specific kind of person within a structure that’s there. It’s not the entire community. And that tends to happen in research. We want to study the virtuoso in the instrument. We give precedence to the activists. But the regular community member or the community member that may not stand out initially, may have an experience that is unique or very common to things that we might not think about.

And it’s important to go there with an open mind and listen to that kind of stuff. And then some people, why should they even talk? That’s the classic issue of fieldwork in general. But you go with an incentive of giving back. How your work is not only to be published, but your work is to have practical application in a way that serves the community. And those are the social justice kind of choices we make. And they require a change in curriculum and they require a change in funding and they require a change in our own behaviors. That’s where it goes – we just have to change the system.

Dominique Vuvan

So, first question (from the audience): “I’d be curious to hear the panelists comment on the concept of generalizability inherent in the motivation of many scientific studies.” We’ll start with you [J.E.W.]. But I’m sure both Jenny and Mike will have responses to that as well.

Juan Eduardo Wolf

Yeah, this is something else that sort of is springing from studies that people are talking about in terms of decolonizing and other ways of thinking about these things, from my perspective, which has come to be that there’s not going to be a panacea for everything. There’s not going to be a solution that’s going to come for everything. But rather, there’s going to be – if we are working within a community, as if we were suggesting – a solution. Maybe solution is not the right word. There’s going to be something that we’re going to try that has some good results within a community, and some of those things might be applicable, if certain conditions are met, in other places so we can extend those things. But we should be building from small building blocks, right? Like the recognition of the study that Open Mike Eagle was a part of. Okay, we learned a bunch of stuff, if you’re rapping in a MRI machine. Okay? But that’s where it is, because I’m sure that your rhymes come out different if the audience is doing different stuff. And I’m pretty sure MRI doesn’t give you much feedback in terms of how dope that rhyme was or whatever.

That’s why I mentioned earlier about the limitations, of being real about the limitations, and being really clear about the generalizations. Again, the granting agencies are going to want to make these huge claims about how important this is going to be for a lot of people, and what should matter is how important it is going to be to these specific folks. And these are the folks that are working with us on the ground and whose voices you will hear. So it’s, again, a little bit of a change in thinking, but I think that it doesn’t mean – I’m an ethnomusicologist; we came from a field of comparative musicology where we tried to sell that all music can be explained under one grand history. We found it didn’t work. So now we spend all our time, each of us working in our own particular space, and then hopefully coming up with some ideas that work, if we’re learning, not trying to make our claims too much bigger than that. So I think that speaks to that space.

Dominique Vuvan

Thank you. Question here for Mike. “I’m interested in pursuing a line of research investigating the role of hip hop music as a form of protest music and a vehicle for advancing social justice efforts. Do you have any tips for a white male researcher who is new to participatory action research on how best to honor the experiences of folks while also avoiding putting the burden and emotional labor of education solely on their shoulders?”

Mike Eagle

It’s a pretty big question. But that pursuit sounds really valuable. So in the context of this conversation, I’m hearing a lot of terms that I don’t necessarily understand the meaning of, but I feel like I’m understanding the intent behind. So even listening to a lot of what Ed is saying about how things should be done, or Jenny is saying about how the funding should be allocated, again, it sounds like this is the same thinking that should be applied here. Already the intention is to not do those things, which is great. And I think it’s really about having very sensitive conversations with people where you actually listen to what they say and combine that with your own expertise to try to find a methodology that gives you the results you’re looking for, but one that is also very respective of the boundaries of the people involved. I mean, talking about protest music, that’s a lot of pain. That’s going to be a lot of pain and discomfort that you’re going to be sifting through to try to get an understanding. And that understanding is very valuable. But I think just proceeding with that intention and sensitivity to those matters and sensitivity to the feelings of those people, that sounds like the way to go. Of course, once again, it’s a lot easier to say.

Dominique Vuvan

Question for Jenny now. There’s a question about how we define what we call music. And so I think in their own ways, both Ed and Mike have touched on this topic, with Ed talking about music being a very problematized category to just sort of have a definition to start. And when Mike was talking about even defining hip hop as music and how some people don’t consider it as such, I’m wondering what your view is on [how we define music] and how you might accept that defining it is going to be a problem in itself. But given the constraints of doing a study, we need to decide what it is that we’re going to study. How do we do that?

Jennifer Mendoza

Yeah, that’s a big question too, but one that I’ve attempted to tackle in some of the work that I’ve done, where that was part of what we did when we were trying to manually annotate music in these everyday recordings of infants’ everyday lives (Mendoza & Fausey, 2021a). So for our manual annotators, we had to have definitions of what counts as music and what doesn’t count as music. And we had a long process to develop that coding manual. We had some pilot recordings that we used and we had a sense of what we might discover, like play songs and lullabies and things that we know from previous work are common for infants in their musical experiences. But then there was a whole range of other things that we discovered of toys that make musical sounds and people who make all sorts of noises that like, does this count as music? Does clapping count as music? Is a sibling making some kind of song – is that music? And so we did multiple iterations of trying to categorize, trying to have a lot of different examples. And I think we ended up with a reliable coding system.

I don’t think I would try to claim [that] this is the way to define music and [that] this applies to all music everywhere, or even [that] this applies to all infant music everywhere. This applies to infant music in Oregon, perhaps in the United States, in the culture that it’s in. So I think my answer to this would be to have a clear definition, be able to explain why you are defining music the way you are. And again, back to what Ed was saying, the limits of when that definition applies and when it might be something else.

Dominique Vuvan

Awesome, especially because I’ve actually been using some of your data as well. So I really appreciate the care that you took in developing those materials, which speaks to the collaborative solutions that I think all three of our panelists have been talking about.

I think this is for either Ed or Jenny:“Could you speak to your experience navigating working to encourage diversity in your field? As someone who is white or straight passing? Speaking as a queer individual who could be described as straight passing, I often find a pull between wanting to be out and proud of my own diversity and not wanting to come off as virtue signaling or drawing equivalencies between myself and individuals who do not have the privilege of invisible diversity. I wonder if you have had similar experiences and how you reckoned with that aspect of your own diversity in your advocacy work.”

Mike Eagle

These questions get tougher and tougher [crowd laughs].

Juan Eduardo Wolf

I’m going to throw some clay on the wheel, as I like to say. I think, as we mentioned at the very beginning, it’s a process that you go through. It’s a trust sometimes in the process as well that you have to try. You’re interested in diversity on a number of levels in ways that you had not considered. Once you start to get into this work, you start to realize that there are going to be voices – there’s going to be definitions of music that you’ve never thought of, the ways in which people use it, the way that people identify that you’re not used to. I remember the first time that I asked people’s pronouns in class, it changed the whole understanding of who my students were. And the people I was working with. And I found that in every classroom that I have asked for pronouns from then on, at least one person has been identifying in a way that I may not have been acculturated to understand them. And knowing that and being aware of that constantly starts to, again, make me rethink the limits of the way, the kinds of claims I’m going to make. Because I want to make sure that I leave room for everyone’s voice to be heard and everyone to be at the table.

I think vulnerability is a good thing to show, and it is something to recognize that we are all in this process together and that we are trying to do good work and that we will make mistakes and that there were times when I was less aware of things than I am now. Showing that availability or that openness to doing that, knowing that, being willing to admit mistakes, something that is not very well accepted in academia more generally speaking. Particularly as you go through the system and institutions you start to realize, in 2020 when all of a sudden I’m sitting as the professor in a discussion, I’m realizing that all of a sudden I am part of “the man,” right? That is going on here while I never conceived of myself that way. All of a sudden it was that realization that, “okay, I’m part of the power structure now, and I should make a difference.” And I think in a very pragmatic way it speaks to this tug-and-pull that will happen. Because we can talk about how we would like to have the system be. We can talk about where we like the funding to go, where we want the curriculum to be. It’s a whole other thing to be in a specific program right now and have to figure out where you’re going to get the funding to do what you want to do and how to convince your advisor or whoever it is that’s judging you, that this has value when they may or may not be on the same page as you. It’s a very pragmatic way of thinking about these things.

So for those of us who are in positions of power, which is all of us, but in relationship to each other depending on what’s going on, some of us have much less power than other folks, but only 30% of us, assuming that most of the folks here are in academic positions, and only 30% of the US population even gets to attend higher ed, let alone keep going on. So we have to think about where our privileges are along the way. Every major change in curriculum, at least from an Ethnic Studies perspective, has come from the students pushing hard against the administrators to make that happen. Administrators – you will often find people who want to do the right thing and have found themselves hamstrung and all the rest of that stuff. So oftentimes the professors with whom you might most identify, who you feel could be your best ally, have also been facing struggles with their senior colleagues, or their administrators, or their way of work. So recognize there’s all these pushes and pulls along the way.

None of this really answers the question, perhaps. But it’s more about opening that awareness of where your particular position is, and how to be able to speak to the types of circumstances or the limitations that you recognize that you may have, and others may have, and keep raising them in ways that you feel comfortable.

Jennifer Mendoza

So what comes to mind for me is thinking about if the goal is to increase diversity of our lab teams, or our departments, or our university spaces, how do we create the conditions that will make people with diverse backgrounds and identities feel welcome and safe and included? And I think that throughout my time as a graduate student, I watched this push for “we have to just bring more people here.” And especially in Oregon, as you may have noticed in your time here, it’s a fairly white dominant state. It has a history of being legally a whites-only state. And so there are not a lot of people of color here. And there was a lot of dialogue around, well, how do we just bring in more people of color? Well, you can’t just bring people in and then expect them to stay if you don’t actually make it a fun place and a safe place and a place where their lives and values are respected and welcomed. So I think that’s a really important part of the conversation that often gets left out is what are the cultural shifts that have to change before we can try to change the diversity of the people who are here.

And I’ve seen that a little bit in my current role. I’ve been trying to, as I mentioned, shift toward more community-based participatory research, having more value on qualitative data and qualitative analyses. And I’ve been pushing for, in our job postings, to be including not just quantitative skills, but also qualitative skills. And I think similarly, my hope is that that will broaden our applicant pool of people who maybe had those experiences and worked in some of the community-based kinds of settings.

But then I wouldn’t want someone who’s gung ho about doing that work to come in and then I’m just like, hey, can you run some percentages for me about what percent of kids experienced this program? We should make sure that we’ve got work set up, so that then those folks would be excited to come do that work. I think about having that match between who are you trying to bring into your space and what will make them excited to stay there? There’s another piece of the question about our own identities, and I just wanted to share. Part of my own experience has been because I was raised with a white mom and in a predominantly white part of Colorado Springs. I’ve recently realized that I grew up in assimilation mode and was just very much in white culture and behaving in white culture and all of the dominant parts of that.

And it took me a long time personally to really recognize for myself all of the nuances of my identity and to actually identify with the queer part of myself, to tell people that I’m Jewish. The whole list of things I said at the beginning, I would never have told anybody that a couple of years ago. It still makes me uncomfortable. It’s very new for me to just share all of those aspects about who I am and how I walk through the world. But I do think that part of why I’m trying to make myself more comfortable doing that is because as you talk about being vulnerable, [you’re able to] connect with the people who are also marginalized in the systems that we are all part of. Recognizing my own power, as someone working in a big white dominant system, [helps me to] share where I can connect with folks, where I can’t, and to be able to have that representation and voice in the spaces that I work in. So I think everyone has to make those decisions for themselves – do you feel safe sharing all those pieces of who you are with people you work with, with the systems that you work in?

But to the extent that you feel like you do feel safe, I think sharing those can be really powerful and can remind the people around you that we are a diverse community of humans and that we can think about what that means for our work together.

Dominique Vuvan

I want to give the panel a chance to ask each other questions. I heard all three of you at different times respond to things that another panelist was saying. What are your questions for each other? Also world peace, how do we get that? [crowd laughs]

Mike Eagle

The documents we were sharing in preparation [for this session] mentioned this question about what music science means. And I’ve been chewing on that since it was written because that term is like everything and nothing all at once. It’s like the system for trying to understand the world, running up against this thing that does not want to be understood. It just happens in your body and in your ears and in your mind and it has very little to do with like its functionality. It has very little to do with a person being able to describe what’s happening. It just happens. And so that’s just a really interesting incursion of universes to me. And I’m curious what you all thought about that.

Dominique Vuvan

World peace. What is music science?

Jennifer Mendoza

Let’s go back to world peace. I’ve been sort of chewing on that as well. And I think one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the work that I’m doing now is sort of what is science? And realizing in my own training and a lot of the work that I’m familiar with, it really is this Western, white-dominant, empirical science and that there are many other ways of knowing and understanding in the world that we don’t often consider science that are equally valid. But I think in some ways, maybe music science is a little further along in that than other fields of science, where for a long time we’ve recognized that music exists across all cultures and across all cultures throughout time and have had a very strong cross-cultural line of investigation as part of the field. Because music is this hard-to-define phenomenon, it pushes us to be more creative in the kinds of methods that we use to study music, [and] we have to be less conventional in the tools that we approach with. And I think a lot of us, I’m guessing, are musicians ourselves or have that creative streak in us where we like outside-the-box thinking and [are asking,] how do we approach problems from this place of art and creativity? And so in some ways, although there may be many systems that we’re working in that are still white-dominant systems, as a field, because of the nature of music, we’re sort of pushing back against that.

Juan Eduardo Wolf

Yeah, I spend my time thinking about – oftentimes – where those two terms fall short. I’ve spent time in both those spaces (science-music). So I know what science can do theoretically, and it answers certain questions very well. But in speaking with Indigenous peoples and when thinking about the way Afro-descendants have had to go through their history and continue to live in a society that can be stacked against them, then I understand that there are concepts that science … that there are other ways of understanding the world, because you were mentioning, that work in different ways, and that there are other ways of understanding sound that are not that. They’re not the ones that are sitting there going instead: “You know what? If it doesn’t have words, it’s not music. If I don’t move to it, it’s not music” or whatever term because music, of course, is that Eurocentric based term. “It all comes from the Greek. Everything comes from the Greek.” [crowd laughs] It’s one of those things where you say, look, I want to do taky.¹ I don’t want to do music. I do taky in my life. Right? And what does that mean? I’m singing. And if it doesn’t have words, it’s something else. Right?

Or if there’s a difference in sound or if there’s a difference in perspective … “I don’t get the music. It doesn’t come from me. It comes from the spirit outside.” Now, scientifically, that means we can say, “Look, okay, actually I don’t get any waves out there that actually show me what’s going on.” That’s fine. But the concept – most oftentimes when you speak to folks, they have these ways of partitioning.

We’re really good at partitioning stuff, human beings. And so, I can talk to you all about how I understand what I know what you think music is, and I’m going to talk to you about music in that way, but I can also sit here and talk about taky and how the sound works in that particular way and the concepts that it brings me. For example, I respect the world and the world outside and maybe I wouldn’t be doing the damage to the environment that we’re doing if I knew that those voices and that music was coming from there, and knowing that I would be destroying those sounds without that. That changed my perspective. That’s a question that we don’t necessarily ask in science, perhaps. Or the ways in which we report it would not take that into account. And how we might be damaging them by making different kinds of claims. Those other spaces is where I like to think.

Dominique Vuvan

I would love to spend all day with this conversation, but cross-cultural comparisons aren’t going to understand themselves. So we do have to make way for the next session here. Thank you so much to our panelists today … [audience applauds] and thank you so much to all of you. Go forth, be brave, change the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Quechua word that speaks to a holistic, united understanding of music and dance.