We Are Spirits...In The Material World...

[pied_piper70]

So, here's the Final Paper proposal I handed in today for my Music and Religious Experience class:

"I am interested in exploring the use of electronic music in ritualistic events and how it can aid in achieving a transcendental state such as trance. I will investigate the Urban Tribal community (mainly within the United States), which

Comments

[dreamsewing]

You might want to check in with local Massage therapy schools/Ayurvedic school as they use music and sometimes moderntribal/electronic music as part of therapy. It might add a nice/more "academic" side to things and they may have stuff like proofs/brain-heart activity scans to show how it effects body without the drug assumption/bias some people may have viewing Burning Man or other festivals.
It's hard to separate such experiences from dance,drugs, dehydration & exhaustion for data, good luck ;)

[pied_piper70]

I'm more interested to investigate how the modern tribal community ITSELF utilizes the music for spiritual purposes, rather than how the music itself effects the body...This is more a ethomusicology paper and not so much a psychoacoustic analysis...although *that* would be cool too...

[dreamsewing]

Oh, no arguement there I am a fire/poi dancer m'self. Was just saying if he was needing to isolate physical data specificly for effects of music. But looks like is not the track he is going anyways :)

[dangerdhotrod]

i remember going over to my friend chris's house and star5 was there, chris had this room in an attic and projected a slide projector onto a mylar sheet hanging over the window. the window was open and it was cold out and the wind blew the light onto the ceiling so that it looked like water relecting light above. and we listened to indian religious music and it was wonderful. but then i feel like at some point it was a record player playing the indian music and an electronic beat was being mixed over it. i would call it a spiritual experience

Chill to the Chant?

[wodurid]

I agree with dreamsewing to a point. In many historic shamanistic practices, music, dance, drugs, dehydration and exhaustion were the prescribed .... Combination. The trick, as noted, will be to overcome this country’s bias (both pro and con, mind you) toward drugs when illustrating the music integration

Re: Chill to the Chant?

[dreamsewing]

and I love how "Modern Tribal" both "borrows" and yet perpetuates "Tradition" especially in music culture.
Anouska Shankar's taking her fathers 4 line song about Shiva and expanding it into a full length piece and adding Austro Aboriginal/techno/trance/Spanish-Arab/moorish influences and having Ravi Love it, is excellent example.
Finding the base/common denomitors is the fun part.

[wodurid]

As a slight digression, I will also add that there is a preference among some of the more "spiritual" practioners in the BDSM community for using trance-type music ... very often electronic music. BDSM practices of some types often produce "altered states," not simply sexual stimulation.

Thus, some practioners use electronic trance music as scene ambiance to increase the desired “vibes”. I've run across a few (albeit rare) individuals that are decidedly shamanistic in their outlook, most notably many Shibari adepts.

Suffice to say that the shamanistic Ordeal Path has some commonalities with (some) BDSM practices. But that’s a whole ‘nother subject, is it not? ... and one even more dicey to include in this discussion than is drug use.

[mysticmoonstorm]

No experiences but I totally want to read that paper when you're done with it!

One thing you could try too - take a bunch of friends, throw them in a room for an evening, break out the electronic music and see what reactions you get from people. Might be an interesting little experiment and you could compare the dancers to the non-dancers and see how much the music influences vs movement, lighting, alcohol, etc.

[pied_piper70]

That would work for a psychoacoustic analysis project...However, this is going to be a cultural analysis paper - how the experiences were affected by the combination of modern tribal culture, the event, and any other aspects and how the music works within that context...

[juliemaru]

I don't have any experience to offer, but DAMN that's gonna be one interesting paper