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Comment by jtotheh | Hacker News Reader

I was there in '84, I have a page here with pictures and recordings of an interesting encounter. The subjects are from a coastal town though, not the highlands, but they were at the "Highlands Show". https://vin-dit.org/amyours.html

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Almost forgot - I was at the annual highlands "sing-sing" competition and took a lot of pix, but only really recently got them digitized. They're not that well-preserved etc but there's a ton of them here: https://vin-dit.org/goroka84/gallery1.html

Very nice music. It has the same song three times?

These are recordings I made on a walkman-like thing in 84, I don't remember all the details of the encounter. I think when I got them digitized and listened to them, they were separate recordings with some differences. Maybe the Amyours band only knew one song, or maybe we can't tell their songs apart. The one has me trying to talk to them in Tok Pisin asking what they call the thing where they hit the bamboo tubes with flip-flops and he responds "Bamboo!" "Thong!" :)

I realized it may not be apparent from my page; the dominant sound of the recordings sounds sort of like a rubbery bass guitar being played with a pick, but it's actually flip-flops striking the bamboo pipes they're sitting on. They had pipes in appropriate lengths to produce various notes.

Western-ish tuning and harmony with some independence in the lines. I'd guess hymns influenced this at some point.

It would have been really interesting to hear original pre-contact music.

My ethnomusicology teacher (Charles Keil) ( I didn't really ever study that, though) has a good friend (Steven Feld) who was doing stuff with some people who were more remote. https://folkways.si.edu/voices-of-the-rainforest/world/music...

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