ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY « GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
M.A. THESIS
JUNE 2019
SEARCHING FOR LULLABIES: REMEMBERING THE PAST THROUGH LULLABIES IN THE SOUNDSCAPE OF EASTERN BLACK SEA
Suna BAŞLANTI
Department of Music
JUNE 2019
ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY « GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
SEARCHING FOR LULLABIES: REMEMBERING THE PAST THROUGH LULLABIES IN THE SOUNDSCAPE OF EASTERN BLACK SEA
M.A. THESIS Suna BAŞLANTI
(409151109)
Thesis Advisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. E. Şirin ÖZGÜN TANIR Department of Music
Müzik Anabilim Dalı
Müzik Programı
HAZİRAN 2019
İSTANBUL TEKNİK ÜNİVERSİTESİ « SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ
NİNNİLERİ ARAMAK: DOĞU KARADENİZ SES ALANINDA NİNNİLER ARACILIĞIYLA GEÇMİŞİ HATIRLAMAK
YÜKSEK LİSANS TEZİ
Suna BAŞLANTI (409151109)
Thesis Advisor : Assoc. Prof. E. Şirin Özgün ... Istanbul Technical University
Jury Members : Assoc. Prof. Dr. Belma Oğul ... Istanbul Technical University
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Evrim Hikmet Öğüt ... Mimar Sinan University
Suna BAŞLANTI, a M.A. student of ITU Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences student ID 409151109, successfully defended the thesis/dissertation entitled “SEARCHING FOR LULLABIES: REMEMBERING THE PAST THROUGH LULLABIES IN THE SOUNDSCAPE OF EASTERN BLACK SEA”, which she prepared after fulfilling the requirements specified in the associated legislations, before the jury whose signatures are below.
Date of Submission : 3 May 2019 Date of Defense : 11 June 2019
FOREWORD
This thesis has been a long, pleasant, yet challenging, tiring, and with full of learning journey, which helped me rediscover the connection with my roots. So, I would like to thank all the people who accompanied me on this journey.
First of all, I would like to thank my advisor Şirin Özgün, who guided me throughout this study. She supported me with all her possibilities and eye-opening questions whenever I felt pessimistic, confused, and desperate. I am also grateful to her for introducing me to “soundscape”. I am glad to have the opportunity to work with her. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Ayşenur Kolivar for her biggest contributions to this study. I am grateful to her for sharing her limited time, audio recordings and incredible memories with me. It was my pleasure to have such long conversations with her.
My special and sincere thanks are for my family. If they were not in my life I would not be the person who I am today. I would like to thank my mother, who supported me the most in every moment of this study. She did her best as a participant, a mother, an interviewee, and a performer both in lullabies and sound sections. Without her, I could not have made this thesis so vivid and intimate. I would like to pay my respects to her as well as all the Eastern Black Sea women for her persistent strength and courage. I thank to my sister Kadriye, who struggled with me during my fieldwork in all those dangerous mountain roads and shared my disappointments. Although she has been far away, she always supported me whenever I called and asked her for some help both technically and psychologically. Finally, I would like to thank my two other sisters and my brother, who patiently answered my never-ending questions all the time. I would not be able to complete this thesis without their amazing memories and fabulous vocalizations.
I owe special thanks to the jury members: Belma Oğul for finding the title of this thesis, sharing her sincere interest and her inspiranitonal ideas, and Evrim Hikmet Öğüt for her sincere interest in my research, her suggestions and her encouragement about potential outputs.
Even though we do not have a chance to meet, I want to thank Emine Kılınç for helping me in the translation process of Laz language into Turkish.
I would like to express my gratitude to my closest friends for their support and sincere help in finalizing this thesis and for being with me all the way through. At last, I owe a special thanks and gratitude to all these special women who gave their time and shared their sincere memories with me, and then the Eastern Black Sea for succeeding to surprise me once again.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
FOREWORD ... ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS ... xi
LIST OF TABLES ... xiii
LIST OF FIGURES ... xv SUMMARY ... xvii ÖZET ... xix INTRODUCTION ... 1 1. Purpose of Thesis ... 1 1.1 Motivation ... 1 1.2 Methodology ... 4 1.3 1.3.1 Fieldwork ... 5 1.3.2 Sensory Ethnography ... 9 1.3.3 Autoethnography ... 11 Literature Review ... 13 1.4 1.4.1 Cognitive Development Studies About Infants’ Auditory Perception ... 14
1.4.2 Experimental versus experiential: What is missing? ... 19
BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY ... 23
2. Memory ... 25
2.1 Memory and Sound ... 27
2.2 Memory and Emotion ... 31
2.3 SEARCHING FOR LULLABIES ... 39
3. For Whom Do We Define ... 42
3.1 The Lullabies Of Women In The Eastern Black Sea ... 44
3.2 3.2.1 The way women use lullabies in the Eastern Black Sea ... 46
3.2.2 Back and forth: Starting from the last ... 48
3.2.3 Childhood to femininity: Unspoken words ... 50
3.2.4 Receiving and transmitting stereotypes ... 55
3.2.5 Improvisation: Speak through songs ... 59
3.2.6 Enculturation: Latest version of the melody in the ear ... 61
Lullabies and the Eastern Black Sea Music ... 64
3.3 3.3.1 The mutual relation of lullabies and folk songs ... 65
3.3.2 Behind the curtain: What music means ... 72
Fairytales ... 79
3.4 THE REALM OF THE SOUNDS ... 85
4. The Sounds Of The Eastern Black Sea ... 87
4.1 4.1.1 Recorded sounds ... 88
4.1.2 Silent sounds ... 91
The Traces of The Sounds in The Memories ... 94
4.2 The Eastern Black Sea Music And The Soundscape ... 104
4.3 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ... 109
An Overview of The Study ... 109 5.1 Recommendations ... 115 5.2 Epilogue ... 117 5.3 REFERENCES ... 121 APPENDICES ... 131
APPENDIX A: TRACK LIST ... 133
APPENDIX B: MAPS ... 135
APPENDIX C: PHOTOGRAPHS ... 137
LIST OF TABLES
Page Table 4.1 : Table of recorded sounds ... 89 Table 4.2 : Table of silent sounds ... 93
LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Snyder’s Illustration of Echoic Memory. ... 29
Figure 2.1 : Snyder’s Illustration of Auditory Memory. ... 30
Figure 2.2 : Figure 3.1 : Taboo and some related concepts. ... 58
Figure B.1 : Map of Turkey ... 135
Figure B.2 : Map of Fieldwork ... 135
Figure C.1: Havva Akıtan, Havva Kuyumcu and Bakiye Kuyumcu singing in Çayırdüzü ... 137
Figure C.2: Çayırdüzü interview ... 137
Figure C.3: Söğütlü Village ... 137
Figure C.4: Seinoz Valley ... 138
Figure C.5: Tea Telpher ... 138
Figure C.6: Cradle Toy ... 138
Figure C.7: Fire in the kitchen ... 139
Figure C.8: Weaving Loom ... 139
SEARCHING FOR LULLABIES: REMEMBERING THE PAST THROUGH LULLABIES IN THE SOUNDSCAPE OF EASTERN BLACK SEA
SUMMARY
The aim of this study is to understand how we encode those initial sounds in terms of examining their reflections into our music perception; to clarify the borders between music and sound if it exists; to investigate the usage of lyrics in order to trace their place in the remembrance of the melody; to understand the role of mothers, women, both in emotional and melodic creation and transmission; to emphasize the importance of sensual perception in memory revival; and finally to contribute to the epistemology of sound. So, the ultimate question in this thesis is: what is the function of the sounds in our childhood in terms of memory and music perception?
This thesis is not a totally cognitive study that seeks to explain the brain’s functions against the elements of music or sound such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre; instead, it tries to create correlations between our essential cognitive functions, our cultures and our memories that mostly affect who we are. So my main methodology is supposed to be holistic by synthesizing different disciplines and different approaches, that is, incorporating the biological and experimental knowledge into the sensory and autobiographical ethnography.
Chapter 2 explains the theoretical basis of memory. I am going to explain the memory by giving brief terminological information along with the general theories about sound and memory. The memory and emotion part is aimed to promote my findings of the importance and power of emotion on memory and its retrieval.
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are mainly devoted to my fieldwork outcomes about lullabies and sound. Chapter 3 contains the definitions of the used terms, the women as a singer or transmitter, and the children of the past as a listener or receiver. Within this chapter I tried to express the place of lullaby in these women’s life and to understand the children of the past in today’s stories. Under this section, I explained the mutual relation between lullabies and folk songs and the meaning of these melodies for people. Because women are one of the most important and effective characters for children as the creators of the lullabies, their stories reflect the emotional and inherited background of these initial memories that children build. In Chapter 4, my main goal is to provide as much sound as possible for the reader. I tried to show the relationship between music and sound by examining the impact of sound on our music perception. Since this thesis emphasizes especially the sound, with accompanied CD, I would like to make them vivid and audible for the reader. In the conclusion part, after a brief overview of the study, I presented my recommendations for further researches, and finalized with the epilogue part by giving my comments.
NİNNİLERİ ARAMAK: DOĞU KARADENİZ SES ALANINDA NİNNİLER ARACILIĞIYLA GEÇMİŞİ HATIRLAMAK
ÖZET
Bu tezin hedef aldığı temel amaç, yaşantımızın ilk yıllarında maruz kaldığımız sesleri, ilerideki müzik algımıza olan yansımaları bağlamında, nasıl kodladığımızı anlamaya çalışmak; eğer varsa müzik ve ses arasındaki sınırları netleştirmek; duygusal ve melodik yaratım ve aktarım sürecinde kadının yani annenin rolünü anlamak; duyusal algının hafızanın canlanmasındaki önemine vurgu yapmak; ve son olarak ses bilgisine katkı sağlamaktır. Bu tezin ana sorusu müzik algısı ve hafıza üzerinde sesin etkisinin ne olduğudur.
Bu tez, beynin işlevlerini müzik veya ses, ritim ve tını gibi ses unsurlarıyla açıklamayı amaçlayan tamamen bilişsel bir çalışma değil, temel bilişsel işlevlerimiz, kültürlerimiz ve çoğunlukla kim olduğumuzu etkileyen hatıralarımız arasında korelasyon yaratmaya çalışan bir araştırmadır. Bu nedenle, bu tezin temel metodolojisi, farklı disiplinleri ve farklı yaklaşımları sentezleyip biyolojik ve deneysel bilgiyi duyusal ve otobiyografik etnografyaya dahil ederek bütüncül bir yaklaşım ortaya koymaktır.
Bu amaç doğrultusunda, tezin 2. Bölümünde hafızanın teorik temelleri anlatılmaktadır. Hafıza konusunda temel terminolojik bilgiler üzerinde durularak ses ve hafıza ile ilgili genel teoriler verilecektir. Hafıza ve duygular arasındaki ilişki açıklanarak alandan elde edilen verilerin bilimsel veriler ile desteklenmesi açısından duyguların hafıza ve hatırlama üzerindeki önemi ve gücü vurgulanmıştır.
Tezin 3. ve 4. Bölümü temel olarak alandan elde edilen verilere ayrılmştır. 3. Bölüm’de alanda kullanılan terimler; müziğin ve masalın aktarıcısı olarak kadınlar; dinleyen ve algılayan konumundaki geçmişin çocukları anlatılmaktadır. Bu başlık altında ninniler ile yerel türküler arasındaki karşılıklı etkileşim gösterilmiş ve bu melodilerin insanlar için ne anlama geldiği üzerinde durulmuştur. Kadınlar, ninnilerin yaratıcısı olarak çocuklar için en önemli ve etkili karakterlerden biri olduklarından, hikayeleri çocukların oluşturduğu bu ilk anıların duygusal ve kalıtsal arka planını yansıtmaktadır.Tezin 4. Bölümündeki ana amaç okuyucuya alana ve coğrafyaya dair mümkün olduğu kadar çok ses sağlayabilmektir. Bunun için sesin, müzik algısı üzerindeki etkileri incelenerek müzik ve ses arasındaki ilişki gösterilmeye çalışılmıştır. Bu tez, kapsamı ve konuş itibariyle özellikle ses üzerine odaklandığı için, çalışma kapsamındaki tüm ses ve ninniler için hem açıklamalar hem de çeviriler yapılmış olmakla birlikte, teze eşlik eden CD ile beraber okuyucu için bu seslerin duyulabilir ve canlı hale gelmesi sağlanmaya çalışılmıştır.
Tezin sonuç bölümünde, genel bir değerlendirme yapıldıktan sonra, ileride yapılacak benzer veya daha geniş kapsamlı çalışmalar için öneriler sunulmuştur. Sonsöz bölümünde ise, sadece çalışmayla ilgili yorumlar aktarılmıştır.
INTRODUCTION 1.
Purpose of Thesis 1.1
The geography we were born in creates our first soundscape where we begin to store the sounds we hear, or we are exposed to. If we take this very first connection as a basis for our musical world, the emotional meanings that we create, consciously or unconsciously, against the sounds we hear, are also important in terms of the meaning that we establishwithmusic in the future. On the other hand, if we imagine a condition where there is no definition, it is not possible for us to call a bird’s singing as music, although it creates the same neurological reactions in the human brain. The appreciation occurs when we start to learn definitions; when we start to get subject to enculturation.So that, culture is a social phenomenon, which does not include inherited traits but the learned ones that are subsequently acquired. When an infant opens his/her eyes to the world, s/he starts to acquire a language, religion, eating, drinking, social life, values, norms, rules, and so on from his/her social environment in the culture where s/he was born. Concerning this reality, culture is a concept that encompasses all the learned and shared things of people living in a society, and it also shapes almost everything that social science studies deal with.So, until we become a mature individual, via different kinds of ideological tools we keep onlearning and internalizing all these definitions, which can be defined ascollective knowledge, or in general culture, and place them into our lives. Then, we become a person who knows what music is and what is not, who has an identity, who has a and a person who social status, who is a villager or a citizen, who has likes and dislikes and so on.
If we consider our memory like a memory card, childhood and adolescence are the periods in which this card is used more actively: we are continuously storing it with lots of knowledge aforementioned above. However, when it comes to music or especially “sound”; yet we somehow keep the information, the first emotional memory that we initially create with the pure sound, in this card. So it can be the
reason that we cannot describe the emotional state that we are in when a sudden melody unexpectedly reminds us an indefinable memory; a moment; a place; a person; a color; or a smell. It is all about the emotional connections that we cognitively created at that memory. The more powerful the connection we create, the longer it staysin the memory, and so it is easier to remember. But what we still do not know exactly is the relationship between exposure duration and the amount of soundscape’s impact on memory.
Up to this thesis, I asked many questions, and in the light of the information above, my ultimate question in this thesis is: what is the function of the sounds in our childhood in terms of memory and music perception? In relation to the question, the aim of this study is to understand how we encode those initial sounds in terms of examining their reflections into our music perception, ; to clarify the borders between music and sound if it exists; to investigate the usage of lyrics in order to trace their place in the remembrance of the melody; to understand the role of mothers, women, both in emotional and melodic creation and transmission; to emphasize the importance of sensual perception in memory revival; and finally to contribute to the epistemology of sound.
In doing so, within the following chapter, Chapter 2, I am going to explain the theoretical basis of this thesis. I divided the chapter into three parts: in the first part, after providing some basic and brief knowledgeabout our nervous system, I focused on the development of cognitive abilities in the prenatal and postnatal periods to explain the time when we start to perceive sound and how we process it. This part allows the reader to understand the roots of the memory and biological basis of perception. In the second part, the section is also divided into three subsections. In the first subsection, I tried to explain the memory by giving some brief terminological information about its types. The main point in doing so is to place my topic under the appropriate terminology in order to combine the previous biological information with my fieldwork findings in the following chapter. In the second subsection, I provided some general theories about sound and memory to envision the theoretical knowledge, although I believe sensorial perception and memory is a whole. In subsection three, I presented the relationship between memory and emotion to promote my findings of the importance and power of emotion on memory and its retrieval. In the final section, firstly, I made a brief literature review of cognitive
studies about infant-directed songs. After that, I finalized the chapter by providing my remarks and comments about these studies to reveal my purpose in conducting this study. Since I aimed at drawing the readers’ attention to the social aspects of this subject in my thesis, there will be no laboratory or experimental results associated with the prenatal period. Moreover, because the field shapes the progress of this thesis, there will not be any observational outcomes concerning the postnatal period. Chapter 3 is mainly devoted to my fieldwork outcomes about lullabies and the stories of the women. Although the title of this section points only the lullabies, it also contains a brief fairytale section. In terms of the topic, this section is divided into three parts: definitions of the used terms; the women as singers or tellers; the children of the past as listeners or receivers. My main aim in designing the chapter in this way is to give the impression of my field experiences that are engendered by the dialogical transmission. The definition section is the result of my first experiences in the field. It reflects the importance of language that the field worker used for communicating and asking a question; the importance of understanding reference culture; the limitation of communication by the standard definitions. After explaining what is used for what, in the women section, I tried to express the place of lullaby in these women’s life. Because women are one of the most essential and effective characters for children, as the creator of the lullabies, their stories reflect the emotional and inherited background of these initial memories that the children build. Then, in the third section, I tried to reflect the other side of the coin by making use of the memories of the people who were born in this geography. Since I did not have the opportunity to study with children, I tried to understand the children of the past in today’s stories. Under this section, I illustrated the mutual relationship between lullabies and folk songs and the meaning of these melodies for people in terms of showing the correlation with the theories about emotion and memory revival in Chapter 2. Finally, in the fairytale section, I touched upon the impacts of vocalization, which the teller made, and the reflection of these imaginary events into the listener’s life and memory.
In Chapter 4, my main goal is to provide as much sound as possible for the reader. To achieve this goal, I divided the chapter into three sections: sounds, related memories, and the relationship between sound and music. In the first section, under the titles of recorded and silent, I presented my recordings: the collected ones and the
unrecorded sounds. After explaining each sound and their sources, to explain how they are placed and encoded in memory, I used both the notes of my interviews and the excerpts from the individual memoirs of people in the literature about the Eastern Black Sea. Finally, I tried to demonstrate the relationship between music and sound by examining the impact of sound on our music perception. Although I used a self-reflexive approach in both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, especially in this final section, I utilized autoethnographical examination in order to interpret both the interviewees' and my experiences. Since this study emphasizes especially the sound, while I was giving explanations and translations for both the lullabies and the sounds of the field, with accompanied CD, I would like to make them vivid and audible for the reader. In the conclusion part, after making a brief overview of the study, I presented my recommendations for further studies. In the epilogue part, to let the readers make their interpretation, I tried to make my comments since I do not prefer to express the precise "result(s)".
Motivation 1.2
I havealways had problems with descriptions: limitations and titles that stick us into the frames and kill our creativity and imagination. Even if many people in the world are against these frames and limitations, in the context of the social order and modern world, we cannot keep ourselves and our minds free from this contagion. Mostly unconsciously, we find ourselves within a collective routine as a part of one particular society, or in the contemporary world as a part of universal society. We adopt the blacks and the whites, the rights and the wrongs in relation to everything about life. Music is one of them; we have "good music" or "bad music", or even "is music" or "not music". But what is music? What is bad or good? Who knows or determines the precise or correct answers? Before I submitted the ethnomusicology program at MIAM, I also had some preferences, likes and dislikes about music. I had certain thoughts about a piece;whether it is music or not. But now, after completing this program, I cannot answer this question as I did earlier. Because of this, I started to ask myself; “am I enculturated” or “am I consciously re-enculturated”? What was the reason for my musical likes and dislikes? What makes something musical? Does memory have any influence on our musical preferences or appreciations? If it is so, how do we keep those memories in our brains?
In conclusion, to understand how a mature individual comes to this point, I turned my attention to our early years like a psychological joke. But it is true, so: Although we cannot deny the genetic heritage, most of our norms, social orders, definitions, and habits come from our childhood. We learn, experience, correlate, and emplace the acquired knowledge. Thus, this study was a journey for me that began by asking how much we can remember the sounds we heard in the initial part of our lives. In fact, my preliminary curiosity was about trying to understand what defines our musical preferences cognitively. How do children become enculturated to particular music? Or do we have congenitally enculturated brains? We might think we have consciously chosen some of the musical definitions, but what if we do not? What if our memories shape our preferences via the experiences we got in the past? How conscious are we in our preferences? Why do some sounds or sometimes a piece of music that we think we are not interested in affect us? In the end, all these questions that were piled up in my brain throughout my education on ethnomusicology led me to search into the relationship among the sounds that we are exposed to, memories that we stored, and emotions that we experienced.
Methodology 1.3
This thesis is not a totally cognitive study that seeks to explain the brain’s functions against the elements of music or sound such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre; instead, it tries to create correlations between our essential cognitive functions, our cultures and our memories that mostly affect who we are. So my main methodology is supposed to be holistic by synthesizing different disciplines and different approaches, that is, incorporating the biological and experimental knowledge into the sensory and autobiographical ethnography.
1.3.1 Fieldwork
One of the most important lessons that I learned from the field is that one can only schedule the end when s/he starts, but not every plan takes you to the conclusion that you desire to achieve. I have started working particularly on this thesis since the beginning of 2018. In the beginning, my plan was to carry out a more comparative study to figure out the role of a mother’s voice in situ. So I was going to implement three different fieldworks, which are geographically different from one another, and
in the end, I was going to analyze the data I had collected. This was what I planned in the very beginning, but it turned out to be slightly different than what I had expected. After doing so many readings on music cognition; memory; the brain and its functions; infant-directed studies, the history of Eastern Black Sea and its culture, when I had access into the field to collect real data for the questions in my mind, as a student nominated to be an ethnomusicologist, I had some concerns about being in the field, finding connections, asking the right questions, and so on. As once a member of this culture, I thought it would be easier to start by focusing on the Eastern Black Sea Region. Nevertheless, it was so surprising -but fortunate- for me to feel that I found nothing to satisfy my expectations. As a result, this study is shaped by my ownexperiences in the field.
First of all, I would like to explain my purpose of using the definition; The Eastern Black Sea. Although, generally, Rize, Artvin, Trabzon, Giresun, Ordu, Gümüşhane, and Bayburt are regarded as the provinces located inthe Eastern Black Sea Region, my main point in using this specific region name is to emphasize the culture rather than the borders. What I have experienced and observed throughout my life has made me familiar with the fact that people tend to interpret a specific culture when they hear the name of the Eastern Black Sea: A specific way by which the local people speak or accent; specific foods; specific music; specific jokes; even a peculiar physical appearance. Moreover, my usage of this term also refers to the shared values and experiences of the people in this geography. Even though there is much more diversity than generally known in this limited area, similar geographical areas create resembling standards of living adopted by the local people in common and make them the stakeholders of this culture.
Secondly, I would like to define my field of study. What I believe -at least at the end of this study- is that the field is not a separate area that you conduct your study and you eventually feel yourself a part of it when you finish up. I, both physically and mentally, have continued to remain in the field during my interviews with people in Istanbul; during my writing process of this thesis; during my personal inferences both as an observer and as a participant of this study. So if I have to frame the field: It consists of geography itself, me, my family, the people I interviewed with, the books about this geography and culture, and all the people revived from the memories of the contributors.
As a part of fieldwork, I had interviews with the people in the field especially the old women; with the people who have previous experience related to the field and people who were born in the region but migrated to an urban area; with professions in Black Sea music; and with the members of my family. The main stories that help me to construct this thesis were collected from my family, especially from my mother, with whom I interviewed most. She is 79 years old, and the main part of her life was spent in Rize. During my study, in all stages -fieldwork, reading and writing- she was with me all the time. Thanks to this, whenever I faced up with new information, terms, or expressions, I got them explained by her through our long but satisfying chats. Since they were spontaneous, I did not have any chance of recording any of them. Throughout the thesis, I made use of her expressions, remarks, and answers many times, and I did not give a reference to these conversations, which is rather different from the rest of the interviews.
As I mentioned earlier, the field had a constitutive role in this thesis. My first aim was to reach the infants and their mothers and make in situ recordings while the mother is singing lullabies to their babies. So, I would record the exact moment of emotional singing along with the environmental sounds that a baby can hear. Since I could not do this, whenever I asked women if they know any lullabies or if they can suggest or direct me to a different person, in the end, I found myself on the road trying to find an old woman who might sing a lullaby for me. Sometimes it was not that easy to reach some villages, especially the ones that are located on the mountains, and I usually had to drive for hours through narrow, dangerous paths. Unfortunately, all my efforts resulted in vain on most of these trips; no lullabies, no lyrics, no fairytales, or even no personal stories, but full of nature, which was worth experiencing. Although I had an idea of recording the sounds of nature and the environment that a baby easily can hear, I -both impulsively and instinctively- started to record some sounds, as well. Hence, because many of the sound recordings from the field were unintentionally recorded, unfortunately, they cannot reflect all the sounds of this geographical area. With the support of (and thanks to) Ayşenur Kolivar1 and the sound imitations of the interviewees, I tried to reflect this soundscape as much as I can. On the other hand, I need to point out that because
some interviewees did not let me do the recording during the interview, unfortunately, some of the sounds could not be included in my study. For instance, although I had vital interview accompanied by a diversity of sounds with Birol Topaloğlu2 in Arhavi, Artvin, but I was not able to make use of them since he would like me not to record.
Finally, I would like to mention about some difficulties I experienced with language. I did not expect that the language would be a problem for me in the land where I was born. There are different ethnic groups in this geography living together for many years. This is not a new thing for me, but I have never realized that in some regions it can be a problem for both the listener and the speaker to express the exact meaning they want to convey. In some regions, even though I was familiar with the accent, I could hardly get what they wanted to say. In the lullabies chapter, the translations and the original versions of some lyrics are available to the reader. My initial intention was not to put those lyrics into the text. But, when I realized that for the creators (women) the words meant something more than music, I decided to put as many lyrics as I could in order to complete the stories with their emotional expressions. My purpose in doing so is: Firstly, to contribute to the literature by presenting the words in their original spoken forms while criticizing bias against the language; secondly, to show how they use words in both expressing themselves and putting their babies to sleep; and thirdly, to pose the problems that I went through in the translation stage of these lyrics. This translation stage was another study for me by itself. For the accented lyrics, I put the original version of them as in speech. Although they were much easier than the Laz lyrics, translating some expressions into English was rather difficult for me. Yet, I am not convinced of my translations. On the other hand, for the Laz lyrics, one of my sister’s (Kadriye) friends, Emine Kılınç, helped me in the translation process of Laz language into Turkish. But those, even they are in Turkish, were harder than the accented ones. Besides, according to what my sister told me, Emine Kılınç also found them very difficult to translate for both the different accent of Laz language and the words that have no counter meaning in Turkish. Therefore, this part was a quite interesting and also
2 Birol Topaloğlu, born in Rize, is one of the known Black sea musicians and has albums such as Heyamo, Aravani, Ezmoce, and so on.
collaborative study for me, which reflects the understanding and interpretation of three people: Emine Kılınç, my sister Kadriye and me.
1.3.2 Sensory Ethnography
Anyone interested in doing musical research is probably confronted with the question of what music is. I do not believe that there should be a precise answer for this question, but the understanding of what music means for people is much more functional for my study in terms of creating correlations among different subjects. Moreover, I do believe that none of us consciously listen or analyze the music all the time because this is against its nature. The way music exists in our lives is mostly functional. Therefore, for me, understanding the mechanism that enables us to make any inferences from music can only be possible by evaluating the connections that people establish in their lives, the society they live in and their biology.
At the beginning of this study, the most challenging part for me was to learn the cognitive definitions and to place the thoughts in my mind according to these definitions by particular logic. But life does not always progress in the logic we have established; you cannot always solve an equation to understand how accurate is your theory. I believe that the main thing we should do in order to have an absolute understanding is to experience it. Like the creation process itself, I think that the most exciting part of the starting point is the imagination of the inner world, which is independent of definitions. As long as we have the chance to think free from stereotypes, we can create more difference and uniqueness, just like the Eastern Black Sea women who shared their stories with me during this study.
We begin to examine our environment from the very early stages of our lives, as in the prenatal period. As they perceive the world and their corporeality through the sensory devices, in terms of sound, infants not only hear the voice of their mothers but they establish emotional connections by gathering the information from multiple sources as well. The very moment of this sensory meaning-making process consists of sound, smell, taste, touch, and vision that infants associate them with their mother and the dominant sense of the related action. Therefore, since the aforementioned sensory capabilities construct the essence of perception, the holistic nature of this study required the use of sensorial ethnography.
In her book, Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sarah Pink defines sensory ethnography as “a process of doing ethnography that accounts for how this multi-sensoriality is integral both to the lives of people who participate in our research and to how we ethnographers practice our craft” (Pink, 2009, pp. 2). Thereby, she explains the aim of the sensory ethnographer by stressing that, “Sensory ethnographer is to seek to know places in other people’s worlds that are similar to the places and ways of knowing those others… aim to come closer to understanding how those other people experience, remember and imagine” (Pink, 2009, pp. 23). By doing so, the ethnographer utilizes the interplay between what s/he experiences and what s/he observes. Similar to the formation of the memories and emotional connections, to use this interplay, an ethnographer has to use his/her own senses. As Paul Rodaway puts forward in his book of Sensuous Geographies in which he approaches the understanding of geography phenomenologically; "Everyday experience is multi-sensual, though one or more sense may be dominant in a given situation" (Rodaway, 1994, pp. 5). So, an ethnographer can demote this information to one specific sense, while s/he needs to experience or practice first by being engaged in the related environment so as to reach the anticipated way of knowing. In her book Sensing Sound, Nina Sun Eidsheim expresses this embodied way of knowing by saying:
.... to think through the multitudinous experience of sound, can only be created if we think about sound from an altogether different perspective: rather than conceiving of voice and sound as phenomena with fixable identities, captured and held by the ear, instead we must understand that we are party to, and partake in, a process and experience (Eidsheim, 2015, pp. 51).
In terms of space-time context, all these intertwined sensory inputs cause us to form and reform (or experience and experience) the memory. Remembrance is the re-experiencing of the previous moment and people use their words, acquired language to describe this memory. But the words are not always enough for portraying this scene, and so for expressing. For this reason, we try to use every tool, every talent, and information we could gather to make the listener understand. But, as an ethnographer, this understanding is possible as long as we experience similar things such as language, sound, smell, taste, and culture. In his book of Rethinking
Psychological Anthropology, Philip K. Bock summarizes this situation by his holistic
approach: “Every bit of human behavior is influenced by a host of cultural and noncultural factors, from climate to hormone levels. All these "influences" join
together to produces the "unified experience" of the individual and the "intentional behavior" that flows from that experience” (Bock, 1988, pp. 3).
Taking everything mentioned above into consideration, I believe that none of the ethnographic studies can be unrelated to and isolated from our sensations, our inferences, and so from ourselves. Thus, every study has some self-reflexivity in it. In my study, reflexivity, as part of sensory ethnography, is key to the experience, to understand and to infer the knowledge that I obtained from people, geography, sounds, music, stories, literature and myself.
1.3.3 Autoethnography
The term autoethnography refers to the autobiographical reflections of ethnographic observation and analysis in relation to the area of the person studied. So it is a method that delineates the cultural experience through the interpretation of individual perspective and experience. Therefore, being a part of the studied culture sometimes provides the ethnographer with a comprehensive understanding while it allows him or her to make an intrinsic analysis and selective writing about the referenced culture along with the revival and inference of personal history.
In the context of this thesis, within the intersection of gender, identity, memory, and sound, autoethnography has been an inseparable method of my way of knowing and expressing. In terms of sound, the exposure to nature after the soundscape of the city made me remember and think about the sounds of my childhood. Even though I was familiar with lots of them, realizing how my approach was rather different from before was such an exciting moment for me. I want to point to Nina Sun Eidsheim’s citation about Robert Fink’s description of “listening through” a sound versus “listening to” that sound, which she favors to explain the matter of “recognizing and knowing the sound” (Eidsheim, 2015, pp. 19). She uses it in order to explain how our previous experiences and stereotyped background -acquired with cultural and sociological mediums- created subjectivity in our connections with the sound and how we shaped our perception and appreciation. In doing so, “listening to” that sound, being as both the outsider and insider, the observer and participant, I re-experienced this geography -where I was born with my new enculturation. Therefore, just like the authors of the books about the Black Sea, this was a partly autoethnographic study of me and my childhood.
Along with re-experiencing the geography, the use of self-reflexivity and autoethnography is important for this study to understand the women as being a woman fieldworker. Diana Wolf, in her book of Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, while explaining the "epistemology of insiderness" she claims that, "The epistemological contribution of women researchers is their "embodied subjectivity" – their own knowledge and experiences are crucial for creating knowledge and for determining how fully they can understand a phenomenon" (Wolf, 1996, pp. 13). Hence, considering that I am a native woman of this geography, I benefited from my personal memories and experiences in making inferences and understanding these women. What is more, with the help of the memories that I went through with my mother, this approach allowed me to evaluate the other side of the gender issue: socialization of the gender idea by internalizing, plus providing continuity through the transmission.
About identity, first, I would like to refer to Kamala Visweswaran’s words (the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography) in order to connote what I understand from this term: “identity is sandwich between home and community, homogeneity and comfort, between skin, blood, heart” (Visweswaran, 1994, pp. 104). Although the concept of “identity” would not be the focus of this thesis, considering the matter of belonging, construction of selves -as she says "exploration of culturally constructed self" (Visweswaran, 1994, pp. 6)- and representations of these selves by music and emotion, I automatically found myself trying to deal with the term by asking: Who actually criticizes the place to which s/he belongs? Or even who thinks about it? When do we start to wonder or to question? Also, what motivates us to start thinking of this? If Kamala Visweswaran is right while stating "there is no alternative to belonging" (Visweswaran, 1994, pp. 111), then, what can bring us back to where we belong (home)? I consider music as one of the stimuli that trigger these questions. So, to make this correlation, one should also speculate about what "home" is. Whatever the definition, even the word itself can cause us to think emotionally. For this reason, since music allows us to create emotional bonds, and since we have a tendency to keep these bonds in our memories with the help of music, as Levi-Strauss describes it: “distancing that would allow one to return more profoundly home” [as cited in Visweswaran, 1994, pp. 105], distancing from home will increase the power of these bonds, and so does music, by feeding the feeling of longing. Thus,
music causes us to remember and revive the “sandwich” of identity that consists of home, created selves, emotional bonds, memories, and everything about us. For this reason, in the scope of this study, I utilized autoethnography in understanding the relationship between music and identity with self-reflexive inferences.
In Women in the Field, Laura Nader puts forward her “formulas for successful anthropological field” by saying: “researchers should do what they are most comfortable doing -in choosing a problem, in building rapport, in deciding how to present their findings to the profession at large. Yet an attempt to generalize what is essentially an autobiographical statement seems in order” (Nader, 1986, pp. 111). Therefore, as I deeply agree with her formulas, I believe that every person has his/her own story, and so there is no such thing as absolute understanding. My ability and opportunity here are just limited by having empathy and making endeavor along with the academic methods, which I feel comfortable to express my inferences and experiences about the field.
Literature Review 1.4
The intense literature review of this study has taken nearly nine months. Although the essence of this study is more qualitative rather than quantitative, my intention in reflecting the biological side of memory is that to support my hypothesis by using literature for an integrative study. So, the second chapter of this thesis is devoted to the literature review for the biological basis of memory. Although I scanned even the most technical sources about brain development, I preferred to use the ones that, at least, have a social correlation with experimental results.
In addition to the literature given below, I checked the theses and books about lullabies and fairytales studies in Turkey. The main part of these studies considers lullaby as a tool for cultural transmission. They define it as a genre with its cultural connections, characteristics, and functions. The primary sources that people use to refer in their researches are compilation studies that classified lullabies according to their subjects or regions. Although these main sources are essential studies to reach the lyrics and the existence of lullabies, there are two points that should be reconsidered: the language reliability and the unilateral approach to cultures.
Along with lullabies, fairytales are also the inseparable materials of childhood. While the classification of fairytales in literature is quite similar to lullabies, their structural analyses are more intensive and comprehensive. However, the problem is nevertheless the same again: The effort of bordering the distinction between tale, myth, and epic along with language bias.
Finally, there is a substantial literature for Eastern Black Sea Region and its culture. Although I appreciate the diversity of these studies, the literary language of some books creates the same separation that they are against to while they are trying to reflect the multiculturality of the region. On the other hand, even though I argued with the writers of these books in my mind, they taught and told me so many things about the region. Therefore, throughout the thesis, I used some their stories as participants of my study.
In this literature review, first, I will review selected literature about cognitive studies on infant-directed songs in the prenatal and postnatal period. Then, I will discuss the points that I think are missing in these studies to reflect my point of view for this study.
1.4.1 Cognitive Development Studies About Infants’ Auditory Perception
Cognitive maturation in the fetal period is important for finding the answer to the questions: what are the fetus abilities? When do our perceptions begin? How close the fetus brain to mature one? When do we start to hear? Is there learning in utero? Our brains begin to develop starting from 9th of the gestation, and this development continues until the birth (Newman and Newman, 2012), whereas we gain our cognitive abilities at 32nd week of the gestation (DiPietro et al., 2004).
On the other hand, the initial development of the ear starts at 6th week of the gestation and by week 20 it takes an exact form such as an adult has (Eisenberg, 1976; Newman and Newman, 2012, Ashmead et al., 2008). Based on this knowledge, the idea that sound perception begins in the uterus with the development of hearing (ear) and the nervous system has inspired many types of researches untill today. Plenty of these studies are related to the mother’s voice, which is assumed that the baby is exposed the most, the origin of language perception, and music or sound perception.
Recent researches about fetal behaviors in uterus show that starting from 4th-months fetuses can react the stimuli, although notable outcomes are taken from the 6th months. The fetus can hear intrauterine environmental sounds: the mother’s bodily sounds, especially the heart rhythm, mother’s voice, and even the outside sounds, mostly the loud ones. (Lecanuet, 1996; Gerhardt and Abrams, 2000). The intrauterine sounds create a "noise floor" (Gerhardt and Abrams, 2000, pp.21), which contains low-frequency sounds. External sounds can also reach to fetus auditory environment filtering by the abdominal wall of the mother and the amniotic fluid (Lecanuet, 1996; Gerhardt and Abrams, 2000). According to the study of Herper and Shahidullah, the fetus has 0,25-0,5 kHz auditory range in 19-27 weeks, and then it increases to 1-3 kHz in 29-35 weeks (Herper and Shahidullah, 1994).
Research shows that newborns can recognize and remember the sounds they are exposed to in the uterus (Haith and Benson, 2008). The first main focus of these studies is about fetus recognition of mother’s voice. Because the mother and the baby reciprocity is much more intense than the other interactions, the baby gives more reaction to its mother’s voice and creates more familiarity (DeCasper and Spence, 1986; Moon and Fifer, 2000) along with other exterior sounds (Kisilevsky et al., 2000; Kisilevsky et al., 2003; Lecanuet, 2000; Zimmer et al., 1982).
Referring to music and sound, there are plenty of research results that show the existence of observable fetus reactions and recognition of same musical stimuli after birth (Kisilevsky et al., 2000, Zimmer et al., 1982), and sound recognition in relation with language and the low-frequency components of the language (May et al., 2011; Lecaneut and Granier-Deferre, 1993; Lecaneut at al., 2000; Shahidullah and Hepper, 1994). For instance, Shahidullah and Hepper showed that in 35 weeks of gestation fetus could discriminate pure tones between 0.25 kHz and 0.50 kHz, and also the difference in some phonemes such as "baba" and "bibi" (Shahidullah and Hepper, 1994).
These are the most common examples of such researches in the literature, and there is a general assumption that the findings may be taken as evidence for fetal memory, language learning, speech perception, and development in the fetus during pregnancy. The fetal memory and its persistance after birth has been tested and investigated by many studies. In his 1997 article, Hepper summarizes types of fetal memory researches into three groups, as "habituation, classical conditioning and
exposure learning", which are associated with evidence for short-term and long-term memory (pp. 343). The vibroacoustic habituation tests show that fetus can recognize the stimulus after the certain period of exposure (Dirix et al., 2009) and there is observable remaining of fetal memory in newborns (Gonzalez et al., 2006; Hepper, 1991).
In terms of music cognition, tempo and pitch are generally considered as the essential components, and it is supposed that tempo has universal qualities found all over the world, whereas pitch is entirely psychological phenomenon determined by frequencies. According to Stefan Koelsch, a widely distributed network of neurons in the brain are involved in processing the tempo of the music, but the cerebellum plays perhaps the most crucial role in keeping time (Koelsch, 2013). On the other hand, researches showed that the frequencies of notes have direct correlations in brain in terms of the perception of the pitch distances or intervals between the notes of the melody (Koelsch, 2013; Dowling and Harwood, 1986).
Although the brain started to develop since the 9th week of gestation, the main changes occur in its constructional features in order to create neural plasticity after birth (Johnson, 2000). As in prenatal experiments, habituation is the most commonly used tool in perceptual studies of infants. In general, a melody in Western musical scale or a folk song is played to a group of infants for a specific time (like two weeks), and then changes in their reactions are observed. If the infants remember or recognize the sample music, usually they do not give any specific reaction (i.e., gazing at a shown object), whereas they might turn their heads if the sound is not familiar to them (Soley and Hanon, 2010).
One of the important debates in the psychological literature asks how we perceive the different dimensions of sound in speech and music from infancy to late adulthood, and how they are represented in the brain. The debate centers on the balance between absolute to relative information in our cognition of sonic features such as pitch relations and voice recognition. Voice recognition is acquired by singing that constitutes the most widespread mode of musical expression, as well as speech. Since all individuals across cultures use or participate in singing, voice recognition is one of the important vehicles in creating predispositions for music, and the early exposure to maternal singing (or speech) that the infant imitates later is often the root of this experience.
Infant-directed music (i.e., lullabies or maternal singing) is generally used for sleeping, soothing or entertaining babies and children. Although there are lots of definitions about their musical characteristics, depending on the geography, they may vary both musically and lyrically. Lullabies can reflect different types of emotional stage depending on the singer’s mood: love, sadness, prayers and desires, death, yearning, complaint, or heart-to-heart talk. They may content repetitions and nonsense syllables or melodic utterances. Children begin to generate recognizable and repeatable songs when they come to 18 months old (Ostwald, 1973). According to the general assumption in the literature, these songs have a systematic form and display two essential features of adult singing: uses of discrete pitches and the repetition of rhythmic and melodic contours. However, they do not resemble the adult songs because they lack a stable pitch structure (Dowling, 1984). On the other hand, common features of infant-directed songs in across cultures are defined by the studies as high-frequency sounds, simple melodic structure, and more repeated parts (Hannon, Soley and Levine, 2011; Trainor and Hannon, 2013). Although higher-pitched performing is favored in play songs, infants' preference for low-higher-pitched performance in lullabies is interpreted as they can instinctively perceive the emotional meaning (Tsang and Conrad, 2010). Thus, infant-directed song is utilized as a tool for communicating with the babies (Trainor and Hannon, 2013).
As they prefer soft and pleasant sounds in their first year (Trainor et al., 2002), Trainor et al. (2004) observed that after a week of exposure to novel melodies, infants were able to discriminate the original tempo of the presented excerpts from 25% faster or slower played versions. Later around the age of 5, children appear to hold a stable tonality, and a regular beat as adults do (Dowling and Harwood, 1986). Infants remember the tempo of melodies they have heard repeatedly (Trainor, Wu, & Tsang, 2004) and there is an increase in the electrical activity of the neurons if there are missing notes or beat in the stimulus (Jentschke et al., 2008).
Between the age of 5-9 years, children become sensitive and familiar to some characteristics of their native music (Trehub et al., 1999) and they can differentiate the harmonic changes in it (Trainor and Trehub, 1994). By the age of five, children have a relatively extensive repertoire of their own musical culture and display singing skills that will be qualitatively as same as in adulthood, unless the child takes music lessons or practice regularly in a choir or ensemble. According to the studies
of Trainor and Trehub, like adults, 7-year-olds infants are equally well at detecting deviant notes in a melody that go outside the key or the implied harmony, but they have difficulty in detecting changes that preserve both the key and the harmony. At the age of 5, children only detect changes deviating from the key, because they are not sensitive to harmonic relationships within a given key, unlike those of the age of 7 and above. At the age of 8, infants detect both in-key and out-of-key changes equally well (Trainor & Trehub, 1992). Thus, in terms of enculturation to culture-specific pitch structures, native music, or exposed music has significant influences on melody perception between infancy and the preschool years. Jay Dowling, in Psychology of Music, explains the relationship between cultural knowledge and music perception by saying that, “Perceptual learning with the music of a culture provides the listener with a fund of implicit knowledge of the structural patterns of that music, and this implicit knowledge serves to facilitate the cognitive processing of music conforming to those patterns” (Dowling, 1999, pp.604).
Watanabe et al. (2007) showed that early-trained musicians performed better than late trained musicians, and the findings support the notion of a critical period in childhood. The ordinary adult seems to be endowed with the basic abilities that are necessary to sing simple songs of their culture even without making much practice. In the midst of these findings, culturally defined music systems and the creation of a predisposition to particular music have caused more attention to the effect of enculturation on music perception. According to Brown (1989) and Feldman (1980), there are theoretical art contexts of learning in the culture, and for Brown learning occurs in the cultures of experts, students, and just plain folks of which has different goals, focuses of action, and cognitive processes. According to Nettl, school music is mostly dealt with the classical music and music for children, which are not created diversity in music cognition (Nettl, 2015).
Patricia Campbell discusses the interplay between formal and informal learning in children’s acquisition of musical cultures. According to Campbell, musical education provides more narrow learning than the occurring process of enculturation, which is not focusing on a selected context (Campbell, 1998). By using the word “narrow”, Campbell states that school music is shaped and constrained by the structures of schooling, by governments and by teachers. Thus, she encourages teachers to regard children’s experiences with musical cultures outside of school. For instance, Soley
and Spelke (2016) reported that children prefer to be friend with other children who know the same songs with them by putting forward that this attitude is based on the instinct of sharing same cultural knowledge.
1.4.2 Experimental versus experiential: What is missing?
Infancy is the active period for perception; children perceive everything around them both consciously and unconsciously, and they are independent of our created definitions until we teach them. Thus, concerning the genetic inheritance and prenatal exposure, newborns are partially free from cultural influence. In her book, Ruth Finnegan (1989) expresses that the manifestation of musical behavior at any given age, including childhood, is dependent on a wide range of factors embracing basic biological potentials, maturation, experience, opportunity, interest, education, family, peers, and socio-cultural context. Alongside their initial socialization in the dominant culture, children are exposed to many different musical genres, and this determines the way they perceive sounds, which are classified as "music" within the culture (Finnegan, 1989). According to David Huron, in Sweet Anticipation, the rapidly spreading monoculture of the West is eradicating the diversity of musical minds, thus narrowing the music cognition (Huron, 2006).
Philip K. Bock defines perception as “all the processes by which an organism acquires information about its environment and its own internal states” (Bock, 1988, pp. 7). In light of this definition, the general approach of these studies overviewed above necessitates to be broadened along with the recent outcomes about different cultures. A point to be emphasized is that considering passive exposure of babies to soundscape that both include environmental sounds and music, auditory perception studies must have a more diverse approach rather than using solely music scales, tempi, or pitches of the related culture. P. Bock lists the difficulties in cross-cultural perception studies as “unfamiliarity with the test situation and test materials, insufficient motivation, and differing values” (Bock, 1988, pp. 8). Related with the test situation, the significant portion of these experiments carried out in a laboratory or completely isolated environments. But the problem is we are not living in an isolated environment, at least totally. Considering the baby can focus on a particular variable, it is obvious that we cannot deny the importance of these kinds of studies.
However, I think neglecting the soundscapes that we live in can cause to miss some connections or auditory mechanism working behind the scene.
In the contemporary world, we and, of course, babies are exposed to more synthetic sound than before. None the less, I think not every components of our soundscape is entirely synthetic at all. For that reason, creating computer-aided melodies or stimuli and reaching some conclusions about the auditory perception of the babies by this way might cause us to miss some critical points. For instance, giving rewards to attentive listening for a specific period can trigger other cognitive functions, such as dopaminergic pathways. Since dopamine also contribute to the emotional processes, it is difficult to distinguish whether the outcome is related to what the baby hears or feels referring the reward.
The experiments that are implemented with the participation of mothers, by the recordings of their regular singing or by reciting singing, do not also reflect the actual state of the mother and the baby. The emotional state of the mother eventually impact the way she sings and hence the characteristics of her voice. Thus, in those recordings or on purpose singing, the reciprocity of mother and child become artificial, and a priori cognitive connections or neurological pathways that the baby created might not emerge. As it is going to be explained in the memory and emotion section, glands have an important role in the creation of love, and so in bonding mechanism between individuals, especially between a mother and her baby. Despite the fact that this artificial singing of mothers cannot change this bonding, I believe it does not reflect the exact emotional contentedness of the moment.
In the introductory chapter of their book, Jarviluoma et al. (2009) explain the relationship between social norms and definitions as:
Defining pleasant, unpleasant and even bearable sounds is not just about the individual preferences but also about community values and the dominant power relations: who has the right to define the pleasant and the unpleasant and to make these preferences audible by passing and enforcing laws. When the soundscape change, the definition of pleasant and/or unpleasant sounds is liable to change (pp. 25).
In line with this aspect, the general definitions for describing the characteristics of lullabies also problematic as well as artificial singing. Trainor and Hannon (2013) mentions about the features of infant-directed songs as for "soothing infants and encouraging them to sleep, have perceptually identifiable features across cultures and
musical systems" (pp. 425), whereas they also emphasize the insufficient amount of implementation. Evaluating and defining a melody or a sound as soothing or calming is directly related to our enculturation, our acquired knowledge, and definitions, just as our likes and dislikes about music. For instance, in some cultures, women use to create high-pitched sound to sleep their baby, whereas we might find this sound quite harsh or even traumatic for an infant. Therefore, generalization, in that sense avoids us to reach exact observations, and it contributes to stereotypical approaches.
In her book, Breuning emphasizes our ability of adaptation by saying, "Humans are born ready to adapt to whatever niche they’re born into. But once you build those adaptations, you’re designed to rely on them as if your life depends on it” (Breuning, 2015, pp. 132). Today, we might talk about the common identical features of the lullabies since people in different geographies have much more communication with each other and have knowledge about popular music or culture than before. In modern life, we have lots of stereotypical behaviors that we use while we are raising our children. For this reason, although it is quite acceptable to talk about the common features of lullabies, for now, the essence of the field necessitates making in situ studies on this subject. Because the definition of music, even the existence of the word in some place, is problematic, I think before identifying what is lullaby or what are the common features that help people to differentiate the lullabies from other songs, we should do fieldwork and try to understand the place of this word "lullaby", if it exists, among the people of related culture.
In conclusion, I believe that in the contemporary world, we should not draw strict borders between sciences. Specialization is important to have comprehensive knowledge on a particular subject, but no one can learn about everything, and so none of the subjects can have a single dimension to be investigated or explored. As long as we make multifaceted and interdisciplinary studies by both including and interrelating social and scientific outcomes, we can achieve more accurate, more reliable, and more integrative results.
BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY 2.
The main researches on music cognition have focused on Western music studies. However, studying music cognition as a general phenomenon requires the scope of research to be more global varieties in terms of world music(s). A wide range of music exists in cultures all around the world that differ from each other in various ways. As John Blacking has claimed, cognitive systems underlying music relate to social and cognitive processes of society and culture (Blacking 1971, p. 92), and then cognitive ethnomusicology relates cultural and biological factors of music making and experience. It aims to understand how and to what extent cognitive processes in music production and perception are influenced by cultural factors while studying the resemblance and parallel development of cultural and musical patterns at the analytical level of cognition. Therefore, the interdisciplinary nature of the subject necessitates the explenation of some basic information about biological basis of memory and perception.
The nervous system is a network that allows us to adapt to the environment we live in and to work in cooperation with the whole body. The entire nervous system is in a never-ending communication, which starts with the perception of a stimulus by our sense organs. Neurons are responsible for this communication throughout the whole body. There are 100 billions of neurons in the brain, which are ready to process information when we are born (Stiles & Jernigan, 2010). Each neuron proceeds to its address in accordance with the self-encoded information, and the same process continues throughout the whole neurons of our body until the stimuli turn to recognition or meaning for our brain and body. During the first two years of our lives, the speed and the amount of creating new connections is much more than maturation. A two-year-old baby has about two million connections, which is two times bigger than an adult has. This means s/he perceives and stores everything around her/him. However, as time goes by, these connections are pruned in accordance with the development of our identity (Eagleman, 2015), and the first
