Introduction

FinEARS blog presents cultural heritage material – that is, sources for historical research – related to Finnish ElectroAcoustic Music – and other closely related art forms, genres, and trends such as underground, avantgarde and happenings. At its first stage, the FinEARS project is a sidetrack of my PhD project which concentrates on the history and analysis electroacoustic music in Finland in the 1960s and 1970s; especially focusing on Erkki Kurenniemi‘s electronic musical instrument design, and electronic music produced with his instruments. The home organization of my PhD project is the University of Helsinki Music Research Laboratory.

Later, FinEARS will be expanded into a larger research project discussing the themes and questions faced in the modern version of Digital Humanities, Research Data Management and SSH in general (social sciences and humanities). The project will be set to develop efficient workflows and best practices to solve problems such as legal, copyright, and privacy issues of the research material, among others. The similar work has been going on in several archives (see e.g.  the project in JAPA).

Eventually, the core of FinEARS will be an open repository of research sources, data and material as well as analyses and analytical materials of electroacoustic music. An excellent example of a repository for analyses and analytical material see: OREMA – The Online Repository for Electroacoustic Music Analysis. The FinEARS project aims to bring together different actors in the field of electroacoustic music research – first in the Finnish scene, later in Baltic [BaltEARS] and in the Nordic Countries [NordEARS].

FinEARS hosts various sub-projects related to digitization and preservation of cultural heritage material and genre analysis of Finnish electroacoustic music. The sub-projects will be introduced in the near future.

The project concentrating on Erkki Kurenniemi’s electronic music instruments is presented here: http://ekis.helsinki.fi