Today, folk music is what a child might hear a mother sing, mouth to ear, or it might be digits nestled in computer files, ready to spread around the world, reframed as decipherable, downloadable bits that mostly move into ears through headphones. Many people find no problem with listening to songs without understanding the words, just for the pleasure of the music. Is it still folk music when separated from its physical and social setting? Murray Schafer called that gap between the source and the faraway listener “schizophonia,” in order to underline how unnatural it is to listen to distanced music. It would be hard to include schizophonia in any conventional defi nition of folk music, but even harder to imagine that the site-sound split does not mark most people’s listening experience today of music they call folk. No matter where and how it is defi ned or heard, folk music is basically sound waves traveling through the air from a source, into an ear, and then into a brain. Scientists today work hard to fi gure out how disturbances in the air turn into meaningful music, from the acoustic to the social and personal.
Folk Music and Historical Memoirs
