Decolonizing African music with visualizations and sonifications using beat-class theory

Abstract

In a recent paper, we introduced mathematical music theory as a suitable new approach to analyze the music of Nigeria (Igbo) (Calilhanna et al., 2019). This paper revisits those materials and extends the ideas to further discuss why Nigerian music can be studied more suitably using mathematical music theory. We address a key issue facing music curriculum development: the perpetuation of traditional Western music theory to analyze and understand all music around the world. Our paper aims to demonstrate how Western music theory is inadequate for analyzing Nigerian music and we present some ways Western music theory has evolved. We explain how new music theory combines understandings of both music and mathematics and with a focus on musical meter we present a student-centred approach to learning. We achieve this through visualizations and sonifications of beat-class theory, using ski-hill graphs and circular cyclic graphs. This approach enables the listener to accurately articulate their subjective embodied psychoacoustic experience of music, meter and mathematics and incorporates research in neuroscience, music education, music psychology and music acoustics, which consistently indicates the importance of music for the well-being of the individual, school, workplace, and community.