Miriam Kolar

My transdisciplinary cultural acoustics research explores the human auditory perceptual and cognitive implications of spatial-cultural contexts and musical instruments. A archaeoacoustics specialist, I have developed novel methodologies for exploring, documenting, and estimating the interdynamics of sound-producing instruments and environmental settings, via a combination of on-site testing and measurements of extant structures and artifacts, performance experiments, ethnological analogies, computational acoustical modeling, and human perceptual experimentation. After we founded the project at CCRMA in 2007, I have led integrative archaeoacoustics and music archaeology research with fieldwork at the 3,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site at Chavín de Huántar, Peru since 2008, within the archaeological site research program directed by Stanford Archaeology Professor John Rick with various Peruvian co-directors. My Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship-supported Ph.D. dissertation applied ecologically valid human auditory perceptual experiments within the interior architecture at Chavín. An overview of some of this fieldwork appears in my article "Archaeoacoustics: Re-Sounding Materital Culture" in the December 2018 issue of Acoustics Today. During my doctoral studies, in addition to Chavín research, I worked with CCRMA Consulting Professor Jonathan S. Abel and Art & Art History Professor Bissera Pentcheva to write the grant proposal that founded the Icons of Sound Project, and I worked closely with them to develop that project's interdisciplinary research approach, including the preliminary virtual acoustics performance experiments. Following my CCRMA doctoral studies (2006-13), I served as the Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities and taught at Amherst College and Hampshire College. More recently, I was a Weatherhead Fellow (2016-17) at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, NM. Currently, I am co-organizing collaborator in the NEH-supported project, Digital Preservation and Access to Aural Heritage Via A Scalable, Extensible Method (auralheritage.org). I have presented aural heritage research at meetings of professional organizations spanning the Humanities and sciences, including meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the Study Group for Music Archaeology of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), among other conferences. Recent journal publications include a theoretical article on archaeological sonics based on Chavín archaeoacoustics and an Inca case-study application of a comparative method for archaeological acoustical field survey.