Using Multimedia to Expand the Audience of ... - Richard Repp

Using Multimedia 42
songs; voice, violin, and guitar invoke the music. Many of the songs in this collection
have secular titles and few are of the sacred genre. The Huichols of the north mountain
range of Jalisco: (El Venado Azul/ The Blue Deer, 1999) is recommended as one of the
best commercially recorded Huichol bands of Mexico. Only the first song, the title of the
CD “Acabame de Matar”, is sung in the Huichol language, but the title is written in
Spanish. The other nine songs on the CD have typical characteristics of ranchera genre,
previously mentioned, expressing themes of romance and rural life. The instrumentation
of this group is similar to the string quartet recorded in Huejuquilla el Alto: two vocalists,
(male and female), a violinist, a guitarist, and a double bassist. The interaction between
the instruments and voices as well as the rhythmic patterns resemble the sound of the
aforementioned string quartet. Even so, the ranchera style is taken to a polished,
published level by The Blue Deer group. The string quartet recorded in Huejuquilla el
Alto resembles the commercialized group most of all out of the published Huichol music
available. The live recording in 2006 of the quartet offers additional material to support
the development of Huichol secular music.
Multimedia
Multimedia captures an audience’s attention by presenting audio and visual
perceptions of a performance: music, language, and behavior. Globalization of
broadcasting information opens new doors for lesser known ethnic groups to be a part of
the world-wide community through the World Wide Web. Since the 1990s, the Internet
has been a fast growing location for ethnomusicologists to present and review topics for
discussion. Web sites are outgrowing the trend of CD-ROM since multimedia Web page
presentations are updated faster and are easier use than conventional formats, such as