Virtual Fieldwork on Chinese Folk Songs: The Participatory Culture of Online Hua er Videos

This paper is concerned with the online representation of hua er, a genre of mountain songs sung at the brink of the Tibetan and the Loess plateaus. The main performance happenstance of hua er is at annual festivals, held according to the Chinese lunisolar calendar in the harvesting slack season. Due to this seasonal characteristic, hua ercould not be heard everywhere, everytime, or by everyone. The seasonal limitation eventually lost its curtail with the rise of video sharing websites after 2005. Hua er now can be heard in all its varieties throughout the year, by anyone with access to the internet. Video sites are at the intersection of media creation and social networking, they embed people in a participatory culture in which to create and share content. These virtual spaces are portals for communities where people bond with peers, engage in public discourse, explore identity, and acquire new, often musical, skills. Do Chinese video sites likewise have the potential to form strong participatory cultures? Is this aspect of participation also manifested in and through folk videos, e.g. the sharing of hua er videos and in the comment section of the videos? This paper draws on the ethnographic method of virtual fieldwork, primarily videos posted on China s most popular video platform, Youku, are analysed. Beside theoretical reflections on how changing technologies of communication and dissemination reshape the ethnomusicologist s understanding of fieldwork, preliminary analytical findings point to a major change of hua er culture, especially in the fields of musical representation, folk classification, and even its mode of transmission: from hua er festivals to hua er video channels . These results may furthermore be relevant for other genres of China s folk musics, describing their development in the virtuality of the internet, which - as a socially embedded phenomenon - is by no means separated from reality, but rather is part of everyday life for musicians and audiences.