MUSIC IN TAIWAN
台湾的音乐

One of the first things I really struggled with my vlog was about what I was going to film. At the start I knew I wanted to do something with traditional music and arts.

Back when I studied history, the arts were the yardstick we used to measure the different time periods. Each period has its own style of art and it reflected the values and issues of the time. So my goal in looking at the evolution of arts in Taiwan was by proxy to look at the evolution of Taiwanese culture.

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With music, a fair amount of my hobbies tend to revolve around it so I was naturally interested in the types Taiwan has. For instance, I collect a lot of instruments, primarily woodwind instruments that are somewhat related to the flute (I have a fife, ocarina, bamboo flute, etc.). So I wanted to take a look at what was different between Taiwan’s instruments and the West’s traditional instruments.

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In line with music I also recently learned that Taiwan’s traditional music is written in something called Jianpu which at first glance looks very different from the nomenclature the West uses. However, when you look closely there are actually a lot of parallels between the two notations from rests to note duration. So I wanted to take a look at why these two different forms of musical nomenclature were so similar and potentially the universality of music.

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However, at the end of the day, I realized that the scope of my project was perhaps a little too big and ambitious. Both my original ideas for art and music required a lot of sitting down and combing through texts making it seem more like a research project than a vlog of Taiwan.

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At the same time both art and music were such a broad topic that I could do several videos on a single topic to really get at the details. But because of the number of videos I was doing for the project was not much, it didn’t seem like a 3-minute video and a half on the subject would do the hundred years of tradition justice.

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Instead I decided to focus more on music which interests me a little more than art. Then next issue I faced from there is that I wanted to do a comparison between Taiwan’s traditional music and the West. But for people who weren’t musically inclined I was worried it might be boring for them. Not to mention, to talk about comparisons between the two systems I would have to potentially teach people 2 different theories of music in a span of about 10 minutes which is hard to do for even one of the theories.

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Then instead of covering the theories of music, I wanted to maybe do something more on the instruments. Finding shops that sold and taught the instruments were easy enough. However, the people I would interview would be a little hard to find, since for the most part the people at the instrument stores were either working or heading to class and didn’t have much time to talk to me.

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While I would like to continue finding people to ask about the traditional instruments, I thought it might be more interesting for people if I went around asking about music in general. I’m planning on going on the streets and asking people if they played instruments and still do, which instruments and how the culture of practising is here. Since practise is something that everyone has to do I think it would be more relatable to everyone instead of just the musically inclined.

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因为你得出去问台湾人问题，我觉得这个vlog很有意思。你不用在网上找东西。你也得旅行看看台湾。可是我觉得字幕很难。难是难，可是我觉得要做英文和中文字幕很聪明。因为我们的中文没有我们的英文那么好，所以如果我们要用英文说一些东西，我们也要学怎么用中文说。我觉得最难的事是用Movie Maker做我们的vlogs，因为我不但不知道怎么找这些程序，而且不知道怎用这些程序。可是，我觉得这个vlog很有意思。