Robert Beahrs

Tuning Voices, Taming Souls traces the voices of animals, spirits, and nature in the inherited cosmologies of Tyvan nomadic hunter-pastoralists living in the Sayan-Altai Mountains of Russia and Western Mongolia. Composed of six short stand-alone ethnographic films, the project explores the sounded spiritual genealogies of postcolonial nomadic world-making. Drawing on multiperspectival film techniques, soundscapes, and interviews, this project shows how Tyvan concepts such as music, play, emotion, and domestication are understood in relation to voices of ancestors and local spirit-masters. Moreover, the power of these voices is invoked and activated through sound-making rituals–coaxing, calling, throat-singing, musical instrument playing, shamanizing, and storytelling during everyday herding and hunting activities. A collaboration between an outsider (an American ethnomusicologist) and an insider (a Tyvan anthropologist), Tuning Voices, Taming Souls presents new perspectives on the postcolonial reverberations of nature, culture, and sound for nomadic communities living in one isolated corner of post-Soviet Inner Asia.