Central Asian Throat Singing in the Digital Age

Abstract

This paper analyzes the musical tradition of Central Asian throat singing and its existence in the digital sphere, identifying a number of issues with its treatment online at the hands of cultural outsiders. Due to the overarching technological divide, which predominantly enables digital communication in the developed West, as well as the particularly rural and isolated nature of many indigenous Central Asian communities, throat singing is vulnerable to being stolen or co-opted by non-indigenous users on partially anonymized platforms like YouTube and Spotify. As a result, the majority of native Central Asian musicians lack commercial success and any form of popular recognition, even when their music may accumulate millions of views online. Many non-Central Asian internet users also demonstrate a tendency to engage with throat singing in a way that reflects harmful and neo-Orientalist modes of thought. This paper will examine these issues by first analyzing the historical context of Central Asian throat singing, both indigenously and in Western representation, then considering a number of more recent attempts to modernize the genre, including examples of indigenous Central Asian artists who have garnered commercial and popular success in the West. Finally, we will examine a variety of case studies from the internet that exemplify the often harmful, reductive, and decontextualized nature of Western engagement with Central Asian throat singing online.