Paper short abstract:

'Te Ao Nui O Ngā Hui' (The Wide World of the Gourd) is a short experimental film that explores how taonga pūoro practitioners (traditional Māori instruments) come into dialogue with the voices of the atua, or the multiple deities.

Paper long abstract:

'Te Ao Nui O Ngā Hui' (The Wide World of the Gourd) (2016) explores mimetic empathy as a method of musical composition used by taonga pūoro musicians (Māori musical instruments). Emphasising the players' awareness of the natural environment and how they harness and utilise empathy to create music, this short film looks at how the musicians come into contact with and subsequently connect to the natural world through Māori whakapapa (genealogy), both human and non-human, such as rivers, rocks, trees and birds. 'Te Ao Nui O Ngā Hui' (The Wide World of the Gourd) (2016) accentuates how the musicians utilise their senses to imagine and furthermore empathise with something, before punctuating these mimetic experiences into music.

This project was made in collaboration with taonga pūoro practitioner Alistair Fraser and visual artist Russell G. Shaw, as part of a wider audiovisual ethnomusicological research project on musical composition and perception with taonga pūoro in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2016/2017). A previous cut of this film was part of Lowe's master's thesis at Aarhus University.