Having lived for centuries in Southern China maintaining the singing tradition developed and maintained by the Dong people is slowly being eroded by the ingress of mainstream Chinese culture. In an effort to preserve this oral record of the Dong history and legend, a project has been launched to record and preserve their music. Key to this effort is Audient’s iD14 portable USB audio interface.

‘As young people leave Dong villages to find work in larger cities, traditional Dong song is at serious risk of extinction,’ explains Noah Krieg, a cultural anthropologist with a background in pro audio sales, who has undertaken this extraordinary project. Joining local musicians and singers with support from concerned international partners, he aims to record the traditional Dong songs, and make them accessible to the wider world.

‘The Audient iD14 is the perfect tool for such an endeavour,’ Krieg reports. ‘It answers the questions of portability and professionalism. We’re mostly working with a single vocal or two-mic vocal/instrument set-up, and the iD14 is just right to capture those core elements. The I/O is brilliant and the preamp quality guarantees a track that won’t need a lot of production.’

Krieg is in the ideal position of being immersed in the community, having moved to a Dong village upon completion of graduate studies in Dong culture at Hunan University in 2015. Currently a grass-roots endeavour, he anticipates this to be a long-term project that will gain traction and support as recordings are assessed and collated.

‘We will work with the local government to publish and distribute these songs throughout the Dong areas, and post them online to be enjoyed by locals and visitors alike,’ he says.

Krieg is also keen to give some of the recordings a more modern twist: ‘We will work with the raw audio and integrate modern musical elements to make the Dong songs more accessible for a generation of ethnic Dong who might feel the traditional music is out of touch.’

Traditionally, song has been integral to every aspect of Dong life: singing at meals, singing in courting, and especially singing for education. The entirety of Dong history, legends, moral teaching, and folk religion practices has been passed down from generation to generation orally through song.

Legend has it that long ago the Dong were unable to sing. When a villager named Xi Ai heard a mountain bird tell of a singing tree in heaven, he decided to go up and steal some songs that grew as fruit on the tree. The songs were taken back to the village and planted in the ground, where they grew up into a new singing tree. The Dong people gathered with the mountain birds to learn the beautiful songs, and ever since the sound of singing has filled the hills where the Dong people live.

If the recording duties have been simplified by his choice of equipment, organising recordings in a distant corner of China isn’t as straightforward, as Krieg has found out: ‘I tried to schedule the first singer, but it was market day and no one had time.’