It no doubt helps, though, that both scholars spend their most valuable research time studying the music not on videos or analog sound recordings but in the very communities where the music flourishes and evolves, embedded in emotionally charged communal contexts like taarab performances and Pre Paid Funerals. Whether you’re an audience member or one of the musicians, the experience of the performance establishes itself as something much more than the sum of its academic parts. “If we, as researchers, don’t get caught up in it,” Stone muses, “we’re not human. Something’s wrong with that.”