About

Jennifer C. Post is an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona School of Music, where she joined in January 2014. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in ethnomusicology and South Asian studies from the University of Minnesota, as well as an M.S. in information science from Simmons College. Her teaching experience includes positions at Middlebury College in Vermont and the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University in Wellington. Her professional work encompasses curating collections and working on exhibitions featuring regional American recordings, manuscripts, and field collections of British ethnomusicologist John Blacking. She was also the founding curator for collections in Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa for the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. Her research focuses on the intersection of music, ecology, and cultural heritage, with particular attention to the musical traditions and soundscapes of regions such as Central Asia, Mongolia, and New Zealand. She has published extensively on topics including musical instrument making, soundscapes, and the ecological and social dimensions of music in various cultural contexts.

Research topics

• Art
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Geography
• Physical medicine and rehabilitation
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Environmental ethics
• Literature
• Psychiatry
• Gerontology
• Anthropology
• History
• Archaeology
• Physical therapy
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Medicine

Selected publications

• A sonic One Health framework: characterizing health of the environment, animals, and humans using a soundscape perspective

  BioScience · 2025-08-29 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract We present a sonic One Health framework with environmental, animal and human health integration centering on understanding positive and negative effects from the sounds of nature or the sounds from society. Our framework includes a sonic One Health system that describes sound and health; a sonic One Health network that describes specialists needed in our sonic One Health system; a human sonic effects model that reviews how sounds effect the auditory, neurological, cardiovascular, hormonal, and immunological systems; and an integrated set of sonic One Health remediation pathways. We review the literature in noise and health, environmental psychology as it relates to restorative effects of being in nature, and approaches to monitoring sound and perception. We also present three brief case studies, describe future directions for research across eight themes, discuss novel and challenging aspects of our framework, and describe the role that AI may play in our framework.

  PublisherDOI

• Ecosystems and Sounding Lives: Musical Instrument Makers in Greater Central Asia

  Journal of Musicological Research · 2024-07-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Environmental changes present new challenges for twenty-first century musical instrument makers who continue customary practices but are also forced to make visual and sonic changes due to eroding natural resource access and health. Informed by fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, western China, and western Mongolia, this article uses an eco-ethnomusicological approach to consider relationships between instrument making and the social, cultural, and ecological systems that influence the characteristics of natural resources and the creative opportunities of makers. Managing change, makers use prior knowledge to account for patterns and variables and support adaptation as they work to sustain local musical practices.

  PublisherDOI

• Resilient Sounds

  2023-09-28

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter addresses the sonic practices and conservation actions of residents of Rakiura Stewart Island in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using a social-cultural-ecological systems model to argue for a more balanced approach to ecologically focused studies, the work shows how sounds and soundscapes as expressive forms are key sources for knowledge about the environment and its conservation needs while also supporting the daily lifeways of the island’s residents. Māori and European settler residents, engaged with local sounds of nature in their daily lives, are supported by local and national organizations as they focus on restoration of the island’s resources to a perceived pre-settlement state. In the process they can support their aesthetic needs, measure conservation success, and mark social bonds. The community focus on sounds in their more-than-human communities contributes to building unique Māori-European relationships while also supporting the resilience of nature and of Māori social and cultural relationships to the environment.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Lives of the Dombyra and Its Makers in Western Mongolia

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2022-02-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the social lives of the Mongolian Kazakh dombyra and its makers in two Western Mongolian provinces, drawing especially from the experiences of four instrument makers who shared their stories about entanglements with materials, tools, processes, practices, and change. The study draws on Ingold’s concepts of “correspondence” with a practice as a process of growth, encompassing relationships of craftsperson with materials and local traditions and the engagement of others with learning about a practice over time. Representing different generations, the makers featured discuss the instrument’s development in Kazakh communities in China, the entanglement of socialist values during the Soviet era, and the growth of dombyra-making practices. The contemporary instrument may appear to be structurally connected to Kazakhstan, but Mongolian makers reveal that its growth is deeply entangled with the history of Kazakhs and their unique cultural practices in Mongolia.

  PublisherDOI

• Celebrating the International Council for Traditional Music. Reflections on the First Seven Decades

  2022-07-21 · 1 citations

  book

  Celebrating the International Council for Traditional Music: Reflections on the First Seven Decades (Praznovanje Mednarodnega združenja za tradicijsko glasbo: razmišljanja o prvih sedmih desetletjih) povezuje razmišljanja več kot sto znanstvenikov z različnih koncev sveta o zgodovini, trenutni dinamiki in perspektivah združenja, ki je do leta 1980 bilo znano kot International Folk Music Council (Mednarodno združenje za ljudsko glasbo). Eseji slonijo na spoznanjih, pridobljenih s pomočjo študija zgodovinskih virov in arhivskih gradiv, kar je v mnogih primerih združeno z osebnimi izkušnjami avtorjev in njihovim ponotranjenim pisanjem o posameznih tematskih sklopih. Knjiga, ki je razdeljena na dele o nastanku in delovanju združenja, upravljanju, znanstvenih srečanjih, študijskih skupinah, publikacijah in akumuliranem znanju ter o pogledih posameznih članov, na sistematičen in izčrpen način predstavlja prvih sedem desetletij obstoja te vodilne mednarodne organizacije etnomuzikologov in etnokoreologov. Je daleč najbolj ambiciozna publikacija o zgodovini združenja in o njegovem mestu v akademskem in družbenopolitičnem kontekstu glasbenih in plesnih študij v svetovnem merilu.

  PublisherDOI

• Interlude

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2022-02-15

  book-chapterSenior author

  Extract In July 2007, I waited in the wide field below a ger nestled in a shallow hollow as Oktyabr carried a small notebook and his dombyra down to the steppe. The summer grazing site where his family was settled in Deluun sum, Bayan Ölgii aimag (province) is in the Altai Mountains along the Chinese border where Kazakh families have herded for generations. Located nearby is a small arasan1 or mineral spring, where local residents value the "healing waters." Settling himself on the ground, Oktyabr opened his notebook and lay it on the ground in front of him. I could see that he had carefully written out the Kazakh verses of his songs. The musical form he assigned to the song he sang, tolghau, commemorates people and places, records local histories, and expresses emotional responses to place and to change. Such songs are valued in the countryside where they are often shared in social gatherings among Kazakh residents in this province.

  PublisherDOI

• Music and Ethnic Identity in Inner Mongolia

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Gender studies

  This chapter offers an introduction to music and the politics of ethnicity in Inner Mongolia, China. It focuses on the themes of regional sub-ethnic diversity and state arts policies—features that noticeably distinguish Inner Mongolia from the nation of Mongolia. It explores the complexities of Mongol and sub-ethnic Mongol categories in Inner Mongolia, categories that are less visible to the Han Chinese and to foreign outsiders, but with which locals are intimately familiar and aware. To illustrate the close intersections between ethnicity and regional musical style in Inner Mongolia, this chapter examines the career and repertoire of the famous ensemble Anda Union, a neo-traditional ensemble that emerged in the early 2000s and has profoundly influenced the urban music scene. Fusing a transnational ensemble form with locally distinct styles and genres from Inner Mongolia (and claiming to be the “voice of Inner Mongolia”), Anda Union clearly exhibits and celebrates the richness of Mongol sub-ethnic diversity, while also revealing the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of ethnic categories in the region at the same time.

  PublisherDOI

• Sound, Music, Pastoralism, and Nature in Mongolian Sound Worlds

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2022-02-15 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter addresses the sounds, soundscapes, and music that Mongolians use to maintain relationships to pastoralism and nature. The topic is introduced with information on geophysical and social diversity in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, a discussion of rural social spaces for maintaining established social divisions of labor and responsibility, and values and beliefs about nature that provide pathways to spiritual health. Focus on sonic practices shares information on ways pastoralists use sounds and music in their daily lives and how music expresses valued relationships to the natural world in both rural and urban contexts. Evidence of these values is shared in embedded references to lands and landscapes through melodies and song lyrics and in other narrative information about sounds, soundscapes, and places. The chapter concludes with a case study on sound and music of pastoralists in the westernmost Mongolian province of Bayan-Ölgii where Mongolian Kazakh relationships to sounds, soundscapes, and music are expressed in the context of their local ecosystems and established social patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• Ecology, Mobility, and Music in Western Mongolia

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2021-08-15 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Focusing on the mobile pastoral herders’ engagement with the environment, Jennifer Post uses a new mobilities paradigm to analyze the impacts of environmental change and related political and economic factors on the environment, lives, and musical practices of Kazakh herders. Kazakh musicians express their attachments to place as they sing about their histories and movement, about local resources and lands they have cared for, and about memories of community events that are rapidly disappearing. Kazakh herders have had to relocate to urban centers in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, and, as their lifeway rooted in pastoralism wanes, this shared body of songs play a role in environmental activism, promoting Kazakh identity and the environmentally-focused values and knowledge carried in song.

  PublisherDOI

• Effects of an In-home Multicomponent Exergame Training on Physical Functions, Cognition, and Brain Volume of Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial

  Frontiers in Medicine · 2020 · 131 citations

  • Physical medicine and rehabilitation
  • Physical therapy
  • Psychology

  = 0.04]. No significant training effects were evident for physical functions or brain volume. Both groups exhibited a significant decrease in gray matter volume of frontal areas and the hippocampus over time. The findings indicate a positive influence of exergame training on executive functioning. No improvements in physical functions or brain volume were evident in this study. Better adapted individualized training challenge and a longer training period are suggested. Further studies are needed that assess training-related structural brain plasticity and its effect on performance, daily life functioning and healthy aging.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ricardo D. Trimillos

  3 shared

• Adrienne L. Kaeppler

  2 shared

• Mohd Anis Md Nor

  2 shared

• Philip Yampolsky

  2 shared

• Eling D. de Bruin

  ETH Zurich

  2 shared

• Lois Wilcken

  2 shared

• Salwa El‐Shawan Castelo‐Branco

  Universidade Nova de Lisboa

  2 shared

• Marcello Sorce Keller

  2 shared