Laurent Aubert is an ethnomusicologist and musician based in Geneva. He is the founder of the Ateliers d’ethnomusicologie, an institute dedicated to the musical cultures of the world (www.adem.ch), and has worked at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (www.ville-ge.ch/meg) as curator of the ethnomusicology department, in charge of its music archives, and as editor of the Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie and the AIMP CD collection.

Most of his field research has been conducted in South Asia, particularly on Hindustani music, folk music in Nepal, ritual music and dance in Kerala, and Sufi music in Kashmir. He has also collaborated on various projects in Romania with Speranța Rădulescu: field recordings and valorization of the archives of Constantin Brăiloiu in particular. His main publications are Mondes en musique (1991), Les Feux de la déesse (2004), The Music of the Other (2007), Musiques migrantes (2005), and The Flavour of Arts (2011).

Margaret Hiebert Beissinger teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University (United States). Her field is Balkan oral traditions, and her current research focuses on Romani traditional culture and music-making in southern Romania. She has authored numerous articles and The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania and is coeditor of both Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (with Jane Tylus and Susanne Wofford) and Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music (with Speranța Rădulescu and Anca Giurchescu). She is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore.

Mariana Hurjui-Său completed a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education and a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology under the supervision of Speranța Rădulescu, at the National University of Music in Bucharest. She is currently a PhD student at the same institution, under the supervision of Florinela Popa. Since 2017 she has participated in numerous field research studies and she is interested in oral music cultures in Romania, especially in the situation of pastoral origin musics of the last century. In 2020 she received an Erasmus+ scholarship at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. She is currently an ethnomusicologist at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, where she takes part in the research of peasant musics and in the publication of thematic records in the Ethnophonie collection.

Zuzana Jurková studied ethnology and musicology at Charles University and at the music conservatory in Brno. She is the head of the Anthropological Studies and of the Ethnomusicological program at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, focused on the research of musics of minorities (Voices of the Weak, 2009; Sounds from the Margins, 2013). She concentrates on Romani music (numerous publications, e.g. Romani Musicians in the 21st Century, 2018; Music – Memory – Minorities: Between Archive and Activism, 2020), the history of Czech ethnomusicology, and, in recent years, urban ethnomusicology (Pražské hudební světy, 2013; Prague Soundscapes, 2014). She has been awarded numerous grants, e.g. Fulbright Research Fellowship; Ruth Crawford Mitchell Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh; Masaryk Distinguished Chair Israel and others.

Bernard Lortat-Jacob is Honorary Director of Research at the CNRS. For fifteen years he was in charge of the Ethnomusicology Laboratory of the Musée de l’Homme (now located on the campus of the Paris Nanterre University). He worked mainly on the musics of the Mediterranean Basin, and in close collaboration with Jacques Bouët on Oltenia and Dobrogea since the early 1980s, and with Jacques Bouët and Speranța Rădulescu on Transylvania and Oaș Country. His books and numerous articles usually go beyond the strict framework of monographs.