Cairang Ji sits on a bed in the main room of a farmhouse holding her two grandchildren on her lap as she quietly speaks the verses of an old folk song. Two other grandmothers dutifully repeat the words, heads bent close to one another as if in prayer, each cupping her left hand over an ear so she can hear her own voice more clearly.

The women are learning by rote an ancient Tibetan song that is sung at the hair-changing ceremony, an increasingly rare rite that celebrates a girl becoming a woman. No one knows how long this has been a tradition, or how it started, but they do know the song is in danger of fading from memory.

Cairang Ji, 61, is the only person in the village of 240 people who still knows how to sing the 30-minute song. Today she's trying to pass the words on to her two neighbors, fellow farmers who live in this barren mountain area 3 hours from the Qinghai provincial capital of Xining.

Dawa Drolma, a 20-year-old Tibetan woman, sits quietly at the front of the brick kang a traditional farmer's bed that is heated by wood burning underneath extending a large microphone toward the women. The bulky headphones dangling over her ears are broken, so she has to use her free hand to keep them from falling off.

The young woman is a member of a small group of Tibetan students at Qinghai Normal University, in China's far northwest, who are attempting to preserve the rapidly disappearing Tibetan folk-song tradition. "The goal is to digitalize the songs we record and return them to our communities," she says. "We want to record as many songs as possible."

The program got started in 2005 when a student in the university's English program for Tibetans approached Gerald Roche, an Australian anthropology professor teaching in China as a volunteer, and asked him if there was some way to save Tibetan folk music, which was gradually disappearing from Tibetan villages throughout western China.

Roche has a master's degree in ethnomusicology but says he knew nothing about Tibetan music, and so he gathered several students together for a brainstorming session. They looked at the different types of songs and the factors that put them at risk.

After two months of training in how to use the equipment and how to collect information about the songs, the first batch of about six volunteers returned home during last year's winter break armed with donated digital recorders some traveling by bus for days to reach their nomadic communities.

The students returned to Xining with close to 200 songs, or more than 10 hours of recorded music. The songs included herding and harvesting songs, drinking tunes, love ballads, lullabies, even songs meant to soothe yaks into giving more milk.

Tibetan music was first threatened during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) as all "feudal" practices of all ethnicities were banned. The order of the day was to "make art serve politics". Tibetan music was particularly suspect because of its religious themes. For close to a decade, no one dared to sing any of those songs out loud, and many were forgotten.

The biggest threat to traditional Tibetan folk music, however, has been the country's modernization. "After we got electricity 10 years ago," says Dawa Drolma of her remote village in Gansu Province, "people began buying tape recorders, radios, and TV's, and then they began losing interest in traditional things."

Anne-Laure Cromphout, a doctoral student at the Free University of Brussels, who is doing research in Qinghai for her dissertation on the relation between traditional and modern Tibetan music, points to the influence of modern pop music from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere in China. "People hear this music all the time on the radio, on VCD's, and cassette tapes," she says. "It comes in and basically takes over."

Dawa Drolma agrees. When young people hear traditional music, "they feel it's very foreign".

Mechanization has also had a huge impact. "Butter-churning songs are disappearing as there are now electric machines to do this," says Cromphout, "and so no need to have a song to provide rhythm while milking."