Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:53am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sounding the Other Session Chair: Mike Levine | |
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On Intercultural Punning: Race, Global Popular Music, and Anticolonial Solidarity Harvard University A hip-hop record contains a whooshing sound: who, or what, might that be? Conventional wisdom proposes the scratching of turntables, but a subsequent viewing of the music video suggests otherwise. Could it instead be the sound of thrusting swords and spears of traditional wushu (Chinese martial arts)? Sounds in motion, sounds in translation: these are by now truisms in the study of music, a medium defined by its multivalence, transnational mobility, and material inconsistency (Tunbridge 2018; Abbate and Gallope 2021). Extending Nina Sun Eidsheim’s recent meditations on voice, sound, and race (Eidsheim 2019), my talk attends to this moment of the whoosh to propose a theory of what we might call “intercultural punning.” The phenomenon of intercultural punning proliferates especially in the age of recording technology, when musical sound becomes ever more portable across cultural and national boundaries. Alongside material gains, however, sound and source become constitutively severed in more ways than one, amplifying epistemological anxieties about sonic, cultural, and political identity. In dealing with the acousmatic question of sound’s fugitivity, my talk approaches sound as a species of wit. Taking Taiwanese singer-songwriter Jay Chou’s 2006《霍元甲》(“Huo Yuanjia”) as a test case, it explores how various instances of intercultural punning—timbral, gestural, and multimedial— braid together hip-hop and Chinese cultural practices in ways that raise anew questions about the relationship between the histories of Africa and Asia, nationalism and decolonization, and political hope and heartbreak. What happens when different cultures are placed on a collision course? What cultural and political alliances or frictions emerge? To understand transnational cultural migration in its complexities and contradictions, this talk suggests moving beyond the polarity of cultural appropriation and assimilation to tease out alternative possibilities for the liberation of the global south. To rethink sound in translation—to play, make, and listen to music otherwise—is to ask, finally, what it means to be free. | |