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.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
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, 02:57:56am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Buddhist Music Through the Ages Session Chair: Jingyi Zhang, James Madison University | |
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Screened Listening: Sonic Infrastructures in Asian Diasporic Installation Art University of Texas at Austin This paper argues that the screen in installation art functions as an acoustic boundary that composes perspective, shaping how bodies hear, move, and register authority in space. I propose screened listening as a musicological analytic for installation practice: a way of hearing how feedback systems, caption infrastructures, and exhibition acoustics organize attention, distribute sonic authority, and choreograph presence. Drawing on Blesser & Salter’s notion of aural architecture (2009) — how built environments shape what and how we hear — and extending it to mediated exhibition environments, I examine works by three Asian diasporic artists to show how mediation itself becomes the compositional subject. In TV Buddha (1974), Nam June Paik constructs a closed-circuit feedback loop that functions as an acoustic enclosure. The seated Buddha confronts its own live image; the monitor regulates liveness by collapsing past and present into a continuously renewing now. The loop converts viewing into duration rather than narrative progression. Perspective here is infrastructural, authored by the camera-monitor circuit that synchronizes bodies within the same temporal frame. In Close Readings (2020), Christine Sun Kim relocates narrative authority from image to caption. By layering Deaf-authored text over muted film clips, she treats written language as a compositional device. Captioning reorganizes sonic authorship, multiplies temporalities of access, and reveals the uneven infrastructure of listening. The screen becomes a contested acoustic surface where legibility is staged as an architectural condition of sound. Wu Tsang’s Anthem (2021), installed in the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda, transforms the museum’s ramp into a compositional device. The vertical projection and Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s layered vocals engage the building’s continuous curve, where reverberation, height, and circulation shape how sound is perceived. Perspective emerges along the ramp as voice becomes architectural material; listening unfolds in motion, distributed across vertical ascent. Across these cases, the screen evolves from enclosure (Paik) to redistribution (Kim) to immersion (Tsang). Together they show how installation art engineers listening through circuits, captions, and architectural movement that calibrate presence in real time. By foregrounding mediation as musical form, this study reframes installation art as infrastructural listening, arranging intimacy, access, and collectivity in public space. | |