Conference Agenda

Among Yoruba drummers in southwestern Nigeria, the Dùndún is often described as Òkú Ewúrẹ́ Tó ń F’ohùn Bí Ẹ̀nìyàn—“the dead goat skin that vocalizes like a human,” a formulation that locates vocality in the drum’s membrane. While studies of Dùndún have richly documented its linguistic and rhythmic functions and social roles (Euba 1990; Villepastour 2010; Omojola 2012), accounts of its vocality have largely centered on human drumming technique and speech imitation. As a result, the material behavior of the drum’s membrane remains analytically underexamined, obscuring how vocal meaning, intelligibility, and expressive nuance are shaped in performance. This paper argues that Dùndún vocality emerges through the material responsiveness of goat skin under changing conditions of pressure, tension, heat, and touch.

Drawing on four months of performance-based observation in Ilora, Oyo State (Nigeria), close listening to archival recordings, oral accounts of material engagement, and interviews with master drummers (Àyàn), I employ material tracing—tracking how the membrane’s physical state shifts across a performance—to analyze how drummers negotiate the skin’s biological limitations and expressive possibilities. I demonstrate that the Dùndún membrane does not possess a singular materiality; rather, it exhibits multiple materialities that yield distinct vocal registers. These include melorhythmic vocality (Àlùjó), produced through a quasi-slack membrane state that foregrounds patterned temporal articulation; nasal vocality, where membrane resistance produces a pinched, speech-like resonance; ohùn ago (a sonorous, bell-like voice), achieved through high-tension clarity; and speech (surrogate) vocality, in which elasticity is manipulated to mirror the tonal glides of the Yoruba language. I show how drummers actively regulate membrane tension: while they apply (solar) heat to tighten a slack skin, they also tie twine around the leather tension cords to deliberately relax the membrane. By foregrounding responsive materials, this paper reframes vocality as a hybrid phenomenon and suggests that musical communication—and the analytic frameworks used in describing it—depends not only on human control or symbolic structure, but on the dynamic properties of the materials through which sound, meaning, and culture are co-constituted.

Recent scholarship in ethnomusicology has called for a shift of focus in organological research from the human aspect of instrument-player interactions to the roles of instruments as both objects and subjects of social relations endowed with agency and power (Doubleday 2008; Bates 2012; Yamin 2019). Studies in ecomusicology have proposed a holistic and relational approach to examining the material world of music. Helena Simonett suggests that music should be regarded “not as an exclusively human invention but one that emerges from communicative relationships with the ecological world.” (Allen and Dawe 2016, 106) Kevin Dawe argues for an understanding of the political ecology of musical instrument-making as “a convergence of human and non-human, technological and affectual, material and cultural fields.” (Allen and Dawe 2016, 119) Informed by these perspectives, my paper explores the idea of the musical instrument as a sentient being, focusing on the Kazakh qyl-qobyz (two-stringed bowed lute) as a case study. A sacred instrument of baqsy shamans among nomadic pastoralists, the qyl-qobyz was suppressed during the Soviet era, and its players and makers were persecuted. The national revival in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, however, has reinvigorated beliefs in the instrument’s ability to heal, to sound on its own, and to mediate with the spirit realm. Based on fieldwork with an instrument maker, blacksmith, and baqsy from southeastern Kazakhstan, the paper examines the meanings of such discourses through the lens of Tim Ingold’s (2000) ecological theory. I argue that the instrument maker’s craft and his views on the sentience and agency of musical instruments offer insight into historical transformations within local music and ritual practice, as well as the complexities of the political and social environment of a postcolonial nation-state in a globalized world.

This paper examines the “Glory to Hong Kong” music box as a nonhuman mediator through which political memory and collective affect persist amid legal suppression. Composed during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests, “Glory to Hong Kong” became a choral practice of assembly and political subjectivation, extending Michel Foucault’s account of embodied practices and power relations to collective musicking as a technology of political self-formation (Foucault 1982; 2008). After the Hong Kong Court of Appeal’s May 8, 2024 interim injunction restricting acts related to the song’s dissemination and performance, the music box produces a different politics of audibility: small-scale, domestic, and diasporic.

I theorize the music box as a Latourian mediator—an actant that translates the anthem across law, platform governance, home interiors, and transnational circulation, reshaping its scale and temporality (Latour 2005). I argue that the object’s “vibrant” capacities (Bennett 2010) reconfigure intentional musicking by redistributing agency across human-object relations through tactile, repetitive, quiet engagements that blur performance, listening, and everyday life—forms less legible as public assembly.

To explain how the music box binds listeners into a precarious collectivity, I take up the quasi-object (Serres 1982), while engaging object-oriented critiques of relationalism (Harman 2009). Drawing on an interview with the song’s composer and analytic reflections on the embodied practices of cranking and listening, and in dialogue with Andrea F. Bohlman’s account of cassette infrastructures as material circulations of solidarity and affect (Bohlman 2017; 2020), I explore how the music box operates as a micro-infrastructure of dissent.