Conference Agenda

This poster examines how contemporary composition constructs climate urgency through sonic structure. Building on Alexander Rehding’s notion of a “sense of urgency” in ecomusicology, I ask: How is urgency acoustically produced within musical materials? Focusing on Julia Wolfe’s unEarth and my data-driven sonification work The Lost Forest, I argue that contemporary climate compositions sonically stage extractivism and responsibility through text, differing voices, and environmental sonification.

In unEarth, a three-movement piece for orchestra and chorus, Wolfe juxtaposes adult and children’s voices to dramatize ecological responsibility and accountability across generations. The first movement centers on the flood as a planetary phenomenon that defies national borders. The second movement begins with the word “tree” sung in multiple languages, foregrounding ecological universality before introducing Emily Dickinson’s poem “Who Robbed the Woods”. As the soprano articulates the confessional line “I robbed the woods-the trusting woods”, the surrounding choral texture expands this private culpability into a collective action. In the third movement, adult voices articulate terms such as “fragmentation, disintegration, devastation” while a children’s choir sings words of hope “conversation, reforestation, simplification”. The recurring “-ion” suffix produces a rhythmic-linguistic cadence that sonically binds destruction and restoration. Without one, the other cannot. Through vocal layering and registral contrast, Wolfe transforms extractivism into an audible intergenerational tension.

In The Lost Forest, I sonify global deforestation data sourced from GlobalForestWatch.org, mapping forest-loss metrics onto timbral density and harmonic saturation in Ableton Live. Taking recordings of rain, wildfire, and forest ambience construct an immersive ecological soundscape, while excerpts from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” frame the ethical tension between awareness and action. Here, urgency emerges not from narrative alone but from the progressive thickening of sonic texture as data accumulates, rendering extractivism perceptible as an acoustic overload.

Together, these works demonstrate that climate-oriented compositions do more than symbolize crisis: they sonically generate urgency through environmental processes and decomposition itself. By reconfiguring musical voice beyond the solely human—transforming text, data, and soundscape into agents of ecological consciousness—these compositions invite listeners to perceive their environment as dynamically implicated in planetary responsibility.

A Chicago police chief from 1901-1905, Irish immigrant to the US, Francis O’Neill, looms large in the Irish Trad music tradition. His work collecting music, recording history, and documenting what was, up until that time, a largely oral art form has become an important resource to players and historians alike. There are tunes named after him (‘Chief O’Neill’ and ‘O’Neill’s Favorite,’ for example), his contribution is highly valued by the community, and his careful ethnographic work has proved irreplaceable for new generations of players.

Focusing on O’Neill’s book Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (1910), this poster endeavors to highlight the ethnographic work done by O’Neill. It also seeks to show the contribution of Chief O’Neill’s collaborator, James O’Neill, who notated thousands of tunes for posterity in conjunction with Francis O’Neill’s vision. The work done by both men further highlights a rich and complex history related to performance practice in the world of Irish traditional music.

In addition to the great depth of repertoire available, there continues to be a lively conversation surrounding the most authentic way to learn Irish Trad music: aurally or with notation. The work of both O’Neills seems to support the tradition of learning by ear, however, their work is also centered around notating tunes. While this research does not intend to suggest any sort of right or wrong way to participate in trad, it does seek to investigate the dichotomy through O’Neill’s work.

Regarding visual materials for the poster, the research benefits from sharing sections of musical notation from various tunes. If there were an option, I would be interested in recording the tunes so they could be heard. Visual materials for the poster would include charts that help quantify the number of tunes recorded by O’Neill and the sheer variety of styles collected. Finally, the visuals featured would include photographs and illustrations from Irish Folk Music, highlighting the many influential players that O’Neill interviewed.

In the past five years, there has been an increasing number of research papers on the virtual ethnography of jazz music and its fans, but there are almost no studies on the virtual jazz life in Chinese context. This article addresses that gap by examining platform vernaculars—memes, posts, commentaries, and forum threads—circulating on RedNote, Bilibili, Douban, and Reddit. It explores how these digital practices shape contemporary jazz culture and urban musical life in China, particularly through discussions of jazz recordings, improvisation, live performances, and festival experiences, at a moment marked by the rapid growth of large-scale outdoor jazz festivals in cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong. The study also considers how online communities negotiate aesthetic values, musical authenticity, and understandings of what constitutes “real jazz” in contemporary China.

The study brings together affective and symbolic media theory with Peter Kivy’s resemblance theory to theorize how musical meaning emerges through both communicative exchange and structural musical reference. Drawing on virtual ethnography and qualitative discourse analysis, the research compiles a corpus of over 300 discussion threads and associated comment chains, catalogs widely circulated memes, and includes semi-structured interviews with influential jazz bloggers, thread initiators, and forum moderators. The findings suggest that online jazz lifeworlds mediate tensions between artistic authenticity and commercial expectation, translating digital discourse into offline participation, festival attendance, and consumer practices. This study contributes to research on digital music life and musicological debates on musical identity formation.

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