This paper delves into the intercultural musical landscape of Ghana's Guan people, a linguistic and ethnic minority constituting about 3.7% of the nation's populace. Spanning regions like Volta and Oti, Guan communities such as Avatime, Tafi, Logba, Nkonya, Akpafu, and Santrokofi boast rich linguistic and musical legacies reflecting influences from Ghana's major languages. Despite speaking distinct Guan languages, these communities often infuse elements from dominant languages like Ewe and Akan into their musical expressions. The paper examines how factors like migration, geopolitical ties, Christianity, Western education, and modernization have influenced Guan music, dance, language, and wider social customs. Through ethnographic inquiry and analysis, this study aims to illuminate how these socio-cultural dynamics have sculpted the intercultural musical traditions among the Guan people. By scrutinizing the convergence of traditional Guan musical practices with external influences, the paper contributes to existing discourse on cultural exchange and musical evolution in Ghana and beyond.

In July 1990, the renowned Portuguese fadista Amália Rodrigues performed a historic show at Goa’s elite Kala Academy. Reports of the event depict thousands of people crashing through gates and clamoring to hear Amália’s mesmerizing voice. The public response to both her performance and her concomitant interview with India’s public broadcasting corporation, All India Radio, not only shines a light on fado’s enduring power and reputation in a Goan sonic imaginary, but also draws attention to India's cultural link to a former colonial power, one that has largely escaped critical attention in global scholarship on music in South Asia.

The history shared by Portugal and Goa is long and fraught. Indeed, Goa was a Portuguese territory from 1510 to 1961 before its annexation and incorporation into India. Thus, we find the prevalence of fado performance in Goa along with contemporary efforts for its revival to be particularly deserving of attention.

This paper deploys fado as a critical and generatve dialectic for examining the sonic link between India and Portugal. As a dialectic of interaction, fado co-produces, co-forms, and co-performs Indian cultural identity while simultaneously constituting and reconstructing a collective Goan past. We further reflect on whether the revival of fado should be viewed only as a heritage revival endeavor, or as a cultural enterprise aimed at co-producing new meanings for Portuguese music and sonic heritage in South Asia.

In this paper, I examine the recent phenomenon in the Korean music industry in which non-Korean individuals play a significant role in the production of K-pop. I argue that border-transcending collaborations have become indispensable to the music, thereby raising questions about the authenticity of K-pop. Throughout the paper, I examine two distinct case studies: diasporic Korean singers in the United States who returned to Korea, and foreign producers and songwriters collaborating with the Korean music industry. I seek answers to these questions: 1) Is K-pop at risk of losing its authenticity? 2) Is there anything musically Korean in K-pop? Informed by Shim’s argument that globalization encourages local peoples to rediscover the “local,” I suggest that new interpretive possibilities of K-pop can be achieved through the concepts of circulation and diaspora, specifically the idea of glocalization (Roudometof, 2016). While scholars such as Michael Fuhr, Ji-Hyun Ahn, and Kanozia and Ganghariya highlight concepts of globalization and cultural hybridity as defining elements of K-pop and its marketing strategies, the significant impact of Western cultural influence—particularly through the involvement of foreign producers and songwriters—is rarely examined in the context of transnational sound circulation, diaspora, and musical authenticity. In my analysis of two case studies, I aim to demonstrate that K-pop embodies deliberate multivalence, thus requiring a hybrid analytical framework that incorporates musical, theoretical, and sociopolitical perspectives. I propose a new hybrid methodology and conceptual lens for the study of K-pop.