Musicians in Turkey and the diaspora played a critical role in organizing social media networks for disaster relief and circulating social media posts of missing persons while the southern region lacked sufficient aid from the Turkish government following the February 6th, 2023 earthquake. Musicians quickly released new songs on YouTube, making extensive use of sampling and lyrically recounting the earthquake’s “traumascape” (Tumarkin 2005, 2019) found in news coverage, interviews, and public user content across social media sites. A short-form video of disaster relief workers yelling “Sesimi duyan var mı?” (“Does anyone hear my voice?”) in unison, followed by silence, is frequently featured across these earthquake-related songs. In this paper, I draw on a corpus of music videos centered on the February 6th earthquake, digital ethnography, and comment analysis to examine cultural grief and intimacy within digital spaces (Abidin 2018 and Marwick and boyd 2014) between musicians and listeners. I assert that the musicians’ affective practice of foregrounding traumatized voices from the earthquake’s digital traumascape brings the listener to sonically witness the pain of those immediately affected. The musicians’ layering of traumatized voices - while weaving criticism of the earthquake’s handling through the lyrics - creates a digitized sonic “counterpublic” (Warner 2002) where musicians and listeners remember and rearticulate their own traumatic experiences regarding the earthquake in tension with government-aligned earthquake discourse. Through emphasizing the affective practice of embedding of the earthquake’s traumascape into music, this paper contributes to scholarship on sonic localities of trauma and affective practice within digital spatialities.

Music was a critical form of resistance to violence and trauma in the apartheid prisons of South Africa (1948-94). While there are many accounts by male political prisoners of music’s role against apartheid violence, especially by those held on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, limited research has focused on the crucially different experiences of female political prisoners under the apartheid regime. Drawing on new first-hand interviews with female former political prisoners and archival documents, this paper examines how music was a vehicle which enabled women activists to cope with the trauma and violence inflicted on them during the anti-apartheid struggle, both outside and inside of incarceration, whether in detention or longer term imprisonment. First, the role of women in the anti-apartheid movement and the importance of music for political activism against apartheid violence will be considered, allowing women to express their fight against violent oppression and to communicate a female perspective on the struggle. Second, music-making in the women’s jails and detention cells is discussed, focusing on how it provided resistance to the trauma of harrowing conditions, torture, isolation and solitary confinement. This model of women’s cultural expression to advance social change raises broader questions into music and women’s rights, violence, trauma, and gender politics in the context of oppressive patriarchal regimes at the intersections of music, sound and trauma studies.

As antisemitism and other forms of communal violence and misfortune have risen sharply in the United States since 2017, American Jewish communities have confronted multiple traumatic events. From the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh (2018) and Poway (2019) to the COVID-19 pandemic that separated communities for months and, most recently, the 2023 attack on the state of Israel by Hamas, synagogue congregations have turned to each other to seek comfort and meaning in the wake of trauma. Commonly, both clergy and congregants turn to sounded ritual as a means of bringing order to a Jewish world marked by disease and antisemitism. Much scholarship about Jewish sounded response to trauma has focused on memorializing historical events such as the Holocaust or the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. Building on the historical insights of this work and on the more recent work of Cantor Meara Lebovitz, as well as interviews with rabbis and cantors and observations of contemporary additions and alterations to established synagogue rituals, I examine how communities use song, chant, and other forms of sounded and embodied ritual to incorporate traumatic events into Jewish life. Through singing, considered choices of language, and altered performances of prayer, synagogue congregations demonstrate how sounded ritual helps communities to normalize and express emotional and spiritual struggles with collective trauma and incorporate them into coherent cultural narratives.

In Orange County’s Little Saigon (CA), sonic nostalgia for the fallen nation of South Vietnam runs rampant. However, since studies of musical nationalism tend to favor the perspectives of the colonizers over the colonized, and studies of popular music and nostalgia favor the English-speaking, white middle-class, few scholars have studied the “post”-colonial soundscapes of diasporic-Vietnamese enclaves. Through hermeneutic analysis and (auto)ethnography, I draw upon the lived experiences of my community to propose a reparative, trauma-informed, and “rhizomatic” theory of nostalgic and empathetic musicking (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). Little Saigon is a place of living “counter-memory” that has been underserved by institutional histories (Foucault 1977). Its space- and time-encapsulating repertoire includes mid-twentieth century pop; intercultural adaptations of bolero; and pacifist anthems that defied North-South boundaries imposed by the Cold War. Community generational fractures, disguised as differences in political parties, are rooted in trauma, lingering “necropolitics” (Mbembe 2019), and ontological-cultural misunderstandings. The constructed “refugee-nationalist” (Nguyen 2008) identity of Little Saigon is heavily mediated through music and vice versa. Although Little Saigon may appear to practice “restorative nostalgia” (Boym 2007) with its reconstruction of pre-1975 Saigon, this framework proves to be insufficient: the musical practices of Little Saigon reveal that nostalgia and trauma are strangely entwined. Situated within intersecting discourses of nostalgia, nationalism (Anderson 1983), trauma (Caruth 1995; Alexander 2004), and popular music, my community’s musical practices go beyond performances of trauma. Through music, Little Saigon preserves the counter-memory of pre-1975 Vietnam, as post-War generations build avenues for intergenerational understandings and healing.