The suling (bamboo flute) is indispensable to the sound of Balinese gamelan; a performance without suling is described as “a dish without salt.” Whereas the sound of suling represents the bhuana alit (microcosmic or human world), the sound of the sunari, a towering bamboo pole instrument erected for high rituals and played by the wind, represents the bhuana agung (macrocosm). Despite their aural and philosophical importance, suling is rarely represented in musicological literature (Sadguna and Sutirtha 2016, Suharta 2019) and sunari only in religious literature (Donder 2017); no source examines their role in “sounding the universe” in Bali.The paper examines how sunari and suling embody Balinese Hindu philosophy and practices. We illuminate the bamboo cutting, making, and blessing of sunari and suling in accordance with the intricacies of the Balinese calendar system (Eiseman 1990, Lansing 2012), which requires auspicious days for certain activities. Next, we connect the physical shape of the suling, its playing posture, and its breath patterns to Hindu theories about bodily energy (chakras). Our sources include interviews with bamboo growers, instrument makers, suling players, and priests; unpublished Balinese archival manuscripts; and decades of immersion in Balinese Hindu ritual and performance life. In connecting the material and philosophical lives of suling (a musical instrument) and sunari (a spiritual tool; Heimarck 2022), our research expands on literature on instrument-making from within and beyond Bali (Dirksen 2019, Kafumbe 2018, Yamin 2019), yielding new insights into Balinese culture and soundscapes, and into broader relationships between instruments, the environment, and philosophy.

This paper is a critical reflection on the role of the ethnomusicologist who goes beyond passive observation and active participation. As part of my research, I adopt an innovative, problem-solving approach to fieldwork as an instrument maker. Having researched the musical practice of the angklung, an Indonesian bamboo instrument, for more than a decade (Author 2014; Author 2024), it dawned upon me recently that I have not taken the initiative to create the instrument myself. Despite the instrument’s status as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, my field interlocutors in the Netherlands face a challenging task in procuring new instruments and have relied on biodegrading ones imported from Indonesia more than three decades ago. The original material of the angklung is sourced from bamboo, which is itself rare in the temperate region of Western and Northern Europe, where I am currently based. As part of a research agenda to create more sustainable musical resources, I attempt to create a prototype of the instrument via 3D printing, that is, through the method of additive manufacturing. 3D printing has been applied to the making of wind instruments – flute, recorder, and saxophone - and advance research are ongoing at the Royal College of Music in the UK. For my purpose of building a plastic angklung, numerous trials and errors have been conducted at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University, Sweden, over a period of two months. This paper is framed as an auto-ethnography that recounts the successes and failures of innovative instrument making.

Post-quake Haitian migration to South America in the 2010 decade constitutes one of the most compelling new migratory phenomena of the early twenty-first century (Audebert and Handerson 2022). The remarkably dynamic expansion of the Haitian migratory system to the subcontinent has had notable sociocultural and musical consequences that span the transnational space between Haiti, receiving societies (notably Brazil and Chile) and pre-existent spaces of the transnational Haitian diaspora (Audebert 2020; Handerson 2015, 2017; Cogo 2018), the study of which assumes substantial relevance in the face of the literature on Haitian diasporic experience (Zacaïr 2010, Jackson 2011, Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001) and music making (Averill 1994; McAlister 2002, 2011; Mason 2011; Cela et al. 2022) in North America, Europe, and the Caribbean. This paper considers the songwriting and songs produced by some of the most prominent Haitian migrant artists in Brazil as the culmination of migrant epistemologies, a way of knowing and being-in-the-world prompted by their individual experiences as Black migrants and diasporic Haitians searching for a living in Brazil. Seeking to contribute to ethnomusicological discussions on music, migration, diaspora, and race (Slobin 2012; Stokes 2020; Toynbee and Dueck 2011) I draw on fieldwork, interviews, and lyric analysis to foreground how their songwriting binds together autobiographic storytelling (Jackson 2013), diasporic consciousness (Hall 2017) and Gramscian organic intellectual reflection in novel manifestations of the critical and socially engaged discourse which characterizes the songs of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993; 2022) and the Haitian notion of mizik sosyal (Dirksen 2020).