In Hungry Listening (2020), Dylan Robinson (xwélmexw) explains that the listening normalized within Euro-American classical music spaces is specifically settler listening, a teleological, single-sense, and regulating listening. This paper considers not only settler listeners (listeners who are settlers) but also settler listening regimes that are foundational to Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania political and socio-cultural spaces. I begin by articulating the sonic traces of the colonizing (so-called “civilizing”) project in this region. Through collective public forgetting, an emphasis on heroic narratives of settler conquest, and the desire of elites “that the throb of industriousness of human activity should be inscribed on a wilderness that was both silent and howling” (Smith 2001, 10), Pennsylvania became a blank slate for settler imaginings, sonic and otherwise. Historically and contemporarily, the distinctions between sound and noise—between permitted, necessary, and desirable sounds and those that are unappealing, unacceptable, and “other”—constitute the settler colonial state’s desire and ability to hear Indigenous Peoples as human and sovereign. From Pittsburgh to Carlisle, PA, from the Kinzua Dam to the Seneca Nation of Indians’ Allegany Reservation, the past, present, and future of Indigenous sonic sovereignty confront the limitations of settler listening, which mediates civic and academic activities. In addition to treaty histories, ethnographies of Indigenous-led sonic disruptions in Pittsburgh, and a sensory re-telling of my visit to Carlisle, I facilitate a collective, networked improvisation that invites attunement to our listening regimes, which, for many attendees, is likely to include settler listening logics.

This paper explores obscured narratives and haunting histories within ruinous landscapes, focusing on the US camptown near the South Korean border. Through an ethnographic examination of the soundscape of Korean borderland, the study delves into the uncanny auditory environment of the camptown, employing a concept termed “ruin-listening” to unveil the significance resonating within its silence. While the contemporary ruin scholarship has emphasized ruins’ potential for productive possibilities (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012), the focus has predominantly been on the visual aspect, highlighting what ruins have been “seen” rather than exploring what they have to “say” or what can be “listened to.” In the aftermath of the Korean War, the narratives of individuals in camptowns have been systematically marginalized, notably concealing women’s experiences within a collective silence. This paper provides a concise overview of how engaging with ruins through listening serves as a bridge, connecting human/non-human, real/imaginary, and nature/culture dynamics within the Korean borderland. The research focuses on diverse modes of ruin-listening, from Rainbow 99’s 7th album project Dongducheon (2019) to shamanic listening at abandoned sites, investigating how modern immersive listening technologies contribute to envisioning and mediating (post)wartime experiences and memories. By offering immersive sound experiences, the study argues that these projects not only substitute for physically inaccessible memories but also foster affective engagement through empathetic listening for spectators. Consequently, the paper reexamines the potential for an embodied re-membering of the past, challenging established dichotomies, and advocating for a more accountable and just approach to the victims of ecological destruction and colonialist practices.

Field recordings give voice to our auditory experiences and relations with each other in the world. Alongside technical considerations about how to make field recordings, sonic practices such as attunement, envoicement, and remediation deserve more critical attention in music and sound studies. In this presentation, I reflect on my experiences conducting fieldwork in the Altai Mountains of Inner Asia (Tyva, Altai, and Mongolia) with gifted sonic practitioners in more-than-human social worlds. I discuss some questions related to the social life of field recordings and archives in my work as an ethnomusicologist and sound artist. Phonography as a sonosocial practice places importance on understanding how sounds are circulated and take on different meanings through subsequent playback while giving theoretical attention to the social, ideological, or political positionalities of listeners (Samuels et al. 2010, Feaster 2015, Robinson 2020). Drawing on the concept of enrollment from Science and Technology Studies, the study explores how field recordings enroll different sonic agents and mobilize listening as witness and testimony. My approach is informed by research in sensory memory and music materiality (Järviluoma 2013, Schuiling 2019, Hahn 2021), where I argue that field recordings serve as socio-material interfaces. These interfaces not only disorient and reorient our sensibilities but also play a crucial role in remediating environmental knowledge and social memory. I show how the process of remediation is both ontological and ethical, shaping our perception of the world and imposing responsibilities on sonic practitioners as storytellers in relation to different subjects.