This article dissects the Dong people's diverse imaginaries of cicadas in Dong music, and further seeks to show how the sonic features of cicadas help construct Dong people's ecological consciousness and mediate their own personal sentiments. The analysis mainly draws on one-on-one interviews conducted with Dong-ethnic interlocutors of various professions and age groups, complemented by ethnographic observations as part of field trips to the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Guizhou, China. In this paper, I analyze various ways in which cicadas are imitated and contextualized in the Dong songs with musical analysis. Moving beyond the focus on transcriptions, I document how cicadas are perceived in the folk tales of the Dong people, depicting the indexical/iconic nature and sonic ubiquity of the cicadas from a macro-perspective. Lastly, through a micro-perspective, I demonstrate the Dong people’s diverse imaginaries of cicadas and draw similarities between them. Based on this analysis, I argue that the cicadas provide terms of knowledge that are significant to the Dong people’s life, and also, are perceived as creatures of humanistic sentiments that strengthen the ethnic identity and preserve the culture of the Dong people.

Beekeepers listen to the sounds of bees to understand beehive health and monitor ecosystem biodiversity. Bee sounds indicate to the beekeeper when bees are dissatisfied, when they might swarm, and when honey flows (a phenomenon known as "the song of increase"). Bees recognize the voices of beekeepers and communicate with each other through sonic vibrations and dance patterns. The globally declining bee population adds urgency to listening to bees and comprehending their sounds. This study positions the bee as a central figure struggling against the effects of war, ecological pollution, and climate change. It draws on ecomusicological fieldwork among Ukrainian beekeepers who have lost their hives due to Russia's war in Ukraine, Mayan beekeepers whose bees have perished from pesticides in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, and American beekeepers in the southeastern United States whose honey yield is affected by drastic weather changes. By placing the bee at the center of discussions on war, ecological pollution, and climate change, this study explores what musicians can do to assist bees, whose beeswax has significantly contributed to musical developments like the early wax cylinder. Bees can detect sound frequencies up to 500Hz and are attracted to music ranging from 250-500Hz, which resembles the sounds they produce in their hives. This presentation argues that bee-focused ethnomusicological scholarship can positively contribute to apiology, the study of beekeeping, by enhancing sound-based language and analysis among apiologists working to save the bees.

In the years leading up to Hawai‘i statehood (1955-59), jazz musicians in the hotel bars of Honolulu created a genre of music marketed as “exotica.” With birdcall vocalizations and diverse global percussion instruments, exotica provided a soundtrack for touristic fantasies of tropical jungles. While exotica seems to emblematize the extractive designs of U.S. empire on Hawai‘i and the anthropogenic climate change it has wrought there, this paper tells a different story. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, I demonstrate that exotica’s birdcalls grew out of Native Hawaiian and Hawai‘i-Puerto Rican musicians’ reciprocal sonic relationships with Hawai’i birds and animal life. Even while working within a tourist-facing genre, musicians Arthur Lyman and Augie Colón used performance to establish anti-colonial cartographic relationships to Hawai‘i, emulating longstanding Kanaka Maoli strategies of “sonic sovereignty” (Reed 2019). As Renee Pualani Louis (2017) shows, ancient hula lyrics and choreography chart atmospheric networks of beings, environmental processes, and relationships in Hawai‘i in extreme detail. From the 1980s to the present, Lyman and Colón’s son, Lopaka Colón Jr., have incorporated the calls of endangered and extinct forest birds from around the Pacific in their performances, reimagining exotica as a conservation tool. Building on Hi‘ilei Hobart’s (2022) concept of “ambient sovereignty,” which asserts the Kanaka Maoli right to determine the thermal infrastructures of Hawai‘i, I argue that Lyman and Colón Jr. practice “atmospheric sovereignty” by claiming control over the affective and vibrational dimensions of Hawaiian space and multi-species relations.

Ideas of “the human scale” have inspired (or hidden behind) research in ethnomusicology for some time. When John Blacking (1973), for example, defined music as “humanly organized sound,” he tied that insight to an ideal of music that could not include the rhythmic sounds of machinery, because “their order is not directly produced by human beings.” The human scale in that regard, frequently centering ideals of restraint, individuality, modesty, and a recognition of limits in contrast to the gargantuan facelessness of urban industrial modernity. As with work in early music and folk music, for example, the concept becomes a benchmark to calibrate and value musicking as an expression of the human community in its most presumptively significant state: the small-scale, face-to face interactions of intimate collectivity. In this paper I explore the history of this concept and its influence on thinking about musical activity. I trace the notion to three sources: the philosopher George Santayana (1916/1998), sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1924), and political scientist Leopold Kohr (1956). From there, I explore some ways in which notions of the human scale have drawn upon musical ideals in support of the concept’s empirical materiality. Vocabularies of ratio, balance, and “harmony,” for instance, bound approaches to architectural space and together with approaches to music, with appeals to the common mathematics of the harmonic series and Fibonacci numbers. I conclude with a discussion of some examples that erode the human scale’s emphasis on the miniature, the modest, and the self-contained as music’s natural predisposition.