The Online Program of events for the SEM 2025 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early October.
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Presenter: Jinyizhuo Wang, Xi'an Conservatory of Music Presenter: Gabriella Saporito-Emler, Florida State University
Location:L-508
Lobby Level
100
Presentations
“Welcome to Montero”: Lil Nas X’s Transmedia Storytelling and/as Queer World-Building
Gabriella Saporito-Emler
Florida State University
Atlanta-born queer Black pop music icon Lil Nas X has been pushing pop music boundaries since his initial rise to fame with his record-breaking country trap song “Old Town Road” in 2019. Since then, he has made a name for himself as an expert of self-marketing on social media, utilizing transmedia storytelling techniques to create a fictionalized story world that he calls “Montero.” Transmedia storytelling, a term coined by Henry Jenkins (2006), is now a common method used by media giants to extend their stories onto multiple platforms, thereby increasing the number of eyes on any given story. Lil Nas X also utilizes this technique in his output by creating cohesive storylines across multiple online platforms, all of which take place in the world of Montero. These stories are often based on events from his real life and center his identity and public persona as a prominent queer Black artist. In this paper, I suggest that Lil Nas X’s use of transmedia storytelling acts as a method of queer world-building, creating an imagined space where queer Black folks can see themselves represented and celebrated. Drawing on media studies scholarship, Black feminist thought, and recent work on queer world-building (King 2022), this paper suggests that Lil Nas X’s use (and queering) of transmedia storytelling techniques in the world of Montero allows him to center and publicly display narratives about queer Black love, heartbreak, and joy.
Reimagining Soundscapes: Cultural Encoding and Aural Narratives in Chinese Shadow Puppetry
Jinyizhuo Wang
Xi'an Conservatory of Music
Chinese shadow puppetry, as a hybrid art form integrating visual, auditory, and dramatic narrative elements, has been confined by a narrow interpretation that relegates its sound system to a mere “background function”. Its cross-media character, however, makes it ideal for studying the interplay between sound and image in traditional Chinese arts. Existing research tends to focus on visual design, craft preservation, or repertoire innovation, leaving the sound system underexplored. This study departs from conventional “heritage preservation” approaches by employing ethnomusicology, semiotics, and performance studies to propose a “soundscape layering” model that repositions sound at the center of shadow puppetry.
Drawing on soundscape theory and a 13-month fieldwork with musical analysis of shadow puppetry in Shaanxi and Gansu, China. This research explores how sound in performances constructs regional cultural identities, emotional codes, and narrative tension through dialect phonology, instrumental symbolism, and onomatopoeic techniques. For instance, the “bitter tone” in performance employs a descending fourth interval to evoke a melancholic aesthetic closely tied to northwest Chinese folk music, while banhu glides and suona’s sharp timbre correspond to character hesitation and pivotal plot turns. Additionally, musicians imitate the wind with tongue trills, and cooperate with the puppets swaying to build an “audio-visual sense”. Through the construction of a “soundscape layering” model, deconstructing shadow puppetry’s sound into three layers of cultural encoding, emotional interaction, and narrative reconstruction. By combining interdisciplinary semiotic analysis, the research illuminates the dynamic interrelationship between sound and visual symbols and their profound impact on cultural identity and aesthetic experience.
Preserving Indigenous Musics Survived in Oral Tradition: A Multilingual Parallel Corpus
LIJUAN QIAN, KEYI LIU
University College Cork, Ireland
Researchers have recognized that culture bearers need to be more centrally involved in music sustainability, both for these programmes to prove practically effective and because it is ethically essential that community members determine what music might be shared with others, if any, and under what conditions. The European Research Council funded ECura project focuses on three Indigenous villages in Yunnan, China’s multi-ethnic Southwest, seeking out ways to empower community members to take up new digital technologies to become active collectors and curators of their own traditional music and dance.
With this initiative, the ECura project establishes a multilingual and multimodal parallel Corpus platform (online database) centred around the theme of traditional songs among ethnic minority communities in Yunnan which mainly exist in oral tradition. The project utilizes modern information technologies to set up the online database and its associated program used in social media platform. The Corpus collects commonly used words in Yi, Bai and Miao language that refer to music and dance genres and activities. The project takes the audio-form (the pronunciation of words and their singing examples) of ethnic minority languages existed in vocal music as an initial point, connecting the terms used and organizing corresponding written scripts (using Chinese, English and International Phonetic Alphabet) and other related materials. I argue that it is ethically important to take indigenous ways of thinking as a central point while connecting these audio sounds of the low-resourced indigenous languages to their translations into two high-resourced languages (Chinese and English).