Taiwan-born pop icon Teresa Teng's (1953-1995) sudden passing from an asthma attack, on the floor of a Chiang Mai hotel suite, was legible to her fans throughout the religiously diverse Sinophone world as a "bad death" (Shih 2010, Feuchtwang 2010, Lee 2023)—untimely, violent, and far from her family's home. As an unmarried woman with no patrilineal descendants to venerate her, Teng might have been condemned to wander the earth for eternity as a "hungry ghost" (e'gui), a ravenous creature hellbent on haunting the living. In this presentation, I consider sound and music as potent forces for ameliorating the trauma of Teng's unfortunate passing and securing her position as an ancestral, even divine, presence in contemporary Taiwanese social life. Building on and moving beyond frameworks that read posthumous musical performances as technologically mediated hauntings (Stanyek and Piekut 2010), I argue that tribute concerts, impersonator competitions, and holographic revivals do not conjure Teng's ghost but rather stimulate what Signe Howell has called "kinning" (2003, see also Lee 2025)—the process through which non-biological relationships may be transformed into enduring kinship ties. Through ethnographic engagement with musical commemorations in Taiwan, I explore how the embodied experience of performing and listening to Teng's songs creates intimate familial bonds that legitimize her veneration. These sonic practices of kinship-making have effectively transformed what might have been a malevolent spirit into a beloved ancestor and emerging deity, revealing music's potential to forge ritual relationships across the boundary between the living and the dead.

This paper examines how a genocide survivor creatively manipulates ghostly presences through sound recording. Marie “Tchaya” Hubert (b. 1939) is part of a Romani population that was subject to genocidal persecution by the collaborationist French government during World War II. Against the French state’s refusal to take responsibility, Tchaya is one of few Romani survivors who openly advocates for broader recognition of the genocide, which she does through writing, speaking, and singing. This paper undertakes a “palimpsestic” listening (Daughtry 2017) of a digital recording Tchaya made in which she added her voice to a 1933 vinyl recording of the German song “Du Schwarzer Zigeuner” (“You Black Gypsy”), attending to both the accretion and erasure of sonic and historical layers. I focus on relationships between Tchaya’s artistic labor and that of the song’s original creators, several of whom were Jews who either escaped Germany shortly after the recording was made or perished at Auschwitz. I show how this recording represents an effort to repair cultural and social loss, a corrective to racial essentialization, and a deliberate redirection of music’s affective potentials. Against enduring popular narratives that portray Romanies as “without history” (Trumpener 1992, Lemon 2000), Tchaya channels an array of ghostly voices to foster a sense of social cohesion between past and present while transforming listeners’ understandings of Romani agency. I argue that by listening to, with, and for those who might otherwise be forgotten, her work generates new modes of relationality and historical consciousness within and beyond her community.

Everyday life in contemporary Taiwan is characterized—and indeed, structured— by bursts of cacophony: hawkers’ voices and moped noise fill the wet market in the morning, train stations bustle with transnational migrant laborers by noon, and chaotic song fragments in private karaoke suites bring on the night. Scholars in ethnomusicology and sound studies have typically explained the prevalence of such noisy sociality (“renao,” lit. noisy-hot) across Sinophone Asia as a cultural preference (Hatfield 2010, Rasmussen 2014) with a distinct ritual function (Weller 2023) manifest as an aural aesthetic (Hsieh 2021). In contrast, in this paper, I postulate that these cacophonous spaces are the sensorial grounds for a ghostly way of listening through which people imagine alternative pasts and futures, as they contend with the island’s profoundly uncertain present. I situate three ethnographic scenes (of the market, the train station, and the karaoke suite) in a transpacific framework that understands Taiwan as a tenuous multicultural democracy haunted by multiple authoritarian regimes, by overlapping and ongoing forms of colonization, and by the Cold War paradigm designating the U.S. as an “empire of liberty” (Yoneyama 2016). I then trace the modes of listening that my interlocutors cultivate from daily encounters with cacophony, and analyze their diverse auralities as expressive of conflicting historical imaginations and politics of class, race, and gender. In reframing these noisy sites from a sonic index of social warmth to a heteroglossia (an insistently heterogenous collection of voices), ultimately, I try to listen to Taiwan beyond “culture.”

Discussant Remarks