Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:17:39pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
“Hail to the Redhawks”: Sounding Against Native American Stereotypes in the Washington Football Team
University of Oklahoma
Poisoned Fish: Aotearoa’s Indigenous Gothic Popular Music
Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington,
Gendered, Exoticized, and Marginalized: Musical Imaginaries of Alaskan Natives in the Early-Twentieth Century United States
Florida State University,
Native Sonic Futures: Sound Back, Sonic Stewardship and the Native Sonic Archive
University of Chicago
Repositioning Japanese Musical Subcultures
Presentations in the Session
Anikura’s Database Intimacy: Remix, Beats, and Tactility
The Lesbian Erotics of Cosplay: Musicking in Women Otaku Counterpublics
Spirit Prison: Linekraft’s Theory and Practice of Affective Blockage through Noise
Teaching Ethnomusicology In Situ: The Challenges and Rewards of Study Away Programs
Practices of Translation: Negotiating Identity and Agency in African Art Music
Presentations in the Session
Mediation in African Art Music: Insights from Àkójọpọ̀’s African Art Music Commissioning Project
African Pianism as Translative Praxis: Memory, Mediation, and Imagination
Women, Gender and African Art Music
The Exodus Model: Engineering Legacy and Sustainability in a Trinidadian Steel Orchestra
Indiana University, Bloomington
Inside the Engine Room: The Social Logistics of Conventional Steelbands in Trinidad and Tobago Panorama
Port of Spain
Sonic Pedagogies for Decolonizing Liberal Arts Education. Introducing the Sikh Musical Heritage in College Curricula.
Hofstra University, NY
Integrating Chinese Music into Academic Spaces: Pedagogical Insights and Challenges
N/A
“Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Moog Synthesizer”: Analog Technology and Queer Worldbuilding in San Francisco’s 1990s Queer Underground
Cornell University
Queering Bach’s Passion: Pride, Heritage, and Community-Building at the 2025 Bachfest Leipzig
UNC Greensboro
Kesha Cruises Atopia: Queer Community in International Waters
Harvard University
Sound Archives as Knowledge Infrastructures: Reframing Ethnomusicology in the U.S. Southwest and the Global South
Presentations in the Session
Uncomfortable Pillars: Knowledge Infrastructures and the Colonial Legacy of Field Music Recording Archives
Archival Mediation and the Afterlives of Nuevomexicano Song: Juan Bautista Ralliere’s Repertory in the Robb and Cobos Field Recordings
“Whose Memory” in the Southwest Hispanic Folk Music Archive: Re-Considering John Donald Robb and Vicente T. Mendoza’s Ethnographic Encounters, Fieldwork Tactics and Collection Strategies
Dancing the Cycle of Life: An Introductory Workshop on Cambodian Dance and Movement
John Coltrane and South Africa: A Centennial Meditation
Entangled Jewish Pasts: Chronologies, Memory, and Retelling
Presentations in the Session
Jewish Opera?: The Look and Sound of Jewish Difference in Bates’ Kavalier and Clay
The Myth of Antiquity: Desire, Contrafacta, and the Making of a Sephardic Past in “Adio Kerida”
The Prayer for the Dead, the Symphony for the Dead
Mobility, Affect, and Style: Cross-Border and Trans-Oceanic Identity Politics in South Asian Frame Drum Practices
Presentations in the Session
Mapping the parai frame drum’s contemporary diversity and historical retentions
Sonic Density as Diasporic ‘Copresence’: Indo-Caribbean Tappu Drumming and Tamil Belonging in ‘Madrasi Religion’
Skin to Subwoofer: Transducing the Dappu Frame Drum and the Affective Politics of Bonalu Festival in Hyderabad, India
Sounding Developments, Potentialities, and Power within the Contemporary Background Music Industry
Presentations in the Session
Automating Atmosphere: Generative AI in the B2B Background Music Industry
Holiday Music as the Frontlines of the Dying Art of Background Music Curation
“Spotify-core” as “Neo-Muzak”: Shifting between Background and Foreground Listening
From Glitter to Green: EcoSwifties, Material Culture, and Environmental Responsibility in Taylor Swift Fan Communities
Wilfrid Laurier University
Branded Postfeminist Intimacies: Music and the Marketization of Romance on TikTok
Temple University
Algorithmic Infrastructures and Musical Labor in Contemporary Music Scenes
TRABZON UNIVERSITY,
From Nana–Nati to Streaming Metrics: Contemporary Gombhira Gaan as Industry Critique in Bangladesh
Toronto Metropolitan University,
Love and Politics in Canciones de mi Padre
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Representations of Post-NAFTA Mexico in Lila Downs’s Border/La Línea (2001)
University of Maryland, College Park
Machos, Vampiros, y Mandilones: Deviant Masculinities and the Banda Cumbia
University of North Texas
“Blue Check Fame”: Rap Narratives and Social Media Addiction
Berklee College of Music
“Es que existes por lo que haces”: Care Practices and Audibility in the Work of “El Mulato” Muñoz
University of Toronto
Rockist Critical Aesthetics of Seriousness, Accessibility, and Kendrick Lamar’s GNX (2024)
University of North Texas
Who sounds Puerto Rican? Bad Bunny, Tego Calderón, and the politics of local racialized folklore.
The University of Texas at Austin
Sing Hard: Wrestling and Masculine Vocal Aesthetics in Southern Senegal
University of California, Davis,
Afrocentric Eco-feminism in the Music of Angelique Kidjo
City College of New York
“A Human Should Act Like a Human”: Interspecies Divine Community in Senegal
University of Iowa
Affective Vitalities: Gendered Voice, Place, and Un/Belonging
Presentations in the Session
Let My People Sing! Gendered Creativity, Song Circles, and Earth-Based Spiritual Practices for Repair and Belonging
Beyond “Amplifying Voices”: Radio, Advocacy, and Refugee Girls’ Sounding Practices
Permissible Voices: AI Singing, Popular Aesthetics, and Gendered Power in Iran
Brown vs. “Coloured” Song: Indigenous, Gendered Rituals of Restoration in Contemporary South Africa
Structural Racism in Brazilian Music Programs and Ethnomusicological Perspectives for Confronting This Colonial Legacy
Federal University of Paraiba,
Crafting Culture: How Lutherie Education Helps to Define San Miguel de Tucumán and Curitiba as Music Cities
Graduate Center-CUNY
The Sensory Abyss of Extractivism: Reflections from Listening in the Brazilian Amazon
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
Listening as Ontological Practice in More-Than-Human Worlds
Presentations in the Session
Listening into Transcendence: Gender, Genius, and the Cultural Politics of Whale Song
Bowhead Song and the Disappearing Acoustic Habitat of the Arctic
Listening to Nuclear Landscapes in Eurasia: Sound, Ecology, and More-than-Human Temporalities
Sounding the Vegetal: Imaginaries of Consciousness, Communication, and the More-Than-Human World
Between Sounds and Silences: Black Slavery, Abolition, and Public Sounding in Southern Iran
University of Pennsylvania,
Listening as Decolonial Mediation: Golha, Balanced Modernity, and the Feminine Principle in Iran
N/A
The Fade of Reng in Iranian Classical Music Since the Late Twentieth Century: Social Aesthetics, Ideology, and Reformed Identities
University of Alberta
"Aesthetic Socialization at a Crossroads"
Amanda Minks, The University of Oklahoma
Streets and Soundworlds
Presentations in the Session
The Street Holds the Stories: Calle de Progreso as a Community’s Sonic Counter-Archive
Sound Relations Along Plantation Lanes
Embers of Memory: Sound and Silence in the Cremà
Discussion
Virtual Jazz Engagement in China: An Ethnographic Exploration of Digital Platforms and Cultural Reimagining
Hong Kong Baptist University
Reproducing Jazz through Machines: The Forgotten Master of Player Piano in Early Jazz History — J. Lawrence Cook (1899–1976)
Binghamton University, United States of America
The Grapevine Twist: Rethinking Early Banjo Song Through Embodied Technique
Maynooth University,
A Legacy Supreme: Making Meaning of the John Coltrane Centennial
A Cyborg Destruction: Feminine Vocality, Techno-Pessimism, and Death of Humanity
1: Colby College; 2: Davidson College
K-pop Viewer Hunters: “K-pop in Public” and the Globalized City
Texas Lutheran University,
Exploring human creativity in AI-generated J-rock
University of Sydney
Where Is Raga Born? Origin, Soundworlds, and Ksemakarna’s Ragotpatti
Ahmedabad University,
Gatra: How the West Influences through Analogy
University of Connecticut
Interval Paradigms and Voice Leading in Guinean Susu Balanyi Music
SUNY Fredonia
In Tune with What? Microtonal Guitar Culture and the Unraveling of "In Tune-ness"
Los Angeles, CA
How the Membrane Makes Voice: Material Emergence in Yorùbá Dùndún Drumming
Harvard University
When the Paṟai Travels: Diaspora, Local Pedagogy, and the Making of a Singapore-Style Tamil Frame-Drum Tradition
1: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University; 2: Damaru Singapore
Beyond the Limits of Materiality: Rethinking Instrumentality through the Quills
Cornell University
Negotiating Ethical Aesthetics: Moral Evaluation and Musical Value in Turkmen Dutar Performance
Brown University
"Sound Awareness": Robert Northern and the Ecological Dimensions of Black Experimentalism in the 1970s
Cornell University
Cauleen Smith’s Arkestral Marching Band (2010): Activating Sun Ra’s Archive as South Side Coalitional Repertoire
University of Chicago
Lessons on Tactical Urbanism from Brooklyn's Jouvé and Toronto's Caribana Parades
New York University
Precarity Amplified: Listening to Medicalization through Technology and Trauma
University of Cincinnati
From Racialized Vulnerability to Sonic Resistance: Asian American Children and Older Adults in Musical Activism during COVID-19
Southern Methodist University
The potential for faith-based musicking to address dementia risk factors
University of California, San Francisco
Playing with Difference: Neurodiversity-Affirming Approaches to Performance Pedagogy
independent scholar
AfroAlt: Theorizing on Blackness, Space, and Place in Popular Music
Presentations in the Session
Rico Nasty, Black Alt Ageing, and the Gendered Voice in Hip-Hop and Emo
The Black Devil's Music: The Negotiation of Afropunk Identity Through “Devil’s Music” Conservatism
#KEEPKPOPKOREAN: Ultranationalism, Historical Revisionism, and Anti-Blackness
Sonic Afterlives and the Politics of Audibility in Post-Protest Hong Kong
Presentations in the Session
Sonic Hauntology: Hong Kong’s Ghostly Voices After The National Security Law
From Street Protest to State Ritual: The Politics of Sound on Hong Kong’s July 1
Cranking Dissent: Object Agency and Precarious Collectivity after “Glory to Hong Kong”
Collaboration in Practice: Partnering with Digital Scholarship Librarians to Build a Community-Centered Traditional Music Archive
University of Toronto Scarborough
“Come in Through the Back Door: Archives, Oral Histories, and Heritage Negotiation at the Louisiana Music Museum”
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Sounding the Archive: Nhạc Vàng, Historical Memory, and Postwar Silences
CUNY Hunter
Mùi, Sến, and the “Bolero Wave”: State Censorship, Cultural Memory, and the Resurgence of a Vietnamese Musical Repertoire
Cerritos College
Mana Wāhine at the Mic: Establishing a Framework for Hawaiʻi Hip Hop Feminism
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa,
Repetition and Iteration: Network Formation and Sustenance in Boston's Underground Techno Scene
Boston University
No Room to Party: Sound Ecology and Queer Collisions at Furry Conventions
Duke University
From Boogie to Ba-Ba-Boom: Re-Indigenization and Cosmopolitanism in Rocksteady Bass Conception
University of Minnesota,
Untangling the “Mongolian-Javanese-Celtic-Nordic-Anglosaxon”: The Ethnomusicological Origins of Percy Grainger’s “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music”
University of Melbourne
“Doubtless the Chinese think our harmony barbarous”: Problematizing Eurocentrism through Christian Universalism in Mary Martin Richard’s A Paper on Chinese Music (1907)
University of Pittsburgh
The Curtain that Never Quite Fell: (Geo)politics of Teaching and Translating Ethnomusicology for East-Central Europe
Department of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
Across and Beyond Coloniality: What Do Ethnomusicologists Get to Say?
Presentations in the Session
What Persists? Questioning Colonial Coherence from the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
On the Interchangeability (or not) of Imperialism and Colonialism: A Look from the Early Sound Recording Industry
Coloniality and the Event of Musical Antiblackness
Discussion
Singing Basque Witches: Linguistic Colonization, Auto-Exotification, and the Affordances of the ‘Master’s Tools’
1: University of California, Berkeley,; 2: University of the Basque Country
Witches and Other Border-Crossers: Sonic Pathways of Solidarity Through Transcarpathia in the Works of Alina Pash
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Listening to Ruin: Aural Hauntings and the Phenomenology of Dereliction
University of North Texas
Hearing Things: Haunted Acoustemology and the Sound of Supernatural in Postcolonial Malaysia
University of Pennsylvania
Recording Industries and Craftmanship: What Romani musicians tell us
University of Texas Austin
Armenian Heritage Language Revitalization Through Music
Royal Holloway, University of London
Gendered Sonic Authority: Female Islamic Singing between Asia and Europe
Cambridge Muslim College, 14 St Paul's Rd, Cambridge CB1 2EZ, UK
Cosmology, Media, and Sociality: Sound and Music in Orisha-Ifá Religiosity
Presentations in the Session
Toward a Yorùbá Metaphysics of Sound and Music in Ifá Oral Literature
Listening, Non-Listening, and the Musical Cosmology of Afro-Cuban Ifá
Race, Immigration, and Spiritual Kinship: Afro-Cuban Sacred Drumming in Mexico
Afro-Atlantic Art, Tradition, and/or Liturgy: Notes on Orisha Music in the Age of Multimedia
Sound, Identity, and Power in the Musical Circulation of Latin America
Presentations in the Session
Transnational Acoustemologies of Cumbia: From the Caribbean to the South
Afro-Dominican Music: From Syncretism to Pastiche
Younger and Closer to Our Grandparents’ Music: How Gender and LGBTQ+ Occupation of Tango Spaces Has Changed The Repertoire
Mexicans Can Swing, Too
Honoring Ancestors: The Toba Batak Mangongkal Holi Ritual Music in Sianjur Mulamula Village, Samosir Regency, North Sumatra Province, Indonesia
Ohio University and The Ohio State University
Development and Sustainability in the 21st-Century Gender Wayang Complex
University of San Diego
Raminten Cabaret Show: Lip-Syncing and the Production of Liveness in Drag
Allegheny College
Háblame de Miami: Sonic Citizenship and the Negotiation of Diasporic and Indigenous Belonging
Presentations in the Session
Where the Condor and Eagle Fly Together: Miami’s plant medicine music subculture and the postcolonial deconstruction of identity politics and indigeneity in South Florida
Diasporic Citizenship and Puente Libertad: Reparto, Mobility, and Belonging between Havana and Miami
Why is Nobody Dancing? An Affectual Theorization of Movement at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Miami
