Music and sounded poetics are integral to the spiritual devotional practices of the Yorùbá-derived Orisha-Ifá tradition, practiced in various forms by millions of devotees located in West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond. The four presentations comprising this panel reflect on the nature of sound in Orisha-Ifá philosophy, sociality, collective memory, and ritual practice. The first two presentations find, in the body of oral literature of Ifá in its Nigerian and Cuban variants, respectively, a philosophy of sound and an articulation of a sounded cosmology that provides something like a non-Western sound studies. The third intervention describes the ways in which music and sound knit together a social fabric of spiritual kinship through the brotherhood of ritual musicians sworn to the spirit of the drum (Añá) in the context of the migration of Cubans to Mexico, which has a burgeoning local Orisha-Ifá community. The final presentation enquires into the relationship between sound, the ontology of its technological capture through recording, and the affordances and encumbrances of recording for collective memory — the encoding of esoteric knowledge in ritual music, its storage in technologies of recorded sound, and the variety of formal, informal, and illicit archives in which it is deposited and accessed. In all, this panel outlines the functions and theorizations of sound within an emblematic Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions.

In times of crisis, how is precarity made audible? And how does the amplification of precarious worlds and precarious bodies reinforce assumptions about our embodiments—their sonicities and their fallibilities? Taking these questions as its starting point, this paper investigates the relationship between technology, trauma, and (sonic) medicalization. It frames technological mediation during the ongoing endemic era as both creating medicalized sonic environments and transmitting these acoustemologies to a diverse—and globally dispersed—audience. It further characterizes these mediated acoustemologies as a sonic manifestation of catastrophilia (Svenvold 2005; Roelstraete 2007) and (re-)traumatization (Foster 1996; Seremetakis 2019; Bregman 2021). Weaving together audiovisual media, including news journalism and social media posts, and ethnographic interviews, I clarify how mediated praxes not only circulate specific sounds, but also strengthen particular listening habits that are inflected (or perhaps, infected) by medicalization. I focus on the myriad ways sound has been utilized in reporting during the endemic era to announce and authenticate the crisis at hand, while drawing us affectively into its orbit (Fink 2020; Kristof 2020). In analyzing these techniques of mediation, I also consider how they rely on pre-established assumptions about what affects medicalized sound incites. Thus, what happens when, as one disabled interlocutor asked me, the sounds of our disabled lives are shared via mediated representations, presumed to provoke fear and reveal inhospitable conditions? In reproducing and reinforcing negative interpretations of medicalized sound, what are the consequences for how a non-disabled majority evaluates the quality of a disabled life?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian violence in the United States was widely mediated through images of vulnerable bodies—particularly older victims and fearful children. While professional artists such as MC Jin and Jessica Sanchez mobilized music to protest this violence, children and older adults also emerged as musical agents. Expanding scholarship on Asian American musical activism that centers primarily on professional rappers (Shao 2025), I shift attention to children and older adults as agents of sonic resistance. This paper examines two case studies: the all-girl youth punk band the Linda Lindas’ shouted anthem “Racist, Sexist Boy” (2021), marked by confrontational, chant-like vocals and distorted guitar riffs, and older Chinese Americans' multilingual community rap “Gai Mou Sou Rap” (2021), delivered through emphatic rhythmic flow while reclaiming the “chicken-feather stick,” a symbol of disciplinary authority in Chinese culture. Drawing on Samia Hesni’s concept of “social script disruption” (2023), alongside close musical and performance analysis and digital ethnography of online comments and media coverage, I argue that these performances interrupt racialized scripts that cast Asian children and older adults as fragile, passive, or apolitical. This disruption operates through timbral aggression, rhythmic insistence, and embodied gestures—including beat-synchronized body rocking and staged disciplinary gestures—that reconfigure vulnerability as defiance. Audience responses register surprise, admiration, and collective solidarity, further reinforcing this disruption. By centering age-coded self-voicing, this paper demonstrates how musical performance transforms racialized vulnerability into recognized political agency, offering a framework for understanding the intersection of age, sound, and resistance in Asian America.

Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia lead to a syndrome of cognitive and functional decline that ends in death. Health sciences research has identified loneliness and social isolation as major dementia risk factors. Current counseling of older adults includes recommendations for social engagement to mitigate loneliness and social isolation, including a health-focused intervention to increase dementia awareness among Black/African-American faith communities. Ethnomusicological research has identified myriad ways in which the expression of faith through music supports personal well-being and social engagement. Yet the two bodies of knowledge rarely intersect. In this paper, we integrate health sciences and ethnomusicology perspectives in a secondary analysis of a four-year longitudinal ethnography of Pentecostal, Baptist, and non-denominational African-American women in churches in the San Joaquin Valley, California, to show how gospel music performance may reduce loneliness and social isolation. Older women in these congregations used gospel as a central site for demonstrating resilience, forming communal bonds, and enacting perseverance. Gospel musicking served as a form of intergenerational storytelling, spiritual and cultural transmission, and, with continued engagement, a means of reinforcing important memories. As a spiritual resource, gospel musicking supported emotional-well-being, replacing feelings of loneliness with a sense of belonging. We recontextualize these findings within the National Institutes of Health Science of Behavior Change framework to demonstrate the potential for gospel music to function as a dementia risk-reduction strategy and to lay a path forward for studying the impact of faith-based musicking on cognitive health.

How can insights from neurodiversity-informed pedagogies benefit ensemble leading and individual instruction in musics beyond the Western canon? Ethnomusicologists, music therapists, and music educators have explored the role of music in supporting circumscribed neurodiverse clinical populations (Carrico 2023; Bakan 2014 and 2016), while scholarship on neurodiversity, accessibility, and universal design has tended to focus on teaching outside the realm of performance (Carrico and Grennell 2022; Costa 2026). And although some ensemble directors and instructors have worked to make their performance courses more accessible, they often lack the institutional support (including time and funding for coursework on neurodiversity) that would enable them to ground and share their approaches more widely. Based on International Coaching Federation-accredited training/experience in coaching neurodiverse students and 25+ years of teaching Irish traditional music in academic, ensemble, and lesson contexts, this paper connects practice-based research and scholarship in music, education, and psychology. From a strengths-based and specifically ethnomusicological perspective based on teaching beyond the Western canon, this paper discusses some of the ways ADHD, autism, and other forms of neurodiversity can show up in performance instruction and offers strategies for helping students thrive in our classrooms and studios. This work is part of a larger project on Irish traditional music pedagogy: intended as both a resource for instructors and an intervention in Western music-based teaching approaches, it will join work by Thomas (2025), Dor (2014), Clendinning (2020), and others in articulating the value of so-called “world music” performance instruction in fostering community and critical engagement.

Sports have been a major American cultural arena for displaying Native American stereotypes. Central to debates about Native mascotry, the so-called Washington “R**skins” maintained the racial slur and logo for almost a century. Native scholars, activists, and Tribal leaders have fervently called for a change in the name for decades. In particular, protests have been important in sounding dissent against Native stereotypes in the home football team of Washington, D.C. My paper provides a close listening to three key sonic moments of Native performers and powwow singers at Washington football games: 1) the 2017 protest led by D.C.-based Northern Drum group, the UpTown Boyz, at the Washington team’s home stadium; 2) the 2020 celebration by UpTown Boyz at the R.F.K Memorial Stadium when the team changed its name; and 3) the 1977 “unexpected” (Deloria 2004) half-time show by an all-Native marching band directed by Louis Ballard (Quapaw/Cherokee). Based on fieldwork and historical research, I show how these performances sonically assert Indigeneity in settler colonial spaces designed to erase it. Deriving from Mapuche sound scholar Luis Carcamo-Huechante’s (2025) concept of “interference,” I argue that these sonic acts of interference disrupted the settler colonial soundscape of the Washington team. This paper contributes to interdisciplinary dialogues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies by demonstrating how Native performers strategically and sonically disrupt stereotypes in the American cultural realm of sports. This paper also suggests that music and sound scholars should closely examine sports as sonic sites that (re)produce settler colonialism.

Over the past twenty years, a sense of the gothic has emerged in the popular music of Aotearoa, especially in music associated with genres such as alt-country, Americana, and indie-folk. Gothic sensibilities come through in the sounds of the music, the visuals, and the marketing, such as NZ indie label Flying Nun Records’ advertising of Erny Belle’s (Ngāpuhi) 2022 debut album, Venus Is Home, as “a showcase of gothic Pacific storytelling.” The use of the voice also adds a specific uncanny quality to the music, where the vocality is often mismatched with the lyrical darkness, such as Erny Belle calmly crooning about poisoned fish and nuclear annihilation or Marlon Williams crooning about passing away alone in the ocean. In this paper, I explore this sense of the musical gothic in recent albums by a range of musicians and argue that this music challenges dominant narratives of Aotearoa and the wider Pacific as paradise. References to environmental decay, ancestral disconnect, economic hardship, and senses of dislocation and loss mix with emotions of love and longing in much of this music. This discussion highlights the ongoing effects of colonialism and displacement and positions popular music as a vital form of expression in our Indigenous context. Through long-term research in Aotearoa, including discussions with musicians and other music industry contributors, attendance at local performances, as well as historical research in local archives, I explore new ways of understanding Pacific popular music through an Indigenous gothic lens.

Facing the crisis of the “closing of the frontier” in the American West in 1890, historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner, imbued with the conviction of Manifest Destiny, suggested that the nation look to Alaska as the “new” frontier. Widely regarded as the “Last Frontier” since the Klondike Gold Rush of the late-nineteenth century, serialized dime novels, paintings, and popular sheet music fashioned in the Tin Pan Alley style during the early-twentieth century have perpetuated the frontier myth of Alaska. In this paper, I explore how popular sheet music about Alaska published in the early-twentieth century has gendered, exoticized, and marginalized Indigenous populations in Alaska as part of the frontier myth of Alaska. Using two case studies, “My Gal’s an Esquimau” (1904) and “Oogie Oogie Wa Wa” (1922), I argue that composers employ seemingly “innocent” songwriting strategies that depict Alaskan Natives as primitive, hypersexualized objects. Through close examination of the music, lyrics, and visual content of illustrated covers, I highlight the layered and often troubling musical imaginaries of Alaskan Natives by the nation during the early-twentieth century.Drawing from theories of decolonial practices of listening, particularly engaging with Dylan Robinson’s concept of “hungry listening” (2020), I situate these two songs, along with early-twentieth century popular sheet music about Alaska, within broader discussions of American imperialism, Indigeneity, and listening positionalities. Ultimately, this paper invites reflection on how studying sonic histories of the American frontier can reveal underlying tensions about “American-ness” and notions of citizenship.

This presentation looks at the ways in which what I call “Sound Back” brings sonic stewardship to Native communities. My intervention lies in combining Trevor Reed’s sonic sovereignty with the Land Back movement, arguing that Sound Back is a growing movement of sonic stewardship. Sound Back encompasses taking up space through Native record labels that assert sovereignty and self-governance, demanding spatial justice by remapping settler geographies and containments, and remixing/looping recordings that are captives in settler archives. Next, sharing fieldwork from my time in Nuuk, Greenland, I present Inuit owned labels as a model for sound stewardship within the larger movement of new labels being founded in the last five years such as Land Back Records. I then look to my time at the Santa Fe Indian Market as a way to remap settler containments, and my experience in N.Y.C. with Quechua language music as a similar way to resound settler geographies. Finally, I present a conversation I had with Kiowa and Apache trombone player Quinn Carson which interrogates the ways in which he samples and uses citational practices to engage with archival recordings of his ancestors.

This paper presents a longitudinal case study of the Exodus Steel Orchestra to theorize the processes of deliberate cultural institution-building within the Trinbagonian steelband tradition. More than a musical ensemble, the steelband or "pan side," of Trinidad and Tobago is a complex social institution through which histories of class, community, and postcolonial nationhood are articulated. Examining Exodus's transformation from its founding in a 1981 schism into a paragon of organizational rigor and artistic innovation, this analysis moves beyond simple chronology to deconstruct the "Exodus model" of sustained success. Drawing on decades of ethnographic engagement, interviews, and archival research, the band's development is traced through four key phases: its disciplined founding under the Mohammed brothers; the symbiotic and highly effective partnership between arranger Pelham Goddard and musical director Desmond Waithe, which produced a signature "orchestral" sound that came to dominate the competitive Panorama arena; the pedagogical engineering of the Exocubs youth program, which ensured robust generational continuity; and the band's role as a proactive cultural curator through initiatives like the Pan Ramajay festival. Exodus's four decades of excellence are not the result of organic community emergence, but of deliberate, interdependent organizational choices. Four deliberate strategies underpin its success: the professionalization of community management; the fostering of artistic innovation; the engineering of generational continuity through youth pedagogy; and the proactive curation of culture. Through sustained excellence across diverse arenas—from the hyper-competitive Panorama to the classical stage and international cultural diplomacy—Exodus offers a granular perspective on how community-based ensembles can achieve sustainability.

The Trinidad and Tobago Panorama competition is the world’s largest steelpan gathering and one of the most complex annual musical events in Caribbean diasporas. While scholarship often highlights the intricacies of the "Panorama arrangement," the extensive operational efforts required to bring a 60 to 125-member orchestra to the stage are less explored. This paper examines the "social logistics" of conventional steelbands - a steelband in which a pannist can play single or multiple steel drums (Pan Trinbago 2026), positioning the panyard as a center of administrative and community mobilization. Drawing on autoethnographic insights and lived experience (Ellis, C. (2004), I offer an insider analysis of the challenges involved in coordinating both human and physical resources. Building on Thurab (2021), I argue that the “viability of the modern steelband now depends” on developing autonomous income streams and securing tenure, making successful Panorama performances reliant on a sophisticated, often unseen, system of social organization. I analyze four key logistical pillars: managing the logistics for the "panyard-to-Savannah" pipeline, navigating Pan Trinbago’s regulatory frameworks, sustaining a volunteer-driven workforce, and delivering a dynamic musical performance. The success of a Panorama set depends on balancing corporate sponsorship with the grassroots energy of the community. By focusing on panyards rather than the stage, this paper demonstrates that the survival of the steelband movement relies on indigenous strategic planning. Ultimately, Panorama logistics are not simply a backdrop to the music but constitute a knowledgeable cultural practice that sustains the social fabric of Steelpan culture in Trinidad and Tobago.

Recent scholarship on the decolonization of South Asian Studies (Santos 2014; Mandair 2022; Thomas and Perera 2025) has redefined the field of education through an interdisciplinary lens and an aural turn (Lorea and Hackett 2024; Feld 2024), contributing to the rediscovery of indigenous pedagogies grounded in sonic practices. In line with these approaches, this paper discusses the introduction of interdisciplinary courses into Liberal Arts curricula that engage with Sikh thought through the study of its musical heritage. Enshrined in the Sikh Scripture and oral literature, the Sikh pluriversal vision is based on an ecology of knowledges that, incorporating Bhakti and Sufi voices, is preserved in a body of about 6000 rāga-based songs. On the one hand, listening and singing to these scriptural hymns as oral-aural ‘ways of knowing’ allow students to experience the role of sung poetry and community practices in the transmission of epistemologies not grounded in the Western canon. On the other hand, these interdisciplinary courses on Sikh musical heritage are an avenue for acknowledging the underestimated role of the Sikh tradition in the history of musics, literatures, and religions of the Indian subcontinent. While the Sikh sonic pedagogy inspires new modes of learning through classes co-taught by faculty and students, with an emphasis on community engagement and experiential knowledge, it also opens a space in the college setting to critically discuss the power dynamics of neocolonial narratives and modern frameworks embedded in liberal arts and music education.

Chinese immigrants have a deep-rooted history in the United States, notably during the mid-19th century and the California Gold Rush era. Despite this enduring presence, Chinese musicians and their traditions have faced challenges integrating fully into academic musical spaces in the U.S. These obstacles arise from historical biases, cultural barriers, and the limited representation of Chinese music in mainstream music education curricula. Consequently, Chinese music encounters difficulties in gaining recognition and acceptance within academic circles, emphasizing the ongoing necessity for inclusivity and diversity in music education.

The establishment of the first Chinese Music Ensemble at the University of Northern Illinois in the 1970s marked a significant shift, pioneering the advancement of Chinese musical traditions within academia. Subsequently, there has been a noticeable rise in Chinese music ensembles across various universities and music schools in the United States.

Building upon the historical struggles and advancements of Chinese music integration in academic settings in the United States, this paper explores effective pedagogical strategies for teaching Chinese music ensembles. Drawing from my experiences as the director of the University of Georgia's Chinese Music Ensemble in the last two years, I will discuss challenges related to instrumentation, repertoire selection, and community engagement. These challenges stem from historical biases, cultural barriers, and the limited representation of Chinese music in mainstream music education curricula.

This roundtable is a Centennial anniversary meditation on John Coltrane’s ubiquitous influence on the South African jazz tradition. While his role as an African American cultural icon has been robustly explored by scholars (Bracey, Sanchez, et al, 2014 and Bracey, 2016), his role as a cultural icon in other areas of the Black world has received less attention in ethnomusicological scholarship. This session builds on Feld’s (2012) exploration of Coltrane’s influence on musicians in Ghana, and Kubik (2017) and Washington’s (2012) study of his influence on South African tenor saxophonist Winston Ngozi. An ethnomusicologist/South African Jazz scholar will moderate a dialogue in the first half with four South African jazz musicians. The dialogue between a legendary tenor saxophonist, a leading younger-generation alto saxophonist, a Blue Note Africa recording artist and tenor saxophonist in the younger generation and a celebrated middle-generation South African jazz pianist will explore why Coltrane was positioned by Winston Ngozi as a musical father in his song “Dedication (To Daddy Trane…),” his tremendous influence on the modal aesthetic of South African jazz and its tenor saxophone tradition, as well as their insider perspectives on the cultural, political, spiritual and aesthetic meanings of Coltrane’s music to South African jazz musicians, particularly his role as a thought leader of the Black liberation movement with African heritage celebrations in recordings like “Africa/Brass,” in relationship to the Anti-Apartheid Freedom Movement. In the second half, attendees will engage with the presenters with questions to further understand Coltrane’s impact on South African jazz.

Beads from a friendship bracelet scatter across asphalt, catching stadium light before disappearing into the dark. A snowglobe breaks in transit, glitter drifting loose, a tiny storm of permanence and loss. This presentation examines the environmental and ecological dimensions of contemporary Taylor Swift fandom through the emergence of “EcoSwifties”—fans who integrate environmental ethics into their participation in Swiftie culture. Framing fandom as both an ecological and cultural phenomenon, I argue that large-scale pop fandoms generate material, infrastructural, and affective environmental impacts through touring, merchandise production, digital platforms, and fan mobility. Rather than positioning environmental critique as external to fandom, I foreground how ecological concern arises from within fan communities as a form of ethical self-reflexivity. Drawing on mixed-method qualitative research, combining digital ethnography, online discourse analysis, and content analysis of public fan spaces, I examine how EcoSwifties negotiate the moral tension between affective attachment to a beloved artist and unease with the environmental costs of fandom practices. Particular attention is given to merchandise culture—such as vinyl variants, limited-edition drops, and defective goods—as a key site where environmental anxiety, consumer guilt, and ethical experimentation converge. Through anonymized ethnographic vignettes, I show how fans articulate responsibility not through abstention, but through reuse, repair, upcycling, peer education, and forms of “low-impact” participation. Ultimately, the presentation contributes to scholarship on fandom, popular music, and the environmental humanities by demonstrating how fans operate as ecological actors, mediating pleasure, care, and planetary responsibility within highly mediated pop cultures.

This paper examines how romantic couples on TikTok use music to create affective, intimate, and marketable representations of heterosexual love, and how these sonic strategies participate in postfeminist constructions of gender, desire, and intimacy. Focusing on three highly visible TikTok couples—Levi Coralynn and William Conrad, Nara and Lucky Smith, and Pookie and Jett Puckett—the study analyzes 18 videos through multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to examine how music interacts with visual and textual elements to shape romantic self-branding. Drawing on postfeminist media theory (Gill; Banet-Weiser) and the concept of romantic opportunism (Bandinelli), the paper argues that music plays a central ideological role in compressing complex relationships into affectively compelling and commercial narratives of romantic love. Across the cases, the paper presents three key findings: (1) music functions as an affective romantic brand that stabilizes couples’ online identities; (2) it supports gendered performances of desire in which women are positioned as primary objects of love; and (3) it blurs boundaries between intimate moments and commercial content. By mobilizing familiar songs, audio trends and memes, and music genres, these couples present romance as both attainable and aspirational, even within sponsored content, aligning intimate life with neoliberal and postfeminist logics of self-branding. The paper contributes to ethnomusicological debates on music, affect, and mediation by demonstrating how sound operates as a form of power and affective labor, naturalizing the commodification of intimacy and framing romantic love as something to be felt, admired, and purchased, reinforcing postfeminist notions of love.

This paper examines artificial intelligence (AI) as a form of infrastructural power that reshapes creativity, sustainability, and labor within contemporary music scenes. Moving beyond approaches that frame AI primarily as a neutral tool for composition and production, the study focuses on AI-mediated platforms, data-driven production environments, and recommendation systems, asking how these infrastructures reorganize the social, material, and symbolic conditions through which music is created, circulated, and valued in everyday musical life. Methodologically, the research combines scene-based analysis with qualitative interpretive perspectives grounded in cultural economy and critical platform studies (Straw 1991; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2019), tracing how creative agency, authorship, and musical labor are negotiated across human musicians, algorithmic systems, and platform infrastructures. Musical practices shaped within the Turkish context are approached not as a bounded case but as analytical intensifiers that render visible heightened forms of algorithmic visibility, platform dependency, and precarious labor within globally uneven music economies. The paper argues that AI reorganizes collective, affective, and experiential dimensions of musical work while redistributing value and recognition, thereby functioning as a regulatory infrastructure that contributes to the reproduction yet also the potential transformation of inequalities across global music worlds (Zuboff 2019; Couldry and Mejias 2019). By foregrounding lived musical experience alongside technological structures, the study contributes to ethnomusicological debates on creativity, labor, sustainability, and power in contemporary music.

Contemporary Gombhira Gaan, a satirical song theatre tradition associated with Chapai Nawabganj and performed through the dialogic pairing of nana–nati (grandfather–grandson), has long operated as a vernacular public sphere where moral commentary is staged through humor, parody, and topicality. Das (2021) argues that Gambhira’s protest poetics convert everyday injustice into performable critique, and I extend his insight to the political economy of music-making under contemporary cultural capitalism. Farjana (2022) shows how Gombhira’s humorous address binds entertainment to ethical counsel, and I ask what happens when that counsel targets the institutions that broker musical value in Bangladesh. Drawing on performance ethnography in festival contexts, lyric and discourse analysis, and digital ethnography of video clips, this paper traces how Gombhira ensembles narrate and mock Bangladesh’s music industries and their Dhaka infrastructures. Performers render the work of intermediaries, including commissioning politics, gatekeeping in broadcast and live circuits, platform-driven visibility, and the problem of piracy and unpaid royalties, as UNESCO Dhaka documents in its sector mapping. Rather than treating folk and industry as separate domains, I show how contemporary Gombhira collapses them. The stage becomes a site where supply-chain logics are debated, rural mobility to metropolitan markets is evaluated, and revenue opacity is named as a failure. The paper contributes to debates on mediation and cultural policy by proposing Gombhira as a form of industry critique that travels across stages and smartphones while remaining anchored in satire’s ethical grammar of shame, laughter, and counsel.

This panel explores gendered vocal presences as they engage physical, public, ceremonial, mediated, and digital spaces to articulate histories of dispossession, migration, mediation, regulation, and the complexities of re-possession. Our papers examine uses of the voice to reckon with histories of colonization (apartheid), conflict, diaspora, and contemporary regimes of gendered repression. These voices [re]claim connection to people and place, cultivate intimacy/vulnerability, release the voice beyond borders, and create technologies of belonging. Individual papers explore (1) song/dance and deep listening in song circles emerging from American Jewish communal farming, where environmental justice and belonging are constituted through feminist musical practice; (2) shared listening and dance, where teen girls’ radio production cultivates technologies of belonging in mother tongue languages for recently arrived Afghan girls in Virginia; (3) AI generated Iranian female voices that interrogate the tension between gains of accessibility through media circulation against potential losses from political repression and risk in the wake of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement; and (4) invoking song and ceremony to reclaim land and community history and belonging for those who identify as “brown” in post-apartheid South Africa. Together these explorations argue that sounding and listening generate place-based affective vitalities: through shared singing, deep listening, ceremony, and dance they ameliorate fragmentation and suspicion by making community audible. We strive for a feminist understanding of singing and deep listening that treats the voice as relational, and builds community through attunement.

How do we listen for place? How do the sounds (or silences) of a place shape the experiences and memories that a space can contain? The presenters on this panel ground these questions in the lifeworlds of individual streets, lanes, and plazas, localizing a broader discourse on the tactics (de Certeau 1984), media (Rao 2009), and dynamic flows (Sheringham and Wentworth 2016) of constructed pathways. In doing so, they listen for the aspects of the built environment that become avenues of access for the lived experiences and memories that sound archives, embracing or resisting the transitory nature of streets to trace everyday sonic inscriptions and their echoes. Panelist 1 examines how everyday sounds accumulate on Calle de Progreso, the street bordering a Mexican garbage dump, transforming it into a sonic counter-archive of labor, memory, and collective identity. Panelist 2 explores workday soundscapes of Assam’s tea plantation lanes to reveal how Adivasi women pluckers navigate relationships and everyday life within the temporal collapse of plantation pasts and presents. ​​Panelist 3 maps the silences that forge and reinvigorate collective memories of place in the plazas that house the burning of satirical monuments during the Falles Festival of València, Spain. Extending this discourse beyond Mexico, India, and Spain, the panelists invite audience members to participate in small-group discussions between presentations, turning the focus toward the streets that animate attendees’ own field sites. The panel culminates in a guided conversation on the intersections between streets, sounds, and senses of place.

This paper examines the unusual ragotpatti (origin of raga) section of Ksemakarna’s Ragamala (1570), in which each raga is said to originate from a specific sound of the animate or inanimate world—from birdsong and animal calls to the noises of everyday labour. While art historians have analysed these verses for their influence on the ragamala painting tradition, their music-theoretical implications remain largely unexplored. Modern scholarship on raga has often characterised elements such as time and season associations, and visual and aesthetic embodiments, as “extra-musical,” peripheral to raga grammar and performance. Through a close reading of sonic analogy in earlier sangitasastra (technical treatises on music), this paper investigates the musicological function of these origin sounds. By examining how premodern theorists mobilised so-called “extra-musical” material to conceptualise raga, the paper argues that such sounds were not peripheral but central epistemic devices within premodern raga theory. For ethnomusicology, this case study invites a reconsideration of raga theory not as a bounded sonic object reducible to tonal structure, but as a form of acoustemological knowledge that embedded musical identity within ecological, visual, and social worlds.

In the music theory and performance of Javanese gamelan music, gatra is an important concept for measuring time and governing interactions within an ensemble. Despite its importance, definitions of the term vary over whether it is a metrical unit inhabited by melody or a unit of melody with specific metric characteristics. Due to metric emphases on the second and fourth beats, Western scholars describe gatra as essentially the reverse of a Western 4/4 measure (Perlman 2004, Pickvance 2005). This treatment of gatra as a metric unit stands in opposition to how Javanese scholars describe it as both melodic and metric (Sumarsam 1995/2023, Supanggah 2004). This paper argues that the analogy between gatra and Western measures caused the definition of the term to shift, resulting in the current divide. To demonstrate this, I trace the term’s usage from its origins in the Indonesian nationalist movement through its shift in twentieth-century scholarship. Gatra, originally used both melodically and metrically, gained an analogy with measures which obscured its melodic definition in favor of an easily understandable description for Western audiences. Scholars read Sumarsam’s (1995) critique of using gatra to describe the act of composition as a critique of its melodic definition, which contributed to the unpopularity of this usage despite Sumarsam’s own support of it. By examining this history, this paper reveals how cross-cultural analogies have the potential to influence the music theory of non-Western traditions by causing concepts to shift in definition to better fit Western frameworks.

This paper investigates the construction of accompaniment patterns in Guinean Susu balanyi music, as a means of understanding the structural intervallic foundations of this improvisatory, polyphonic genre. As accompaniment patterns form the backdrop for songs and more elaborate improvisation, understanding their characteristic combinations of intervals is essential to an overview of their systemic use. This paper focuses on intervals rather than specific pitches, as this is a modal system whose instruments, although nowadays commonly tuned to a C-major scale, were historically equiheptatonic.

In the Susu balanyi (also bala, balafon) tradition of Western Guinea, a soloist improvises over one to several supporting parts. As these musical lines layer and interlock, they create interval paradigms, a backdrop of interval patterns that establishes a context for the lead player and/or supports a singer. My analysis of more than twenty balanyi pieces created by six master players, where each piece consists of at least three accompaniment patterns, often also including sample runs and songs, reveals four types of recurring interval paradigms. These range from extremely simple, where only one note changes from one collection to another, to neighbor-tone dyads, to more complex changes.

My analysis builds on the work of scholars such as Eric Charry, whose balanyi analysis invokes such concepts as “harmony” and “tonic,” as well as Susu scholar Joe Luther Williams, whose transcriptions provide additional sources to the scores of patterns included in this analysis that I learned via years of lessons with balanyi master N’Camara Abou Sylla.

Since the emergence of 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET) in early modern Europe, proponents of 12-TET have pointed to the guitar and other fretted instruments as evidence that equal temperament represents not only a theoretical compromise, but a practical necessity. Such theorists have suggested that fretted instruments must rely on 12-TET in order to diminish the dissonances of historical tuning systems and enable consonant playability in all major and minor keys. Thus, for centuries, the guitar and similarly fretted instruments have been considered to be inextricably linked to the theoretical structure of 12-TET. Although 12-TET has achieved hegemony in the modern era (at the expense of historical, alternative and global systems of tuning and temperament), there persists a niche subculture of guitarists who will not so simply acquiesce to this theoretical ubiquity.

This paper explores the many ways in which contemporary guitarists have sought to reject the predominance of 12-TET by way of organological modification. Based on interviews with instrument builders and “microtonal” guitarists, this study examines how, in their pursuit of intonational idiosyncrasy, such instrumentalists have repositioned the concept of “in tune-ness” as a value that is negotiated through community discourse, craft knowledge and performance practices. In foregrounding these interventions, this study emphasizes that “in tune-ness” is not simply an inherited epistemological framework, but, instead, is a socio-cultural construction that remains ever evolving.

How can working across disciplinary boundaries increase digital access to, and community engagement with, audiovisual archives? This paper, co-authored by a musicologist and two librarians, argues that multifaceted transdisciplinary collaborations can support sustainable research infrastructures that themselves serve multiple purposes. We describe the creation of a bilingual open access online portal and digital archive to provide curated access to the Fonds Jean Trudel (150+ hours of audio/video, 2000+ digital objects) and propose faculty-library collaboration as a means of working within university structures to create meaningful and sustained community engagement with archives. Following Barwick (2019), who distinguishes between archivists, end users, and “knowledge holders,” where the latter are deeply embedded in the community with which an archive is associated, we argue that a musicology-library partnership has created the necessary infrastructure for the musicologist to move beyond preservation, organization, and documentation to community-oriented transmission and dissemination, or what Seeger and Chaudhuri (2015) call the “collaborative archiving of community traditions” (25). The Fonds Jean Trudel ensures the long-term preservation and accessibility of a faculty member’s research, embeds experiential learning for information students, expands multilingual and audiovisual capacity within the library’s shared Islandora-based infrastructure, and strengthens partnerships with allied memory institutions to sustain the circulation of carefully curated, human-produced knowledge (Rothman 2024). These outcomes support the mandate of the library (Lankes 2011; Kisilowska-Szurmińska et al. 2024)

In 2028, the Louisiana Music Museum is expected to open to the public in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana. According to their vision statement, the museum seeks to stand “as a testament to the rhythms and harmonies that resonate within the history of our state, from Indigenous roots to the globally-connected present.” Towards this vision, the second story will feature a functional dance floor meant to emulate regional dance hall venues, once popular communal sites fundamental to local social life throughout the twentieth century. Importantly, histories and memories of these spaces have been largely transmitted through oral traditions, which have since been collected and mediated through archival institutions. Drawing from contemporary theories in heritage studies, I consider the interconnection of sound, dance, and oral history in heritage construction processes. I am interested in how sound and dance is integral to remembering dance hall experiences and how it facilitates the negotiation of local heritages in relation to senses of (un)belonging. Through archival research in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies and interviews with local heritage authorities linked to the Louisiana Music Museum, I explore the ways in which archival mediation and museum re-presentation of oral histories contribute to reactivating the sociocultural significance of dance hall life in the public imaginary. My research seeks to weave together theoretical insights from heritage studies with ethnomusicological methods, developing a framework for understanding how individuals, as parts of larger multivocal community networks, engage with sound as a mode of heritage negotiation.

My paper synthesizes historiographical theory to explore how nhạc vàng (“golden music”), a sentimental genre associated with the former Republic of Vietnam, functions as a counter-archive that circulates historical consciousness through sonic and affective means. Long condemned by the postwar Vietnamese state as politically reactionary and neocolonial, nhạc vàng preserves lived experiences of wartime and postwar Vietnam and has persisted through censorship via underground and diasporic circulation. For many Southern Vietnamese in the diaspora, it remains a vital repository of memory, identity, and intergenerational connection. As a counter-archive, nhạc vàng renders historical narratives legible that are often absent from official memory: carceral experiences, displacement, fractured family histories, and enduring state suppression. Its archival power emerges through the naming and collective recognition of songs, artists, and narratives shaped by political struggle. Diasporic institutions such as Thúy Nga and Paris by Night have structured the genre’s circulation, mediating which histories are foregrounded, softened, or left unspoken through performance, production, and audience engagement. In dialogue with critical historiography on archival silence, oral history, and affective memory, this paper argues that nhạc vàng demonstrates how music can sustain politically and emotionally charged histories across geographies, generations, and migration contexts. As a living archive, it challenges conventional understandings of historical preservation and shows how sound, affect, and social memory create forms of historical consciousness that exist beyond state and textual archives.

In post-Renovation ("Đổi Mới") Vietnam, the "Bolero Wave" represents the public resurgence of pre-1975 South Vietnamese popular music—a repertoire historically marginalized by state pressure and pejoratively labeled "yellow music" (nhạc vàng) against North Vietnam's revolutionary "red music" (nhạc đỏ). Focusing on the 2000s to the late 2010s, this paper examines how "bolero" evolved from a rhythmic descriptor into a depoliticized signifier facilitating this music’s re-entry into the official public sphere. Rapidly expanding to absorb interconnected local genres, the term’s use culminated in mainstream phenomena like the show Bolero Idol (Thần Tượng Bolero, 2016). By mapping conceptual overlaps between bolero and diverse local categories—romantic nhạc trữ tình ("music conveying emotion"), pastoral nhạc quê hương (“homeland/countryside music”), and repertoires simultaneously praised as mùi (pungent) and disparaged as sến (maudlin)—this study reveals genre-making as a complex process of cultural negotiation. Musically, Vietnamese bolero mediates between Latin American rhythms signalling cosmopolitanism and the provincial aesthetics of southern traditional genres (e.g. cải lương). Discursively, adopting the "bolero" moniker eases the genre away from politically fraught wartime repertoires in favor of apolitical romanticism. This shift transforms a stigmatized, southern artifact into a pan-Vietnamese popular tradition, a reorientation I argue is embodied in the divergent performance styles of two prominent vocalists: southern-born Đàm Vĩnh Hưng and northern-born Lệ Quyên. Ultimately, this presentation highlights musical nomenclature and aesthetics as strategic tools for historical reclamation, offering ethnomusicological insights into how post-conflict societies navigate censorship, rehabilitate marginalized archives, and leverage genre to reshape cultural memory.

This panel interrogates the notion of coloniality in music scholarship. For many centuries, imperial interventions and colonial maneuvers have played a decisive role in shaping transcultural scenarios and cultural practices (including music making) around the world. However, an overreliance on coloniality as a totalizing narrative has usually come at the expense of neglecting not only other material and social processes but the convoluted agency of colonial subjects. Building on the work of Caribbean and Latin American decolonial thinkers like Sylvia Wynter and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui but also on Myriam Chancy’s idea that colonial subjects are more than what coloniality has made of them, the panelists reflect on these questions from the vantage point of their own research projects: To what extent do the “colonial” or the “postcolonial” continue to be relevant intellectual frameworks? What kind of musical facets become more or less legible when accounted from narratives grounded on colonial histories? Has the notion of coloniality been limiting or misleading when applied to diasporic scenarios? What kind of contradictions come to the fore when considering the perspective of Black, Latin American, and Caribbean scholars regarding “coloniality”? The first speaker questions whether the early colonial era was as coherent as the framework of coloniality assumes. The second speaker examines the imperial character of the sound recording industry in the early twentieth century. The third speaker turns to Anglophone Caribbean music and critical Black studies to argue that while coloniality remains useful, antiblackness reveals its limits as an account of the present.

This paper examines the musical performance of mangongkal holi, the ancestral bone-exhumation ritual of the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra, Indonesia, with particular attention to the role of gondang sabangunan music and tortor dance in mediating memory, cosmology, and social identity. Drawing on hybrid ethnographic fieldwork in Sianjur Mulamula—including audiovisual documentation, musical transcription, and ritual theory, I argue that gondang functions not merely as ritual accompaniment but as a powerful musical compendium that structure ritual processions, sustains kinship and social relationships (dalihan na tolu), and facilitates communication between the human and ancestral realms.

Engaging prior scholarship on Toba Batak ritual music, including Artur Simon (1982), Okazaki (1994), and Mauly Purba (2000, 2004), among others, alongside broader ethnomusicological discussions of music rituals in Southeast Asia, the paper situates mangongkal holi within a dynamic continuum of continuity and transformation. Particular attention is given to the leader pargonsi (musicians), Aliman Tua Limbong, and the negotiation of indigenous cosmology with Christian influences and contemporary social realities. By foregrounding music as a central ritual ceremony, this study demonstrates how ritual music sustains ancestral presence, negotiates cultural resilience, and articulates indigenous identity amid historical and modern pressures.

Commonly defined as the quartet of metallophones that accompanies Balinese shadow puppet theater, gender wayang is widely described as “the music for wayang.” Yet in twenty-first-century Bali, this definition is increasingly partial. Gender wayang now circulates through extracurricular school programs, arts competitions, banjar and sanggar initiatives, radio and television broadcasts of the Puja Tri Sandhya mantra, commercial recordings, and experimental compositions. While these developments suggest vitality, they also raise a central question: what, precisely, is being sustained? Drawing on Huib Schippers’ ecological “Five-Domain Framework,” and engaging scholarship by Lisa Gold, Ako Mashino, and Brita Heimarck, this paper argues that development and sustainability within the gender wayang complex are paradoxically intertwined. Rather than equating sustainability with the number of performers or new compositions, I examine four interrelated domains, systems of learning, musicians and communities, contexts and constructs, and media and infrastructures, to assess how change simultaneously enables and endangers distinct dimensions of the tradition. Standardization in formal education, competition repertoires detached from puppetry, shifting ritual practices, gender inclusion, and expanding media circulation have broadened participation while narrowing regional repertoires and weakening links to dramatic function. By disentangling these processes, this paper reframes sustainability as a multi-layered condition rather than a binary of loss or survival. For ethnomusicology, this case underscores the need to theorize development as both generative and erosive, to interrogate what stakeholders value as “tradition,” and to foreground context, power, and mediation in analyses of musical change.

Hiding in plain sight in Yogyakarta, a city in Muslim-majority Indonesia, the top floor of a clothing store has hosted a twice weekly drag performance called Raminten Cabaret Show since 2014. The shows often begin with performances of traditional Javanese dance and then feature drag acts ranging from American pop stars like Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj to Indonesian popular artists like Dewi Perssik and Inul Daratista, complete with acrobatics and pyrotechnics. Sexual and gender minorities in Indonesia are currently threatened by a criminal code which was passed in 2022. Despite these social and legal threats, Indonesia has a long history of tolerance and recognition of plural gender expressions and this remains evident in sold-out performances at the Raminten Cabaret Show. Audiences are primarily Indonesian and typically range in age from 20-60 although attendees sometimes bring their children to the event. This presentation focuses on the practice of lip-syncing, commonplace in drag but unique in this context in that the performers use live recordings instead of studio recordings for their performances. By providing an ethnographic case study, I extend Philip Auslander’s challenge to the binary between the live and the mediatized by examining how drag queens perform using prerecorded music from live events.

This panel investigates the “alternative” creative expressions of Blackness in popular music genres and fandoms that have been designated as “not traditionally Black” in the public eye. “Alternative” encompasses the spectrum of Black expression that exists outside of the most popularized and accepted presentations of Blackness. We not only discuss white audience perceptions of Blackness in music, we also synthesize Black voices into our theoretical analyses. Black audience perceptions of “non-Black” genres can highlight the gaps in representation and the resulting consequences caused by the global and domestic music industries. Presenter 1 analyzes how Rico Nasty uses screaming, a hardcore and emo sonic aesthetic, to challenge a gendered and racialized hegemony seen in hip hop and emo to validate the identities and experiences of Black Alt participants. Presenter 2 theorizes that the adaptation of “Devil’s Music” conservatism into communal Black spaces, notably through Afropunk, has transformed into a tool of identity negotiation and generational repression of Black expression in Black society and the American music industry. Presenter 3 evaluates #KEEPKPOPKOREAN, an ultranationalistic social media campaign that wishes to stonewall “outsiders”—meaning Black fans and artists—from participating in K-pop despite its Black-coded aesthetics and musical influence, and to uphold the purist ideologies of K-pop by non-Black fans, undermining the experiences of Black fans and suppressing K-pop’s history of globalizing Black culture and performing anti-blackness.

Since the postwar period, Japan has seen the emergence of a wide variety of niche sabukaru (“subcultures”)—from anime to visual kei to lolita fashion—with many gaining wide global appeal. Despite the abundance of scholarship investigating these scenes, the structural distinctions between sub- and mainstream culture are often glossed over. This panel complicates meanings bound in the prefixial function of “sub-,” exploring alternative positionalities other than those simply under, below, or less than a relative entity. While EuroAmerican discourse typically frames subcultures as oppositional, marginalized, or subordinate to a dominant culture, Japanese iterations of sabukaru have historically positioned themselves removed from, even indifferent to, such power struggles (Yoda 2000). Sabukaru participants repurpose mainstream culture through localized theorization and place-making, reconfiguring hegemonic social orders into relations of alternativity (Thornton 1997). Music, as both representation and enactment of sociality, provides a vantage point from which to explore such processes. In interfacing studies on the production of space and place (Lefebvre 1974) with ethnomusicological perspectives concerning the circulation of affect in musical practices (Abe 2018; Garcia-Mispireta 2023), this panel delves into the underlying affective economies that dissolve, at times intensify, the sticky thresholds between sounds, bodies, and venues. We present case studies on sabukaru formation through musical collectivity in anikura (anime song nightclub) venues, queer cosplay events, and noise music performances, and reframe sabukaru participants from mere ethnographic subjects to active producers of musical knowledge. In doing so, this panel contributes to broader conversations in ethnomusicology concerning subaltern musicking, microgenre formation, and musical affect.

Across disciplines, scholars have diagnosed the twenty-first century West with a peculiar affliction: analog nostalgia (e.g., Beverland et al. 2024; Schrey 2024). They note that artists and consumers revive analog media such as photography, vinyl records, and analog synthesizers to retrieve a materiality, agency, and intentionality they perceive to be lacking in an increasingly digital world.

However, analog nostalgia has been a part of Western music cultures ever since the rise of digital technologies in the late 1970s. One early analog revival scene took place in San Francisco’s queer underground around 1990, spearheaded by artist Michael Collins. Many of his and his comrades’ activities revived the analog styles of new wave music from a decade earlier: from the original songs by Collins’ performance group the Popstitutes, to drag performances of new wave music videos, to “Club Analog,” a nightlife event with the subtitle “Stop worrying and learn to love the Moog synthesizer.”

In this paper, I ask how and why Collins and his associates enacted analog nostalgia for an era barely ten years past. Closely reading their archival materials—flyers, press clippings, video recordings, and more—I argue that analog technology was crucial to this circle’s queer worldbuilding in the face of the AIDS crisis. While this analog revival could be seen as a precursor to today’s analog nostalgia, the San Francisco underground made explicit the queer pleasures of analog technology in a way that recent analog revivals, centered on hegemonically masculine discourses of control and mastery, have obscured.

The queerPassion production at the 2025 Bachfest Leipzig sheds light on contemporary European values of musical heritage, authenticity and sociality. A contrafact of the St. John Passion, queerPassion resets Bach’s music to a new libretto by Thomas Höft, highlighting tragic stories of homophobic violence in the eighteenth century (1730 Utrecht sodomy trials, a Prussian trans man) and recent times (Orlando, Chechnya, Lagos). At Bachfest, queerPassion featured under the festival theme “Transformation”: the project incorporated the professional Baroque orchestra Ārt House 17 and soloists, with a local women’s choir and gay men’s chorus singing the chorales. Leipzig thus presented a provocative context where Bach “superfans,” historical performers, the LGBTQ+ community, professionals and amateurs would intersect. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in Leipzig, including observations, musician interviews, and an audience survey, I situate the queerPassion at the intersection of scholarship on participatory musicking (Turino 2008, Reily & Brucker 2017, Bartleet & Higgins 2018), queer music studies (Attinello 2006, Barz & Cheng 2020, Maus & Whitely 2022, MacLachlan 2020, Hilder 2023), music revivals (Bithell & Hill 2014), and festival studies (Falassi 1987). My study explores how the utopian vision of the funder Creative Europe to “safeguard, develop and promote European cultural and linguistic diversity and heritage” played out in Leipzig: while fostering tolerance and understanding among participants and audience, the queerPassion also exposed sometimes competing artistic and ideological values (professionalism vs. amateur community-building; queer pride and identity vs. Bach reverence and historical authenticity in performance) with lively, but not always harmonious, results.

This paper explores the cultural contradictions of music festival cruises aimed at fostering community despite participation in the destructive forces of capitalism, climate catastrophe, and violence against women and children globally. I focus on a 2019 cruise hosted by Kesha for her largely queer fanbase that curated an aesthetic space physically removed from heteronormative society through an all-hours party atmosphere. I frame this as an atopic “non-space” (Augé, 1992) where attendees felt protected from such sociocultural structures in international waters; yet the very same structures take advantage of international waters to avoid accountability as the cruising industry wreaks havoc on the environment and reproduces violent, ongoing histories of colonialism. This paper engages online communities as archive and ethnographic field, blending methodological approaches to explore the potential of social media as a fruitful scholarly resource. Working from theorists including Jill Dolan, Amy Hollywood, and José Esteban Muñoz, I question the extent to which a population alienated by society holds themselves accountable for contributing to environmental damages (air, water, and noise pollution) and the exploitation of other vulnerable populations (underpaid employees from the global south, and women and children guests subject to violence with little recourse). In an atopia designed to protect community from structural marginalization, how do we reconcile such benefits with the detrimental impact on the world at large?

This panel examines reciprocal processes through which Jewish histories of forced migration and adaptation are narrated, imagined, and mobilized across musical contexts, and through which Western classical musical idioms and narratives are drawn upon, reworked, and recontextualized in relation to Jewish stories. Rather than assuming a one-directional flow of influence, the papers attend to moments of translation, borrowing, layering, and reinterpretation in which works mediate between diverse Jewish cultural histories and musical performance. At times, these stories privilege an ideological conception of Jewish experience over historical fact. The first paper explores representations of Jewish difference in Mason Bates’ opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, arguing that his use of Jewish languages, melodies, and iconography represents a temporal displacement of ethnolinguist ideologies from the present onto a story set in 1939. The second paper examines performance of the Ladino song “Adio Kerida,” tracing how a modern song shaped by operatic and popular idioms has come to be widely understood as a medieval Sephardic artifact through contrafacta, performance framing, and allegorical interpretation. The final paper shows how Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony evolved, from its original composition by Bernstein through additions made by Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar and his family. Taking each addition as a form of “intermundane collaboration” (Stanyek and Piekut 2010), this paper explores the symphony’s current performers’ perceptions of intergenerational witnessing. This panel ultimately considers how Jewish stories are reinterpreted musically, retold, and re-enacted in the present, and how such performances become constitutive in Jewish historiography.

In 1987 Linda Ronstadt diverged from her successes in rock and other genres to record the album, Canciones de mi Padre. In it, she revived nostalgic Mexican mariachi music to honor her father and Mexican American heritage. Record industry insiders doubted a Spanish-language album featuring decades-old songs could succeed in the mainstream market. Nevertheless, the album reached 42 on the Billboard 200, sold over 2.5 million copies, won a Grammy for best Mexican/Mexican American performance, and became the bestselling non-English music album in U.S. history. This presentation analyzes Canciones in dialogue with interviews with musicians and fans of the album. It contributes to ethnomusicology by understanding music as a political action that mediates affect and emotion (e.g., Chávez 2017; Desai-Stephens & Reisnour 2020; Garland 2020; Gray Kun 2016; Sakakeeny 2024). Specifically, it asks: what are the political implications and effects of the love the album conveys? While romantic love is thematically relevant in many of the album’s songs, I argue Canciones constructs and prioritizes a love for family, community, and Mexican Americanness. Although Ronstadt did not intend to record a political album, this love is political. In 1987 and still today, Canciones challenges the stigmatization of Mexican American people while also contributing to the construction of what scholars call a “third space” beyond the U.S./Mexico binary (Anzaldúa 1987; Licona 2005; Sandoval 2013).

Since the beginning of her career in the mid 1990s, singer and songwriter Lila Downs (b. 1968) has weaved themes of Indigeneity and migration in her songs. Inspired by her Mixtec Indigenous, Mexican, and U.S. American heritage, Downs blends a variety of languages (Spanish, English, Mixtec, Zapotec) and musical styles (Mexican sones, rancheras, corridos, cumbia, jazz). Taken together, her heritage and musical fusions allowed Downs to consolidate her career as a “World Music” artist at a time of deep transformation in Mexico, with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Zapatista uprising of the same year, and later, the power transition after the 2000 Mexican presidential elections. Building on scholarship that explores the intersection of musical activities, migration, globalization, and the U.S.-Mexico border (Ragland 2009; Madrid 2011; Ramos-Kittrell 2020; Días Santana-Garza 2021), in this presentation I analyze Downs’s representation of the post-NAFTA border condition in her 2001 album Border/La Línea for Mexican and international audiences. Through musical and lyrical analysis, I examine two songs: “La Niña” (“The girl”) and “La Línea” (“The line”), in which Downs portrays themes related to neoliberalism, NAFTA, and the border, with references to the maquiladora factories, childhood, and labor. I argue that while Downs’s songs illuminate the conditions of vulnerable groups at the border, they also exhibit a “strategic exoticism” (Saavedra 2012; Guldin 2021) in line with “World Music” aesthetics. Ultimately, this paper contributes to conversations about popular music and neoliberalism in Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Starting in the early 21st century, Mexican bandas have increasingly adopted a distinct variant of the cumbia norteña featuring faster tempi, licentious lyrics, and nonnormative masculine expressions: ranging from hypersexualized machos preying on women in party contexts, submissive men dominated by their wives, or queer behavior. This banda cumbia—increasingly popular among U.S-based Mexican audiences—thus provides a valuable opportunity to explore what sociologist Raewynn Connell identifies as the “many local instabilities of gender” resulting from the establishment of a world gender order dominated by Western conceptualizations of masculinity (1998, 16); a reality intimately felt by many migrant Mexican men who feel feminized by authoritative U.S. social structures that submit them to lower-class, supervised jobs while also granting their spouses more autonomy and rights (Rouse 1992, 38). I argue that the sound of the banda cumbia, which most often appears late at night during Mexican parties, creates a cathartic space of masculine possibility that enables men to subvert U.S. and Mexican gender orders: be it via hypermasculine behavior, or the assertion of queer identities. Along with an analysis of the banda cumbia’s unique sonic properties, its ambiguous yet transgressive lyrics, and the de-coupled circle dance that accompanies it; I draw from my time performing with the Banda Poderosa de Jalisco in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (2018 – 2022) and interviews with affiliated banda musicians and listeners to demonstrate how the banda cumbia expands the banda ensemble’s capacity to represent and celebrate a myriad of transnational masculinities.

Higher education in music in Brazil has evolved through a historical process marked by coloniality, a legacy that continues to shape undergraduate music programs today. As a consequence of this trajectory, structural racism has emerged as one of the significant challenges the country must confront to build a model of music education aligned with its social demands and cultural potential. In response to this reality, this paper presents findings from a research project that examined undergraduate music programs at 30 universities across the country. Conducted between February 2019 and January 2025, the project investigates how Brazilian undergraduate music programs incorporate Afro-Brazilian music and Black individuals, highlighting the tensions between institutional inclusion policies and the persistence of colonial structures. The study adopts a qualitative approach grounded in bibliographic and documentary analysis. The results indicate that the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian cultures and the participation of Black individuals remain underrepresented within music programs, particularly given the significant strength and impact of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Brazil, as demonstrated by research in Brazilian ethnomusicology and music education (Araújo, 2006; Pereira, 2020; Queiroz, 2023; Sandroni, 2001). This tendency reinforces the logic of structural racism, historically rooted in the country. Based on this diagnosis, as well as on ethnomusicological and educational initiatives developed nationwide and on studies and proposals systematized in the country since the 2000s, the paper outlines brief decolonial pathways for rethinking and overcoming structural racism in music curricula and pedagogical practices in this context.

Over the past decade, San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina) and Curitiba (Brazil) have become prominent examples of music cities, partly due to the role of lutherie influencing their cultural and urban identities. Drawing on key sources on music cities (Finnegan 1989, Cohen 2007) and scenes (Straw 1991, Bennett 1999), this paper argues that the presence of comprehensive public lutherie programs alongside affordable private courses has been influential in establishing both cities as key hubs for regional and national musical instrument making. The incorporation of lutherie into public university curricula elevates the craft to an academic discipline, changing a master-apprentice tradition into an interdisciplinary and collective knowledge integration (Godemann 2008). Meanwhile, affordable private courses broaden opportunities for aspiring luthiers. These rich learning environments have contributed to establishing a large and collaborative population of luthiers, whose instruments, workshops, and events influence and help to maintain local music scenes. Such actions are reinforced by local initiatives, cultural institutions, and the participation of musicians, students, and audiences, creating a cycle that boosts cultural identity and economic growth (Soja 1996). By examining the interactions among education, production, and practices, this paper shows how lutherie, often overlooked in urban music studies, serves as a foundation for musical milieus in each city. The case studies also reveal how lutherie education and infrastructure can elevate a city’s status as a music city. As a result, these cities serve as valuable models for other urban centers seeking independent music cultures rooted in craft, innovation, and community participation.

What kind of collectivity do we listen with when sensing the river in this or that way? Who is interested, and when, in hearing this song, breath or voice as something that exists and knows? As social educator, environmental activist and researcher Ana Laide Soares Barbosa observed, thinking from a river brutally devastated by a mega-dam: “There is an abyss of not-listening, and because of people not listening to those at Volta Grande do Xingu, the destruction is voracious” (2023). Ontological thresholds of listening mark divides between modes of living and knowing (Ochoa 2014). In contexts of territorial conflicts and advancement of megaprojects on ancestral lands, these divides shape what is recognized as alive, valuable, and worth being preserved. This paper theorizes the sensory abyss as a central mechanism of socio-environmental destruction and "ontological occupation” (Escobar 2015) in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on ethnographic research and inter-epistemic dialogues with interlocutors in Pará, I examine the intersection between sensory alienation and extractive logic, where the devastation of ecosystems is sustained by a dissociation of agency and perception. In resonance with analyses of neoliberal and settler-colonial sonic governance in Indigenous territories (Robinson 2020; Veeraraghavan 2024; Cárcamo-Huechante 2026), I theorize extractivism as not merely an economic process, but a regime of listening. This regime produces sensory alienation and material devastation while organizing whose voices count, whose worlds are audible, whose territories can be rendered available. This paper contributes to ethnomusicological debates on the colonial and political implications of aurality in socio-environmental struggles.

In the past five years, there has been an increasing number of research papers on the virtual ethnography of jazz music and its fans, but few studies have focused on the virtual jazz life in the Chinese context. Traditionally, jazz has been confined to elite spaces such as clubs and conservatories in urban centers like Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. However, the rise of social media and digital platforms has democratized access to jazz, expanding its reach beyond these institutional settings to a broader, more diverse audience. This study employs a virtual ethnographic approach to analyze four distinct cases of jazz-related content on platforms such as RedNote and Bilibili, focusing on memes, short videos, and comment sections. By applying affective media theory, Kivy’s resemblance theory of musical expressiveness, and the framework of participatory culture, the paper demonstrates that jazz is no longer solely a domain for the musically literate. Rather, it is a medium that evokes emotional resonance, symbolic associations, and widespread participation. This research challenges conventional notions of jazz as an exclusive art form, emphasizing its role in creating belonging and reimagining local cultural meanings. The findings suggest that virtual jazz participation disrupts traditional access barriers and allows jazz to circulate as a living, dynamic cultural resource in China.

The player piano and piano rolls occupy a unique space in jazz history, bridging live improvisation with mechanical music reproduction. These technologies preserved intricate jazz performances and allowed artists to reach audiences beyond live venues. Yet, despite their significance, many figures central to their development remain underrecognized.

This paper examines the contributions of J. Lawrence Cook, a prolific yet overlooked Black artist who played a crucial role in the player piano era. As one of the most productive piano roll arrangers of the 20th century, Cook crafted thousands of rolls, many of which were widely circulated by major music roll companies. His work extended beyond simple transcription; he infused rolls with stylistic nuance, capturing the dynamism of jazz performance in ways that mechanical reproduction often struggled to achieve.

Cook’s influence is particularly evident in his connection to Fats Waller. Some of Cook’s rolls were released under Waller’s name, highlighting the complexities of authorship and recognition in jazz history. Furthermore, Cook's contributions were not limited to performance—he also played a key role in advancing piano roll technology, refining techniques that enhanced the expressivity of mechanically reproduced music.

This paper draws on ethnographic and ethnomusicological approaches to analyze Cook’s piano rolls, shedding light on his stylistic innovations and technical contributions. By acknowledging his legacy, I aim to reposition Cook within jazz historiography, illustrating how his work not only shaped the player piano era but also influenced subsequent generations of musicians.

Accounts of early banjo repertory have tended to privilege textual and melodic sources over the embodied techniques through which tunes and songs took shape in performance. As a result, instrumental practice has remained peripheral to accounts of Atlantic musical exchange. Though widely regarded as a definitive study, Hans Nathan’s analysis of the early blackface minstrel repertoire as rooted in Anglo-Celtic and Afro-Caribbean music and dance cultures stops short of explaining how that fusion was realized in instrumental technique. Comparative analysis of notated sources associated with early minstrel banjoists instead points to downstroke playing (a percussive downward striking style) as a principal site at which European and African American musical practices were brought into relation. Building on Cecelia Conway’s account of banjo song as a tradition forged within African American communities and transmitted through interracial exchange, this paper explores how the Irish/Scottish fiddle tune “The Devil’s Dream” was reconfigured as the “Grapevine Twist” through patterned striking motions of the right hand. Rather than treating syncopation as a stylistic trait added to otherwise stable European tunes, the paper argues that their internal organization shifted to accommodate Black banjo technique. What emerged was not simply a change in rhythmic inflection but a restructuring of the tune itself, shaped by the demands of downstroke banjo playing.

This panel examines how musical genres across Latin America become sites for negotiating identity, memory, and power as they circulate through geographical and social borders. By tracing the transnational journeys of cumbia, the reimagining of Afro-Dominican religious music, the queering of tango, and the localization of jazz in Mexico, we illuminate the complex acoustemologies that emerge when genres travel and adapt. The first paper traces cumbia's transnational acoustemologies from 1940s Colombia to Chile in the 1960s and to Argentina in the 1990s, arguing that its sonic expressions of festivity intertwine with local experiences of social and political adversity. The second examines Afro-Dominican fusion music as a palimpsest of Blackness, where religious traditions are both celebrated and commodified, transforming perceptions of Black Dominican music. The third explores how queer milongas and younger musicians in North America subvert tango conventions to reclaim the genre as community-centered practice. The fourth investigates how Mexican jazz programs adapt a global genre to regional needs, with "jazz" functioning as a malleable label empowering local musicians. Together, these papers engage questions of sound and place, tradition and innovation, and the impact of social hierarchies on musical expression. By following musical currents across the region—from the Caribbean to the Southern Cone, from religious ritual to the jazz classroom—we reveal how communities use sound to navigate legacies of colonialism, dictatorship, and marginalization while actively shaping new sonorous futures.

For ethnomusicologists, study away and study abroad programs may seem to dovetail naturally with our fieldwork, training, and expertise. But the logistics of traveling with a dozen or more students can appear daunting. In this roundtable, panelists share their experiences planning, organizing, and teaching in study away/abroad programs. Decisions about site location, preparation, accommodations, finances, local partnerships, student selection, and travel arrangements set the tone for the entire program. Upon arrival, faculty often have responsibilities beyond their on-campus roles, serving as budget managers, counselors, dorm parents, emergency responders, and travel guides. In the compressed timeframe, resilience and adaptability is key. The rewards are clear: faculty build lasting relationships with students in a more intimate setting; students learn more deeply and quickly in the focused, intense environment; and all gain a deeper appreciation for the program’s topic when participating, observing, and studying in situ. Panelist 1 has students discover Chicago’s public programming and vibrant summer festival calendar. Panelist 2, who lives in Chicago and teaches in Panelist 1’s study away program, utilizes professional contacts to help the city’s musical life come alive for students. Panelist 3 brings students to Uganda to study performing arts alongside local partners. Panelist 4 travels with students to Morocco where they study sacred sounds in diverse faith traditions. Panelist 5, who has taken students to Ireland 10 times over 30 years, will discuss the process of extensive preparation, working closely with a local institute, and engaging students in a reflective essay upon their return.

This panel examines the “knowledge infrastructures” (Edwards 2010; Larkin 2013) that underpin field recording archives, arguing that they are not neutral repositories but active mediating formations that have shaped ethnomusicology’s objects, methods, and authority. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and critical archival scholarship, we show how mid-twentieth-century institutional arrangements—missionary networks, university patronage, state funding, and transnational circuits—imposed specific epistemic logics on Indigenous and Hispanic vernacular musics from the U.S. Southwest, particularly New Mexico, and the Global South. Following Derrida (1996) and Stoler (2009), we treat archives as historically situated structures that condition what can be collected, classified, circulated, and heard. These infrastructures did more than preserve traditions: they organized “whose memory” counted, stabilized genre taxonomies, and naturalized hierarchies of value that continue to shape disciplinary discourse and heritage narratives. Confronting these legacies requires ethnomusicology to reckon with the material and institutional conditions of its own knowledge production and to engage ongoing debates on archival responsibility and epistemic accountability. Presenter 1 analyzes how knowledge infrastructures in the U.S. and Peru conditioned the extraction and framing of recorded repertories. Presenter 2 traces the archival mediation of Juan Bautista Ralliere’s repertory in the Robb and Cobos collections, contrasting institutional taxonomies with devotional networks and oral transmission. Presenter 3 reconsiders the John Donald Robb Archive, examining how Robb’s professional profile and collaboration with Vicente T. Mendoza structured Southwestern regional memory. The Discussant synthesizes these interventions to address their broader methodological and historiographic implications for the discipline.

The South Indian frame drum (called parai, tappu, and dappu) varies in shape, style and rhythmic patterns across South Asia and its diasporas, while performed in similar ritual functions and contemporary political and folkloric contexts. This panel presents emerging musical dialogues linking frame‑drum practices across state/land borders of South India and its trans-oceanic diasporas—in Mauritius, Réunion, Malaysia, Guyana, and the U.S. We engage themes of contemporary political movements, caste, religion, racial discourses, cultural contact, folklorization, and the complexities of postcolonial identity. Panelist One uses a digital music-mapping framework to analyze distinct style elements linked to place and histories of cultural contact arguing language, subcastes, and location form the boundaries of style in Tamil Nadu while Saivism driven by class mobility is reshaping practice in its diasporas. Panelist Two examines a diasporic performance in which Indo‑Caribbean “Madrasi” tappu drummers spontaneously join Tamil-speaking Singaporean Hindu drummers. They argue that such collaborations enable Indo‑Caribbeans to mobilize performance to legitimate belonging within South Asian American diasporic culture particularly when facing casteist-racial criticism of Kali trance practices associated with Madrasi tappu. Panelist Three examines the “dappu” in Telangana, India, arguing that when remediated on Bonalu PA systems, it not only transduces electricity into air pressure, but also into public affects which bolster claims about urban space. Noise pollution and its concomitant, social organization are redefined through aspirations to develop Hyderabad into a global city. This panel expands research on South Asian folk drumming to nuance its complex contemporary socio-cultural and musical identities.

Emcee Chosan’s song “Blue Check Fame” interrogates the pursuit of clout and influence through attaining blue check verification status on social media platforms. Appearing on his 2023 album, Me Against the Algorithm, it is part of Chosan’s broader narratives about the benefits and drawbacks of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and social media usage. Inspired by the title of rapper Tupac Shakur’s 1995 release, Me Against the World, Chosan uses the songs featured on Me Against the Algorithm as commentaries about our increasingly digital lives.

“Blue Check Fame” is Chosan’s exploration of public perception and social media addiction. The track’s lyrics propose that the coveted blue checks create addictive behaviors as well as extreme fixations with achieving public popularity and visibility. Chosan emphasizes that after 2022, many social media users opted to pay monthly subscriptions to garner blue check recognition, and the emblem’s significance was irreversibly transformed.

Based upon lyrical, musical, and video analyses, this presentation investigates Chosan’s examination of blue check verification status and its impact on social media users. It incorporates details from interviews and personal communication with Chosan about “Blue Check Fame”between 2023 and 2025. Moreover, it integrates data gathered from a co-facilitated 2025 lecture with Chosan about Me Against the Algorithm. The presentation also draws upon theories of social media as a behavior modification tool (Lanier 2018) and motivator for chasing virality (Newport 2025). By these means, it uses “Blue Check Fame” as an example of a rap narrative critiquing social media addiction.

This paper examines the work of hip-hop artist and cultural worker Brayan “Mulato” Muñoz in the city of Pasto (Nariño, Colombia). I argue that while musicians in Pasto often struggle to sustain long-term careers within its dense soundscape—marked by intense competition among numerous regional artists—Mulato has remained audible by embedding practices of care (Hobart and Kneese 2020) into his work. Mulato’s impact is evident not only in his success as an artist, but in his cultivation of transformative community spaces.

Drawing from interviews conducted with Mulato, I explore how he emerges from an “overpopulation of sounds” (Schafer 1977) while staying grounded in the vision that guides his organization Surprise City Foundation. This includes creating and sustaining spaces dedicated to youth expression and education, human rights advocacy, citizen participation, and sexual and reproductive rights. I pay particular attention to the annual event, Encuentros Hip Hop por la Paz (Hip-Hop Encounters for Peace), which exemplifies an initiative designed as both entertainment and community development through skill-building workshops. The skills and knowledge acquisition fostered through these programs shape broader community development efforts by expanding access to opportunity (Harrison 2020).

Ultimately, I show how Mulato’ work exemplifies that creative practices rooted in care can serve as forms of resilience and long-term community-building. Mulato’s work responds directly to institutional shortcomings in his city through community-oriented action. By foregrounding interdependency, he demonstrates that listeners are worthy of care from the artists they support. Reciprocally, artists are sustained by attentive and engaged audiences.

GNX (2024) has largely failed to attain the same near-universal critical acclaim as Compton rap star Kendrick Lamar’s previous records. This is best evidenced by an infamous review score from Pitchfork: 6.6/10. As critic Langdon Hickman wrote, “By pre-existing metrics Kendrick has more than willingly slotted himself into, of course GNX would be a disappointment.” This paper investigates these “pre-existing metrics,” revealing how twentieth century conceptions of rockist seriousness still guide critics today. I argue that two metrics of seriousness remain pervasive: 1) the (concept) album as the most valuable format of musical expression, and 2) a perceived oppositional orientation towards the “mainstream.” To demonstrate this, I provide comparative analyses between the critical reception of GNX and good kid, m.A.A.d. city (2012), illustrating how discourses of seriousness have guided the reception of both records. I engage primarily with the historiographical work of Keightley (1995), Lindberg et al. (2005), and Brennan (2017) pertaining to rockist critical aesthetics. I also engage with a critique of hip hop politics as applied to Lamar’s older records by Burton (2017), illustrating how Lamar has updated his messaging to a new mode of political expression that is predominantly implicit and thus largely illegible to critics. I conclude by asserting that GNX teaches us about the aesthetic value of accessibility in popular music. Ultimately, this investigation reveals a new politics of seriousness that has taken hold in contemporary popular music, politics which are no longer beholden to the rockist idea that seriousness and accessibility are mutually exclusive.

Bad Bunny references traditional Puerto Rican genres—bomba, plena, and música jíbara—on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which many have described as his “most Puerto Rican album yet.” The use of barriles (bomba drums) and panderos (associated with plena), layered with reggaetón rhythms and salsa samples, grounds the album in local musical heritage. While this project marks a new level of commercial and critical success for Bad Bunny through its embrace of traditional sound markers, such fusions are not unprecedented. Throughout his career, Tego Calderón has incorporated elements of bomba and salsa into his rap compositions, particularly on El Abayarde. Building on Bruno and Victoria’s concept of “productive nostalgia” in Un Verano Sin Ti, this paper compares Debí Tirar Más Fotos and El Abayarde, focusing on their use of samples and sonic markers drawn from bomba, plena, and música jíbara. I argue that both albums engage with representations of Puerto Rican identity shaped by state institutions and grounded in ideals of racial democracy through mestizaje. Through his deployment of traditional genres, Bad Bunny often reinforces state-sponsored narratives of racial harmony, whereas Tego Calderón foregrounds Black sonic epistemologies that challenge these discourses. Using frameworks of productive nostalgia, acoustemology, and Black Sound Studies methodologies, this study examines how each artist mobilizes local sound to negotiate, contest, or reimagine hegemonic constructions of Puerto Rican identity in the archipelago and its diaspora.

This panel explores the ways sound acquires meaning depending on who, how, when, and where it is produced. How is human culture impacted by the ways in which we make meaning of the more-than-human musical output? From land to water, and from massive to microscopic, collectively we examine how sonic listening practices have produced new ethical relationships of care amid growing awareness of human ecological impact in the late twentieth century. These encounters—between humans and whales, humans and plants, and between composers and land—reveal that meaning-making is never neutral, but is rather shaped by gendered ideologies, aesthetic concepts of beauty, and ontological concerns on what it means to be a human. While studies on more-than-human musicalities tend to prioritize species who vocalize in ways that appeal to Western musical taste, there are remarkable examples of composers’ sensibilities that attempt to move beyond those canonical ways of listening and instead interrogate how new ethical relationships can emerge from listening closely to and with human-damaged land and ocean. The first two papers explore how meaning-making in the ocean is produced by focusing on gendered and musical beauty in the repertoires of humpback and bowhead whales. The second half of the panel turns to land and plants, interrogating how listening to damaged landscapes and vegetal life reframes ethical responsibility and exposes the ontological stakes embedded in our listening practices. Ultimately, this panel positions listening as an ethical mode of attunement that reshapes ecological responsibility and human self-understanding.

One hundred years after the birth of John Coltrane, this roundtable asks what his legacy signifies in the present and how it might orient the future. This panel takes a rare, nuanced, Africana studies-centered, ethnomusicological approach in convening tradition bearers, scholars, and practitioners across generations to discuss the meaning of his Centennial anniversary. Hour one will include a presentation by a leading contemporary tenor saxophonist who will reflect on how Coltrane shaped his current practice and the colossal, lasting impact on younger generations in the jazz saxophone lineage. Then a senior jazz tenor saxophonist and a Black music scholar will dialogue with a living legend/jazz elder who worked with Coltrane, exploring a firsthand perspective on his practice. To close the first hour, an Africana studies scholar will present his film “Speakn' Trane,” (20 minutes). The film is a visual conversation exploring the revolutionary spirit behind Coltrane's "A Love Supreme." Through themes of meditation, nature, and Black musical cosmologies, the film honors Coltrane's spiritual journey and his deep connection to Philadelphia, returning home to reclaim lost parts of himself, in the spirit of Sankofa. This conversation will engage Coltrane as a revered musician and cultural ancestor within the Black music continuum. During the second hour, the audience will be asked to engage with the presenters by asking questions that consider how his legacy asks musicians, artists, scholars, and communities to imagine more expansive futures, treating Coltrane’s legacy not as a monument but as an unfinished project into the next 100 years.

Among Yorùbá drummers in southwestern Nigeria, the Dùndún drum is described as Òkú Ewúrẹ́ Tó ń F’ọhùn Bí Ẹ̀nìyàn—“the dead goat skin that vocalizes like a human.” This formulation locates vocality within the drum’s membrane rather than in human technique alone. While scholarship on Dùndún richly documents its social functions and speech imitation, it often treats the instrument as acoustically neutral, overlooking how the membrane’s physical behavior conditions vocal expression. This paper argues that Dùndún vocality emerges through the material responsiveness of goat skin under shifting conditions of pressure, tension, heat, and touch. Drawing on four months of performance-based ethnography in Ìlorà, Òyó State, I employ a method I term material tracing: tracking how physical changes in the instrument—such as fluctuations in elasticity—shape performance decisions. Through analysis of archival recordings, Yorùbá proverbs that encode material knowledge, and interviews with master drummers, I demonstrate that the membrane moves through multiple material states that yield distinct vocal registers, including melorhythmic (àlùjó), nasal, ohùn agogo, and speech-surrogate vocality. Drummers actively regulate these states through environmental and tactile interventions, such as applying solar heat to tighten slack skin or binding twine around tension cords to recalibrate response. Vocality thus arises not from inert matter but through dynamic engagement with a responsive membrane. By foregrounding this material encounter, the paper reframes instrumental voice as a relational achievement in which sound, meaning, and agency are co-constituted across human and material bodies.

This paper addresses a significant gap in scholarship on the ancient Tamil paṟai frame drum. Existing ethnomusicological research has primarily focused on the instrument’s performance practices in Tamil Nadu, where it is closely associated with the Tamil Dalit community, addressing topics such as anti-caste oppression, social justice activism, and identity empowerment. Conversely, few studies examine how the paṟai’s role is repositioned when it circulates beyond South India and enters diasporic and multicultural contexts. This study responds to that gap by examining paṟai practice in Singapore, a cosmopolitan city-state in Southeast Asia. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and documentation of drumming workshops and staged performances, this paper examines how the paṟai’s role has been reconfigured in Singapore under the direction of Thirukumaran, a leading Tamil drumming pedagogue and founder of Damaru Singapore. Thirukumaran combines performance styles from Madurai, Tanjavur, and Chennai, which are usually kept separate in Tamil Nadu, into a single Singapore paṟai style. He further develops an ensemble performance format inspired by Brazilian street percussion, integrating layered rhythmic patterns and coordinated dance movement. In Singapore, paṟai drumming has only recently been revitalized, and the absence of gatekeepers or learned audiences has given Thirukumaran the freedom to experiment with blending regional paṟai drumming styles. This makes Singapore a distinctive site for examining how paṟai drumming is reshaped beyond its place of origin in Tamil Nadu. The study contributes to the discourse on how musical practices acquire new meanings as they cross borders.

Musical instruments are material things—but is that all they are? The so-called “material turn” within music studies has brought renewed attention to the physicality of technologies, bodies, and particularly instruments (Bates 2012; Dawe 2015; Allen 2023). However, material-turn organology still presumes instrument stability, tending to treat instruments as materially coherent entities rather than unstable assemblages sustained through practice, technological flexibility, and cultural memory.

Building upon Emily Dolan (2025), I will probe the “limits of materiality” through the nineteenth-century African American panpipes, or “quills.” Through an archive of extant instruments, commercial and field recordings, textual accounts, and oral histories, I demonstrate that the quills were realized through a dizzyingly wide variety of materials, tunings, and number of pipes. Strikingly, wind instruments that would be taxonomized separately by later scholars—single-pipe fifes, edge-blown panpipes, and end-blown fippled flutes—were all understood by practitioners as different material manifestations of quills. What links these diverse manifestations is the characteristic method of playing, itself extending beyond the material instrument: “hooting,” the practice of vocalizing pitches in alternation with blown notes, deriving from sub-Saharan reedpipe traditions.

I argue that the quills reveal musical instruments to be more-than-material assemblages, sustained through embodied practice, cultural memory, and technological flexibility, thereby challenging organological models grounded in material fixity. This paper therefore asks the material turn in music studies to reconsider where instrumentality resides; not solely in objects and their physical properties, but in practices and imaginaries that endure beyond any single material form.

Throughout the world, people evaluate music in ethical terms, and ethnomusicologists are learning how subtle and all-pervasive the moral view of music is (McGraw 2023). This is also true in Turkmen music, a fact which has gone unnoticed until now. Drawing from fieldwork insights and performance experiences with dutar players in Turkmenistan, I argue that the aesthetic ideals of dutar performance transcend merely what is played and sounded on the instrument, but are aligned with Turkmen moral and ethical values. Given the connection between these cultural codes, dutar players must negotiate carefully between contrasting ethical expectations. For example, dutar music is technically demanding and virtuosic, and expert listeners appreciate performances that meet these exacting standards with praise such as “ýerine bardy,” meaning “it went all the way.” Yet audiences may also interpret excess sound or exaggerated body gestures as “ýeňil,” implying pretentiousness. Facilitating an aesthetic response from listeners requires fulfilling their expectations of high musical accomplishment while coming across as unpretentious. In this paper, I analyze specific sequences of dutar pieces to identify key moments that shed light on these evaluations.

21st-century hip hop feminist scholarship now spans beyond Black American idioms to include global gender dynamics. However, US-centric racial frameworks often obscure local constructions of power and gendered systems. A nuanced understanding of international hip hop feminism requires analyzing the interplay between localization and gender expression. Positioned as a geographic and culturally distinct outlier to the mainland United States, Hawaiʻi offers a compelling case study on the intersection of domestic status and outsider identity, underpinned by a local culture rooted in Indigenous Hawaiian values that seek to reclaim power as opposed to equality within a colonial patriarchal system. This paper serves as an initial investigation into establishing a theoretical basis for a Hawaiʻi hip hop feminist framework. I argue that the Hawaiʻi emcees analyzed in this study localize hip hop music through processes that intertwine equitable gender values (mana wāhine), sovereignty narratives (ea), and deeply felt place-based connections (aloha ʻāina) to the point that one becomes inseparable from the other. Through the analysis of lyrical texts, vocal techniques, and embodied practices I suggest that the potential for gender parity could serve as a definitive characteristic of Hawaiʻi hip hop, thereby distinguishing it within the global hip hop landscape. This research is based on observations at live performances, cyber ethnography, and interviews with artists recently active in the city of Honolulu. In this presentation, I expand upon extant studies on sonic resistance strategies in the Pacific by providing an in-depth analysis on how female gender expression contributes to this discourse.

In light of recent attempts by city officials to rejuvenate Boston’s nightlife economy, this paper examines one subcultural scene—underground techno—with a foundational role in global nightlife culture, yet a complicated relationship with Boston. I investigate how the city’s material and regulatory constraints shape the formation and sustenance of underground techno, highlighting the importance of local collectives. Despite a young and transient population, a comparative lack of infrastructure, and strict legal codes, the scene has nonetheless persisted. While existing scene studies tend to highlight either the social (community, identity) or the spatial (urban geography, venues), this paper analyzes how material constraints force the social to adapt to external pressures, revealing how distributed agency across human and non-human actors contributes to subcultural scene formation. Actor-Network Theory, Dynamical Systems Theory, and spatial theory help identify the emergent self-organization of socio-material networks, reframing genres, collectives, and scenes as dynamic processes rather than static categories. Drawing from autoethnography and interviews with organizers, DJs, and dancers, I argue that subcultural scenes materialize through the repetition and iteration (both key sonic aspects of techno) of networks—the same process by which space becomes place. As humans confront a rapidly shifting technological horizon compounded by increasing isolation, understanding the forces that keep people connected becomes crucial. Ultimately, it is the momentary 1-to-1 connection between two individuals confirming each other’s realities that seeds any network, which through continual reproduction and iteration, reaches temporary states of consolidation that we register as genres, collectives, scenes, and places.

Queer subcultures have seen various degrees of resurgence post pandemic. The furry community has had to grapple with a sudden surge in convention attendance, caused in part by rising popular musicians identifying as furry artists. Issues surrounding growing attendance numbers, seen recently at Bewhiskered and Anthrocon, go beyond financial. Organizers for these recent furry conventions have outright banned the existence of “room parties”, a practice that has historically included do-it-yourself music performances to showcase independent Furry artists, pointing to concerns of safety, optics, and noise. The relationships between hierarchies of sound ecology are cross-examined with hierarchies of queer coalition building. Fieldwork and archival footage lead to listening to furry convention sound ecology as a site for coalition building through points of collision with history, space, the intrapersonal, and the institutions of music. History’s collision is addressed through comparative sound analysis of archival recordings of furry convention spaces in the 80s and 90s with field recordings at Bewhiskered 2026 and Anthrocon 2026, highlighting how changes in community structure dictate sound ecology, which in turn dictate one’s intrapersonal relation to identities. Convention organizers thus reinforce institutions of music through their committal to top-down structures, causing fissure with previously established networks of DIY events by enacting officially organized concerts and raves at conventions. Tracing how larger discourses of queer optics actualize themselves as sonic objects and absences lead to a problematization of queer hierarchical community structures and their power to shape space as a field for identity building and queer coalition.

From hip hop to reggaeton to bhangra, the autonomous bass-and-drum grooves providing the foundation for global dance beats follow precedents set by Jamaican dancehall rhythms, whose earliest manifestations reveal aesthetic roots in the brief but pivotal period of stylistic innovation glossed as rocksteady. While often represented as little more than a transitional style between ska and reggae, due to the “essential Americanness” that such researchers as Lloyd Bradley hear in its soul-influenced vocals, rocksteady looms large in oral-historical accounts of prominent musicians, who place the emergence of the foregrounded, often percussive electric basslines and the one-drop drum-set conception—which Kenneth Bilby considers fundamental to the “re-indigenization” of the music—firmly within its seminal developmental ambit. In this paper, I draw upon artist interviews, ethnographic field research, and musicological analysis to cast new light upon the development of rocksteady’s startlingly original bass conceptions, which abandoned the walking basslines of African American jazz and boogie-woogie, in favor of locally conceived paradigms evincing noteworthy affinities to roots-drumming traditions like nyabinghi, while owing surprisingly little to the Motown/Stax-era soul models avowedly embraced by the musicians. As I demonstrate, from the time of their appropriation by the Muscle Shoals production team in the States—predating reggae’s rise to international prominence with Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” or Jimmy Cliff’s “Harder They Come” —rocksteady rhythms helped set in motion cycles of cross-fertilization blurring the boundaries between local and global, national and international, and ultimately leaving a distinctive Jamaican imprint upon cosmopolitan dance culture worldwide.

Decolonial movements and postcolonial theory have long debated the possibilities and hazards of using ideologies and strategies implicated in colonialism, acknowledging their affordances while warning of their pitfalls (Chatterjee 1986; Fanon 1961; Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2007). The Basque Country is a stateless nation on the Iberian Peninsula that has long resisted outside domination and music is one way in which Basques develop alternative visions for their future. In this project, I examine the repertoire, imagery, and performance techniques of the all-female Basque pop band Neomak, a group who began as back-up singers and percussionists in a project called “Kepa eta Sorginak” (Kepa and the Witches). In the Basque Country, the colonization of consciousness has occurred through restrictions and impositions upon the Basque language and through the portrayals of, and associations with, sorginak (“witches”) and other pre-Christian Basque figures. Through an in-depth examination of their eponymous 2022 album and a 2026 live concert, I explore how Neomak’s use of and promotion of the Basque language and Basque cultural autonomy through auto-exotification, sexualization, and the mannerisms, structures, and formulas of global pop music is not an anticolonial attempt to “dismantle the master’s house,” but rather an attempt to use “the master’s tools” to build their own home (Lorde 1984, 112). I seek to reveal how ethnomusicological research can offer insights into the difficulties of enacting meaningful change to oppressive systems and highlight the ways in which such actions can still be powerfully positive.

Ukrainian witches take many forms. One commonality that rises from their diverse practices is their ability to reach across the boundary between worlds. Like Baba Yaga’s one leg of bone and one of flesh, the Ukrainian witch straddles the boundaries between life and death, civilization and wilderness, the everyday and the supernatural, as well as the self and the other. Barbara Creed argues that such depictions of “monstrous” femininity can be wielded with the intent of challenging the patriarchal symbolic order and seeking alternative modes of being (2023). Others note that witchcraft serves as a last resort when one has no other recourse against oppression (Boudovskaia 2017; Kivelson 2013). This paper examines musical representations of witches in the works of Ukrainian singer and rapper Alina Pash during Russia’s war on Ukraine. My analysis demonstrates that, by using occult symbolism and folk belief to oppose Russia’s hegemonic claims, Pash’s music challenges colonial notions of ownership, belonging, and monolithic cultural and linguistic unity that have served as Vladimir Putin’s justification for the war. While Pash roots much of her work in Transcarpathian diversity, her sound is also internationally engaged, informed by collaborations with multiple international artists, genres, regional instruments, and languages. In this way, Pash’s witches contribute to a rich and diverse Ukrainian musical landscape whose lineages and solidarities can be traced both locally and globally. She displays the creative and political potential of crossing and dissolving sonic boundaries of identity and belonging that patriarchal aggressors seek to manipulate in their favor.

Building upon Akhil Gupta’s theories on urban decay, this paper positions urban soundscapes as a continuum of decay and ruination that shape acoustic experiences and reconfigure one’s orientation in place. Through soundwalks of abandoned environments in Dallas, Texas, I examine how the acoustic dimensions of derelict environments facilitate a mode of perception shaped by acoustic hauntings, uncanny atmospheres, and remnants of past human activity. Rather than treating abandoned and ruined soundscapes as static backdrops, I view urban soundscapes through Tim Edensor’s theory that ruined environments are dynamic, arguing that abandoned places function as ever-evolving acoustic fields marked by constantly shifting spatial and temporal horizons. Defined by the mnemonic traces of their former lives and the remnants of material environments that dwell within them, ruined places function as continuously evolving loci of collective memory, where temporality and spatiality collapse, creating a fragmented phenomenological experience of overlapping acoustic fields. By viewing urban soundscapes through the lens of ruination and decay, we can begin to understand how these auditory environments function as a process, rather than a location where sounds and silences are collected. This paper challenges the dominant human-centric assumptions of placemaking by demonstrating how soundscapes evolve beyond human habitation, resulting in an uncanny discord between their past lives and unrealized future horizons. By recentering acoustic experiences around displacement, absence, and loss, this phenomenological framework reconceptualizes the human relationship with sound, place, and temporality in contemporary urban soundscapes

Hantu (ghosts, spirits and/or demons in the Malay language) occupy an important place in Malaysian traditional belief and contemporary popular culture alike. From Malaysia’s significant production of pontianak (female vampire-ghost) films to infamous real-life instances of demon-induced mass hysteria in young women and girls, hantu have also come to represent Malaysia internationally, on and off the screen. This paper connects the changing role of spirit entities in postcolonial Malaysia with shifting local attitudes toward music and sound. I explore how music and sound are still today used to summon, negotiate and repel hantu as well as what these entities themselves “sound like” to modern Malaysians—following anthropologists such as Aihwa Ong and Emily Ng in taking ghosts seriously as an object of research. Indeed, while spirit possession, folklore, and belief in the supernatural are well documented in anthropological texts on Malaysia, and representations of such entities are an emerging topic in screen, media, and film studies, scholarship focused on music and sound in this area is relatively scarce. Working across texts in music and sound studies, hauntology, screen studies, postcolonial studies and folklore studies, I use ethnographic data collected in two fieldwork periods in 2025 to discuss the place of hantu in contemporary Malaysia. Through conversations with Malaysian musicians in both traditional (mak yong, wayang kulit) and popular music contexts, I argue that attitudes toward hantu are inextricably linked to music and sound’s subjugated and heavily-regulated place in Malaysian society.

Miami has functioned as a hemispheric crossroads where migration, media circulation, and cultural production reshape identities across national, racial, and political boundaries. This panel examines how musical and sonic practices mediate belonging among diasporic and Indigenous communities, positioning Miami not as a site of exile or enclave but as an center of cultural transformation. Through sound, ritual, and embodied experience, music generates forms of citizenship, spirituality, and collective identity.

The panel highlights three interconnected musical formations. Hannah Junco examines Colombian plant medicine practitioners affiliated with the Inti Runa Native American Church, showing how ceremonial music and altered states foster pan-Indigenous identities that transcend national origin. By transforming historically criminalized plants into sacred musical conduits, participants claim belonging while articulating prophetic visions of hemispheric reunification grounded in Indigenous relationality.

Mike Levine analyzes the circulation of Cuban reparto between Havana and Miami, arguing that the genre enables migrants to renegotiate diasporic citizenship under unstable legal and territorial conditions. As reparto moves across digital and physical spaces, it connects migrants to memories of Havana while re-centering Miami as a hub, revealing how diasporic subjects reconfigure cubanidad, belonging, and authenticity.

Maddy Allwein examines audience embodiment at the Miami Montreux Jazz Festival, where dance programming elicited minimal visible movement. She argues that surveillance, class dynamics, and multicultural spectatorship produced unity through restraint, demonstrating how belonging is enacted through the disciplined management of bodily presence.

Together, these papers show how Miami’s sonic landscape enables diasporic and Indigenous communities to reimagine identity, territory, and life through music.

In the years following the 2019 pro-democracy movement and the enactment of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, public protest has been curtailed, yet sound continues to register political life in altered, often subdued forms. This panel discusses how power, memory, and resistance are mediated through sound, silence, and material practices in post-protest Hong Kong, asking how audibility itself becomes a site of governance and dissent.

The first paper develops the idea of sonic hauntology to describe how political trauma and state authority linger in everyday life through both sound and enforced silence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it traces how censorship, euphemism, and self-censorship give rise to ghostly presences that shape musical and artistic expression. The second paper turns to the transformation of July 1—from a day of mass protest into a carefully managed state spectacle—examining how legislation, spatial control, and curated repertoires reconfigure the city’s soundscape. While projecting stability and patriotism, these sonic interventions paradoxically underscore the absence of protest. The third paper listens to the afterlife of the protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” through a music box, showing how collective memory and affect persist through small-scale, domestic, and diasporic listening practices.

Together, these papers listen for how sound, in its muted and mediated forms, sustains political subjectivity, historical memory, and collective feeling beyond the moment of protest. Attending to echoes, silences, and mediated resonances, the panel contributes to ethnomusicological debates on power, affect, and the sonic afterlives of protest.

African art music is frequently framed by debates over interculturality, hybridity and authenticity. This panel shifts the focus from whether the genre is "authentic" to how it actively theorizes culture through compositional, institutional, and social practices. We argue that "Africanness" is not a stable attribute but a product of translation—a dynamic process occurring across institutions, instruments, and gendered histories.

Three papers examine distinct manifestations of this process. Presenter 1 analyzes institutional mediation through the Àkójọpọ̀ commissioning project, demonstrating how infrastructure—including rehearsal practices and curation—translates cultural imagination into a lived Pan-African identity. Presenter 2 theorizes "African pianism" as a sonic and perceptual act of translation. Introducing the "translative imaginary," he shows how pianistic gesture and texture reconfigure rhythmic imaginaries associated with broader African instrumental traditions through the interplay of performance and listening. Presenter 3 examines translation as a social and ideological process. Using intersectional feminist theory, she explores how colonial restructurings of gender roles became embedded in musical institutions, shaping twentieth-century canon formation and the exclusion of women from compositional discourse.

Together, these papers propose that African art music is a site of layered translation. By integrating ethnographic fieldwork, performance-based research, and feminist theory, the panel offers a methodological intervention into global music scholarship. We move beyond treating Africanness as a static trait, showing instead how it is actively composed, mediated, and negotiated through sound, social structure, and human agency.

In this 90-minute workshop, participants will learn the basic Cambodian dance hand gestures to explore the cycle of life cycle. Textual documentation, iconography, and oral histories explain that the art of Cambodian classical dance is over a thousand years old and a form of prayer performed in temples for rain and fertility, essential to the Cambodian agrarian society. Since the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975-1979), Cambodian performing arts have reached new heights because artists who survived and transmitted these cultural traditions. Using gestural metaphors rooted in various stages of growth from the plant life cycle, such as planting, growing, young leaves, flowering, and ripe fruit, Cambodian dancers embody the transformations in nature. Dancers evoke the serpent's spirit in their bodies by imagining rivers, transforming into life-giving water cutting across the earth and tying back the practice to local Khmer spirituality. The first part of the workshop will introduce classical dance stretches and basic hand gestures that narrate the cycle of life metaphor. Then, we will teach the dance, "Flowers of the World," a dance taught to young and beginner dancers to solidify foundational techniques. Lastly, we will end the workshop by teaching a popular dance called romvong. The story of the plant cycle, as told through dance, can be interpreted as a metaphor for present-day Cambodian creatives who thrive from the resilience of surviving artists and teachers. Now, dancers choreograph dances in Cambodia while using traditional practices to reclaim cultural identity and heal from the trauma of war, genocide, and displacement.

In his watershed Ethnomusicology article from 1997, “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space,” Jonathan Sterne launched commercial background music as a serious subject of ethnomusicological study and, with it, not only a revitalization of sound studies but a lively subfield devoted to “ubiquitous listening” and its varying degrees and weights of attention (Goldschmitt 2020; Kassabian 2013; Larkin 2014; Stoever 2016). However, ethnomusicological engagement with the background music industry has been fleeting since that time, despite the fact that it has experienced socially telling changes that both reflect and affect how businesses conceive the effectiveness of recorded music as a component of experience design. This panel provides a corrective with three examples of research devoted not only to more recent developments but also to new vantage points on established business models and programming practices. The first presentation considers the continuities and sea changes represented by the rise in AI-generated background music use. The second explores meanings behind the unprecedented displacement of Christmas-season holiday standards as a pillar of U.S. background music programming beginning in the 2020s. The third examines a new blurring between background and foreground music by streaming services and its effects upon listeners and listening practices. All three presentations address not only the diminished earning power of content creation and curation in the background music industry but also, more generally, the relationship between ubiquitous listening and aggressively neoliberal socioeconomic moves.

Wrestling is a compulsory ritual of manhood for young men of the Senegalese Jola ethnic group. Featuring signature rhythmic patterns, pre- and post-match dance styles, and friendly song competitions, it is also an intrinsically musical social field. Every young Jola man has personal songs made about his wrestling career, which not only reflect his strength and bravery but inspire him to embody those values. These songs accompany men through their lives, becoming markers of gendered reputations that persist long after their wrestling days are over. In this presentation, I demonstrate that wrestling music teaches young men to envoice Jola masculine aesthetics. Specifically, wrestlers learn to “sing hard” (kakijiyen laal) and “sing abundantly” (kakijiyen gnë), producing deep, resonant vocal timbres that both index and vocally enact masculine ideals of strength (sembe) and vigor (eser). In turn, singing collectively in a community of men feeds back to publicly affirm Jola masculine values and vocal aesthetics. In this sense, wrestling songs link individual lives and ways of vocalizing with broader cultural values. The heightened stakes of ritual performance ingrains these gendered vocal norms so powerfully that they carry forward into everyday speech contexts, teaching young Jolas that they must “speak like a man” and verbally “demonstrate rigor” at all times to generate respect. Based on interviews and observations of wrestling events during fifteen years of fieldwork in southern Senegal, this presentation contributes to voice studies as well as foundational research on athletics, ritual, and gender.

In this paper, I explore how the Beninese star Angelique Kidjo has developed philosophies and aesthetics that are both Afrocentric and eco-feminist over the course of her long career. Focusing in particular on two albums, Ayé (“Life,” 1994) and Mother Nature (2021), I draw on interviews with Kidjo and fieldwork in Benin to unpack her deepening ecomusicological vision. Notably, Kidjo wrote the material for Ayé when she was pregnant with her daughter Naïma, and the album reflects the ways that becoming a mother crystallized her identity as an artist-activist. She expresses this new positionality through the imagery of vodun Dan, the serpent who holds up the earth in the cosmology of southern Benin. I also discuss the ways that the album creates an Afrofuturistic sound world using innovative studio technologies. Kidjo’s album Mother Nature, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, finds her contemplating again the intersections of her own feminist position with the deepening environmental crisis, now through the sounds of contemporary Afrobeats music. I suggest that Kidjo is doing the work of an ìyálóde, a figure in Yoruba culture known as a “public mother,” a spiritually powerful, respected political agent who manages conflict, represents women in political affairs, and oversees the market. I place Kidjo’s work in conversation with African eco-feminism, including the Nigerian scholar Catherine Acholonu’s (1995) concept of “motherism,” which she calls an “Afrocentric alternative to feminism.” I seek to bring this discussion of gender and motherhood to bear on ecomusicological questions about nature, culture, and sound.

A recent more-than-human, multinaturalist turn in ethnomusicology attends to living, sounding beings, often positioning them non-hierarchically. Likewise, as Senegalese Islamic proverbs and stories consistently demonstrate, humans are part of a Divine community which includes animals, trees, and the ocean, among other creatures. But humans are considered unique in their place within Divine community because of their freedom of choice to disobey God, a choice which—Leopold Sedar Senghor said—makes the act of being human both “a question and a worry.” For humans imbued with this singular responsibility, listening and hearing are essential. Individuals must attend to the sounds of advice, social norms, and non-humans in the surrounding world, in order to fashion an ethical humanity where people live in community with each other, non-humans, and God. This paper explores the sonic constitution of Divine community in Senegal through proverbs, stories, and ethnographic work centered around the Islamic holiday of Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) in the urban capital of Dakar. In the days leading up to Tabaski, the city fills with the sounds of preparation, generosity, and sheep, followed by the sounds of slaughter and preservation, offering a temporal window in which to hear Divine community. This paper prods at the crafting of humanity within this community—as modern, sociable, and ethical—through the sonic.

This paper examines a strand of Black music history in southern Iran from the late Qajar to early Pahlavi era, focusing on the entanglement of slav ery, abolition, and the agency of Black musicians in shaping religious and non-religious music across public and semi-public spaces. Framed by the contemporary resonance of loud, collective, male-only dammām drum ming during Muharram and Safar in Bushehr, it considers how this his tory is narrated today by local performers and scholars, and how these narratives intersect with, or diverge from, historical accounts. I draw on historical accounts in which the presence of Black people is most often de scribed through musical moments. These sources reveal how music linked to marginalized communities circulated between religious and non-reli gious settings, often inhabiting liminal positions—between sound and si lence, freedom and unfreedom, visibility and invisibility—especially in the years immediately after abolition, when former slaves navigated new so cial and economic roles. By rereading these fragmentary sources alongside contemporary oral histories, I discuss an alternative way of thinking about the past of this collective music, one that bears the history of life in a port city shaped by the Indian Ocean slave trade and layered with geopolitical upheavals. The paper concludes by returning to the present-day dammām drumming of Bushehr, which endures not only as an audible trace of the past but also as a vessel for its silences, erasures, and the shifting bound aries between what is remembered and what is forgotten.

This paper examines the mid-twentieth-century Iranian radio program Golha (1956–1979) as a project of mediated modernity that challenges dominant colonial and developmentalist narratives of tradition and modernity. Scholarship on Middle Eastern music has often framed modernity as rupture—an inevitable displacement of classical forms by media, nationalism, or Westernization. By contrast, Golha demonstrates a distinctly Iranian model of balanced modernity in which radio functioned not as a vehicle of cultural erasure but as a mediating instrument for ethical continuity.
Conceived by Davud Pirnia, Golha embedded Persian classical music within poetry, interpretive commentary, and disciplined listening practices. Rather than popularizing or folklorizing art music, the programs cultivated what I call an ethics of listening—an aesthetic formation grounded in moderation, relationality, and care. Central to this formation was the emergence of the “unseen feminine voice”: female announcers whose disembodied yet authoritative presence reconfigured sonic gender without relying on visual visibility. Here, femininity operates not as identity politics but as epistemology—a logic of balance and receptivity that structures the relationship between music, poetry, and listener.
Drawing on decolonial theory and feminist ethics of care, I argue that Golha anticipates contemporary debates on decolonizing archives and media by modeling sound as relational rather than extractive. Its recent digital revival through the Golha Project extends this ethic transnationally, transforming archival practice into shared stewardship. By centering listening rather than spectacle, Golha offers ethnomusicology a case of modernity without rupture, authority without domination, and mediation as resistance.

This paper examines the social aesthetics of reng, a precomposed instrumental form in Iranian dastgāh music, and its gradual decline since the late twentieth century. Historically associated with dance (raqs), reng functions as a lively piece in duple or triple meter at moderate to fast tempos in Persian classical music (Farhat 2004, 22). For centuries, reng’s connection to dance embodiment, courtesan culture, and theatrical entertainment contributed to its lower artistic status under Islamic rule. During the early twentieth century, however, the modernist reforms of the Pahlavi era and new developments of Iranian art music elevated both the musical complexity and cultural standing of reng. It emerged as a respected independent composition, valued for rhythmic vitality and stylized syncopation, and frequently concluded prominent vocal genres such as tasnīf or an entire dastgāh performance (Azadehfar 2011; Zonis 1973). The compositional innovations of master-musicians, including Ali-Naqi Vaziri, Abolhassan Saba, Ruhollah Khaleqi, Darvishkhan, and Faramarz Payvar, further consolidated its pedagogical and performative significance. Despite these developments, reng entered a new phase of decline in the late twentieth century. Through analysis of selected musical examples, this study traces this fading to broader socio-cultural transformations: emergent waves of traditionalisms enhanced by orientalist discourses of spirituality, the marginalization of the popular 6/8 idiom (shish-o-hasht), and cultural reforms intensified after the 1979 revolution. I argue that shifts in social aesthetics, embodied ideologies, and reconfigured identities have decisively shaped the fortunes of reng in contemporary Iran. This study contributes to the broader debates on music, aesthetics, and cultural transformation.

In the seminal “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), Donna Haraway argues that technological advancement ushers in a utopian age that dissolves the categories of race and gender and the distinctions between man, machine, and nature. Post-bubble Japanese media, whether psychological sci-fi anime or vocaloid music, repudiates this stance (Uno 2008); as time goes on, the cyborg becomes less human but more feminized and more racially marked (Eidsheim 2019). This paper considers the music of Vocaloid utaite (cover singer) Ado and her harsh vocal, lyrical, and visual critiques of the Japanese idol industry as a case in which technological advancement reifies and exacerbates the social, gendered, and material conditions that produced it. We explore cybernetic women as a hyper-feminized, posthuman subject in Japanese popular culture by drawing parallels between Ado’s recordings and sci-fi anime Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Serial Experiments Lain (1998). We argue that the fetishized feminine figure, modified by the male gaze and the manipulation of the voice and physical body by technology (Black 2012, Lam 2016), ushers in a society in which intimate, sexual relationships between humans are replaced with parasocial relationships between male and machine (Aoyagi 2005). Ado, and other Vocaloid singers like yama and Kenshi Yonezu, comprise a system wherein humans imitate machines emulating humans, all while losing their humanness in the process. Vocaloid singers’ voices become subjects of fetishization: as the ultimate site to fulfill a fantasy about female bodies, and as a cyborgian projection of the futile future of humanity.

A stroll down the avenues of the Xinyi or Ximending shopping districts in Taipei will yield quite a few busking shows ranging from musical performances to terrifying acrobatics. And if it’s a nice Saturday, there will be at least 10 amateur dance troupes vying for a performance spot to film their next “K-pop in Public” cover for YouTube. These dance troupes are not buskers. They do not request permits, ask for money, or even interact with crowds. While they help to define the spaces in which they perform, they are more a part of a global community associated with the “K-pop in Public” trend – in which dance troupes ranging from amateur to semi-professional imitate K-pop dance videos in public spaces for online consumption. While the use of “irl” spaces in these videos affects the physical community that they are a part of similar to buskers, the larger impact lies elsewhere – a sort of grassroots cultural export that brings the place into online spaces and communities and highlights aspects of local culture even as it participates in and reifies a global phenomenon. This paper will utilize studies on place and space, globalization and glocalization, mediascapes, performance practice, identity, and Taiwanese and Korean studies to argue that Taiwanese youth are not only reifying Taiwanese identity and creating locality through their participation in “K-pop in Public”, but are also protecting and future-proofing Taiwanese identity as artifacts of both identity and place continue to travel ever more broadly through a globalized mediascape.

Research by computer engineers on the technical and scientific aspects of AI music generation has expanded rapidly in recent years (Cros Vila et al. 2025; Hernandez-Olivan and Beltran 2021; Mycka and Mańdziuk 2024; Rowe 2020; Yang and Lerch 2020; Zhao et al. 2025). However, few studies have examined AI as part of a collaborative creative process (Knees et al. 2020; Newman et al. 2023; Rohrmeier 2022). Existing examples of AI-based artists show that coherent musical output is possible (King and Earl 2025; Kleinman 2025; Lozo 2026; Vaziri 2025), but research rarely documents the artistic processes or reflects critically on human choices in AI music generation (Gioti 2020; Micchi et al. 2021). Studies examining AI as part of a human-led approach, in which composers guide and transform commercial AI-generated material, have yet to be conducted. Addressing this gap, this paper examines AI-assisted music-making through hokutone, a virtual Japanese rock band and AI music project that serves as a platform for practice-based research into human and AI collaboration. It investigates how human composer-songwriters work with AI-generated music as a creative tool, considering its advantages, limitations, and the ethical concerns surrounding intellectual property. Central to this process is the design of prompts or written instructions that commercial AI platforms such as Suno rely on to generate music. This paper explores human interaction with AI-generated music, analyzing how composers experiment with creative choices, express their artistic identity, and the extent to which AI contributes independently, revealing the complex dynamics of creative collaboration with technology.

In recent years, a significant body of scholarship has been devoted to critiquing the settler-colonial epistemologies embedded in 'acoustic ecology,' particularly in relation to R. Murray Schaffer and the World Soundscape Project (Robinson 2020; Hagood 2021). While this work has illuminated the indigenous erasure and environmental imaginaries shaping late twentieth-century listening listening practices, comparatively little attention has been paid to parallel ecological discourses within Black music. Many artists associated with the 1970s jazz avant-garde developed novel ways of theorizing relationships between human and non-human actors, instantiating them in new musical and pedagogical forms.

This presentation examines these questions through the music and pedagogy of Robert Northern (Brother Ah). After performing with leading jazz artists in the 1960s, Northern developed a set of relational listening practices in the early 1970s that he referred to as “sound awareness,” an encompassing philosophy of ecological listening shaped by his travels across the African continent and by Afrocentric thought. As an instructor at Dartmouth College (1970-73), he developed pedagogical practices oriented not only toward trained musicians but toward “anyone who would awaken to music in the natural world.”

For Northern, communion nature and with an ancestral homeland were inseparable; nature’s real or imagined wholeness served to counteract the violent rupture of diaspora, providing rootedness to those who have been forcibly uprooted. Situating Northern alongside contemporaries such as Sun Ra, and drawing from theorists Fumi Okiji and Kodwo Eshun, this paper reframes 1970s Black experimental music as a crucial, yet overlooked, site of ecological thought.

On a rainy September afternoon in 2010, members of the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band departed South Rich High School for Chicago's Chinatown Square. The patter of rain on concrete and metal was cut by snares and the opening strains of Sun Ra's "Space Is the Place" (1973), as the once-empty agora filled with uniformed bodies in musical lockstep. This flash-mob performance marked the culminating event of visual artist and scholar Cauleen Smith's residency with Chicago art organization Threewalls, during which she organized performances of Sun Ra’s archive with different South Side high-school marching bands.

This paper examines how Smith's performances activated archival materials to broaden networks of South Side identity and diasporic memory. Drawing on Daphne Brooks's (2021) theorization of sonic curation as Black feminist labor of Black cultural stewardship and transmission, I frame Smith's work as a form of sonic curation that activates Ra’s archive through cross-cultural performance.

My argument proceeds in two stages. First, I contextualize this particular engagement within Smith's broader Arkestral Marching Band project. Second, I examine the flash-mob as evoking a ritual site where social relations are organized and restructured. Pairing performance and musical analysis with accounts from Smith herself, I show how the marching band structure and flash-mob staging adapt Sun Ra's repertory to engage South Side communities in Ra's spirit of collective minoritarian resistance. The choice of Chinatown Square situates the event as a cross-cultural encounter in which Afro–Asian coalition is enacted through live performance.

Tactical urbanism is a term used to describe do-it-yourself, citizen-led interventions in urban space, such as painting bike lanes, putting up stop signs at unsafe intersections, or installing café tables and planters without government approval. Though its detractors criticize a potential disruption in social order, its proponents advocate for its nimble approach to urban problem-solving through non-governmental means. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Julan Henriques, archival research at York University and NYU, and fieldwork in Toronto and Brooklyn, this paper connects tactical urbanism to diasporic Caribbean performance practices through an analysis of Toronto's Caribana and Brooklyn’s Jouvé, the largest Caribbean festivals in North America. I argue that Afro-Caribbean street performance, built upon long-standing practices of resistance strategies to colonial oppression, are a form of subaltern territorial claim and improvised spatial reorganization within the urban environments of Toronto and New York City. In doing so, I aim to both reframe and expand tactical urbanist discourses to highlight/include the sonic and performative and bring the concept of tactical urbanism to bear on ethnomusicological case studies. My paper will analyze the ways that Caribana and Jouvé, which use sonic and visual/performance practices to claim urban space and assert Caribbean presence, operate as citizen-led interventions that address issues of invisibility and marginality that diasporic Caribbean citizens encounter in North American metropoles.

Since John Blacking did so in a 1987 book, Australian-American composer and pianist Percy Grainger (1882-1961) has often been labelled an underappreciated pioneer in ethnomusicology. This claim mainly rests on two of Grainger’s activities: First, his innovative approach to folk song collecting, and second, his 1932 NYU class “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music,” one of the first university World Music surveys. But while Grainger’s methodology for folk song collection bears detailed examination (e.g., he was an early advocate of wax cylinder recording, and his transcriptions sought to capture microtonal variation and rhythmic nuance), his NYU class is more likely to be praised only for its inclusive approach to world music. His categorization in the class of the world’s musics into two racial-ethnic categories, “Mongolian-Javanese-Celtic-Nordic-Anglosaxon” and “East Indian-Arab-Moorish,” is generally dismissed as arbitrary and unscientific. In this paper, I argue that while Grainger’s framework was indeed arbitrary, he nevertheless constructed it out of what he believed to be a methodologically rigorous combination of scholarship in comparative musicology with his substantial firsthand experience with traditional Asian and Pacific music and European folk music. I identify the comparative-musicological sources of Grainger’s ideas, primarily the writings of Karl Bücher and Joseph Yasser, and analyze how Grainger adapted their arguments to present students with a racialized model of the world’s musics across two semesters. In doing so, I broaden our understanding of the history of ethnomusicology and complicate the history of World Music teaching in the US academy.

By analyzing A Paper on Chinese Music (1907) by Mary Martin Richard (1843-1903), a Scottish Baptist missionary in late Qing China who uncharacteristically adapted “un-Westernized” local Chinese musics for devotional purposes, this paper presents a case study that, I argue, shows clear evidence of a sympathetic attitude and open-minded approach towards Chinese musics and their practitioners from the perspective of a Christian-European expatriate in the age of high Western imperialism and “scientific” racism. Unsurprisingly, Eurocentrically culturalist and/or racist ideas and attitudes are commonly found in late 19^th and early 20^th century European texts on Chinese music, such as J.A. Van Aalst's Chinese Music (1884). I show how A Paper on Chinese Music differs from similar texts in one crucial aspect: while the author does not completely dispense with the commonly held idea of “civilized vs. barbarous,” she at times reflexively relativizes and, thus, de-Eurocentricizes it. This is clearly shown in her discussion of the lack of harmony in Chinese music: after pointing out that European harmony, typically regarded as an emblem of European musical superiority then, “is said to have come from Northern barbarous hordes,” she claims, in an as-a-matter-of-fact manner, that “doubtless [the Chinese] think [our harmony] barbarous” (17). I further suggest that her problematization of Euro-supremacism and Euro-exceptionalism was ideationally grounded in a Christian-universalist worldview. Theoretically, I hope to shed some light on the complex and not always harmonious relations between Eurocentrism(s) and Universalism(s), which tend to be lumped together in discussions within contemporary Anglophone music studies.

This paper examines teaching ethnomusicology in a post-socialist East-Central European country as a situated practice marked by a constant effort of translation between languages, cultural and geopolitical histories, and academic traditions. This involves translation between English and a local language, but also between ethnomusicology as a ‘global’ Western academic discipline—whose theoretical discussions are largely shaped by postcolonial and decolonial discourses—and its ‘local’ practice in the transforming post-socialist (Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021), “white but not quite” (Kalmar 2022), semi-peripheral and disenchanted (Krastev and Holmes 2019) East-Central Europe, which occupies a precarious geopolitical position between others’ imperial and colonial aspirations (Feinberg 2024). Historically without colonies but sharing aspects of the colonial imagination towards the Global South (and sometimes their inner Others), and through their membership in (or candidate status for) the EU and NATO, these countries today experience their own “point zero of decolonization” (Barša 2020). Against this backdrop, I have had to negotiate my position as both a teacher and a translator of ethnomusicology at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, for more than a decade. To support Czech-speaking students, I translated Rice’s Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (published in Czech in 2020), and I initiated and serve as the main academic editor of the Czech translation of Rommen’s and Nettl’s Excursions in World Music, 8th edition (forthcoming). The paper offers grounded reflections on teaching and translating ethnomusicology as situated cultural practices and critiques epistemic schemes organizing ethnomusicological knowledge that sometimes lack nuance regarding the East-Central European situation and replicates Cold-War stereotypes.

Recent studies of recording industries have begun to shift from focusing on corporate structures and technology to increasing inclusion of the impact of such technologies on the musical craftsmen (Hesmondhalgh 2019; Stahl 2013). Compensatory studies that attend to musicians in studios reveal the extent to which music industries exploit creative joy for the sake of profit margins at the cost of human well-being and economic stability. In Türkiye Romani communities have been socially, politically and economically marginalized since the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires into the contemporary Republic period, yet throughout these periods have provided crucial services in niche occupations---musicianship constituting the most prestigious and audible work. By focusing on the role of Romani musicians in the changing structures of the Ottoman-Turkish recording industries, I propose a deeper understanding of the role of creative laborers whose musical production has been a crucial yet hidden factor in recording history. From 1890 to the present, the Ottoman to Turkish recording periods evidence dialectical influences by which musicians' subjectivities were shaped, as well profoundly impacted the structures of recording practices. In this way I expand upon Sterne’s 2013 insight into the mutual development of technology, fidelity and liveness into the co-development of musicians’ craftsmanship, subjectivity and recordings. Drawing upon field research and archival materials, I propose 5 areas of investigation: 1) local values and traditions of craftsmanship; 2) mimesis in terms of dialectical relationship between "live" and "recorded" sound; 3) genrefication; 4) tensions between commercial -v- state discourses; 5) transnational distribution networks.

In 2010, UNESCO classified Western Armenian as a “definitely endangered” language, highlighting the need for language revitalization in Armenian diaspora communities. This research examines a community-centered approach to revitalizing Armenian heritage language through the integration of folk songs that remain active in modern-day Turkey, Armenia, and diaspora communities worldwide. Many of these songs are preserved in Western Armenian dialects such as Hamshen, Gyumri, and Akhalkalak. Hamshen folk songs, now republished in contemporary musical formats like Black Sea Rock, increase their relevance and accessibility for younger generations. Folk songs, being communal, offer a supportive environment for diasporic Armenians to reconnect with their heritage language, helping to counteract the insecurity that often hinders language use. Research by Salcedo (2002) and Engh (2013) shows that language acquisition thrives in low-anxiety environments, and music can lower emotional barriers, enhance vocabulary recall, and improve pronunciation. Folk music’s deep connection to heritage language reinforces cultural identity, making it a key element in diaspora language education. This research includes ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2025 and March 2026 in various diaspora communities, participatory action research through folk singing workshops in diaspora communities, and analysis of interviews with the diaspora’s older generations and music educators, and performances. It uses frameworks from ethnomusicology, heritage language education, and affective theory in second language acquisition to explore how musical participation fosters linguistic confidence and emotional ties to Armenian identity. Ultimately, folk song practices in diaspora communities can serve as vital tools for sustaining Armenian heritage language and fostering a sense of collective belonging.

This paper examines female Islamic singing in the Balkans through a comparative perspective linking Southeast Europe with Central Asia. If Islam is transmitted not only through doctrine but also through sound—recitation, lamentation, devotional poetry, melodic formulae—then women’s vocal practices become important sites of religious continuity and lived knowledge.Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina and comparative research in Uzbekistan, I explore devotional genres such as ilahije, na‘t, nesheed, salavat, mevlud and Hudoyi recitations, and zikr-related repertoires as gendered sound worlds of faith. In both regions, women’s singing often takes place in semi-private, domestic, yet socially meaningful settings. These performances cultivate what Mahmood (2005) calls pious agency—forms of ethical self-making shaped through devotional practice. Following Sugarman’s (1997) insight that singing produces subjectivity rather than simply expressing it, I argue that female devotional performance actively shapes religious identity. Through vocal timbre, maqam-based melodic patterns, poetic language, and performance context, women articulate moral commitment and communal resilience.The comparison highlights shared Islamic sound principles—clear delivery of sacred text, melismatic expression, modal organisation—alongside different historical experiences. In Central Asia, women’s Islamic singing adapted to Soviet secularism; in the Balkans, it responded to war, displacement, and post-socialist revival.Placing Balkan devotional singing within a broader Islamic acoustic tradition (Asad 1993; Hirschkind 2006), this paper argues that women’s voices function as forms of sonic authority through which piety, resilience, and religious meaning are sustained across Asia and Europe.