What does basketball sound like? Football? Baseball? Soccer? Indigenous sports? This roundtable examines how music and sound shape the performance, experience, and understanding of sport across various arenas, real and imagined. In this age of surgent nationalism, sports soundscapes play an increasingly significant role in public discourse as scenes of social, political, and epistemic struggle and expression, and as sites for negotiating ideas, identities, ideologies, and ontologies across a diversity of situated and large-scale social contexts. While the intersection of music, sound, and sport has long been an object of ethnomusicological inquiry, brought to the fore with important works by Tim Cooley and the late Ken McLeod, the field demands further investigation as halftime shows, crowd singalongs, DJs, organs, chants, and cheers demonstrate the critical role of the aural in sport’s global mediascape. This roundtable brings together six scholars conducting cutting-edge research and developing innovative pedagogical approaches to teaching these materials. Drawing on fieldwork across North America, Europe, and South America, participants examine basketball, football, baseball, soccer, and Indigenous sporting practices. Their research spans the late nineteenth century to the present, employing methodologies from historical archival research to sensory ethnography and research-creation. Collectively, they address the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of their work along with the sociocultural and political implications of their teaching and writing. Following ten-minute position statements, presenters will discuss how sports soundscapes serve as sites of power, politics, and pedagogy, setting the stage for extended audience discussion with the field’s most pressing questions and future directions.

Mainstream environmentalism has a reputation as gloomy, nostalgic, or self-righteous, but environmentalist work outside these modes has potential to be more inclusive and effective. Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism (2018) makes this case through an examination of ecological art and performance that use what she calls “bad affects” to advance an alternative green politics. Inspired by Seymour, this roundtable gathers scholars to engage in “bad ecomusicology” and consider music and sound art that mobilize irreverence, mundanity, queerness, playfulness, or sexiness as part of environmental discourse.

Presenter 1 examines Stevie Wonder’s 1979 album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, arguing that its marginalization reveals narrow cultural expectations about environmental sound and who can create it. Panelist 2 explores an Aotearoa New Zealand competition for saxophone compositions designed to get the endangered kākāpō “in the mood,” sounding out how humor, romance, finance, and conservation intertwine through biopolitical investments in “amatonormativity” (Brake 2011). Panelist 3 critiques the pursuit of “novel sonics” in field recording, highlighting how the search for unheard sounds can romanticize environmental difference and overlook the creative potential of familiar soundscapes. Panelist 4 examines Tom Lehrer’s subversive 1950s and 60s comedy, demonstrating how his songs offered audiences humorous yet provocative ways to confront environmental and existential crises while operating within the mainstream. Panelist 5 analyzes Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s 2024 audio installation “Forest as Lover” to show how their ecosexual approach uses intimate, typically private sonic practices to transform the forest into a playful and erotic site.

In 2026, the pre-conference organizers for the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology tried something new. Instead of curating a mini-conference, they created the “Returning” Workshop for Collections in Need of Communities. This workshop, conceived as a direct response to the call of our colleagues during the 2023 Seeger Lecture, was designed to provide hands-on training for any practicing ethnomusicologist interested in connecting communities with their recorded music, dance, language, and other cultural heritage held in archives. The 2026 Workshop returns us to our roots as a discipline, where collections of sound recordings were created as part of standard professional practice, and provided a pathway for wide-scale participation in the shared obligation to help with return.

This roundtable reflects on the major lessons of the pre-conference and invites the audience to collectively consider how best to continue the work of return. Panelist 1 will discuss the vision and planning for the Workshop, addressing the collective responsibility for the rift that separated songs, sounds and other media from their communities of origin in a political-economic context that has stripped resources, increased workloads, and fostered precarity among professional archivists. Panelist 2 will speak about the impetus for the preconference and plans for ongoing initiatives by SEM. Panelists 3, 4, and 5 will share their experiences as presenters and mentors for return. They will reflect on the histories of extraction and ethics of return, about potential models for proactive return, and the hands-on training they provided.

In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James centers Black revolutionary agency in the Haitian Revolution, challenging European class-reductionist models of Marxism and demonstrating that race and colonialism fundamentally shape revolutionary struggle. Taking James’s intervention as a point of departure, this paper asks: What does it mean to invoke “Black Jacobins” in a contemporary U.S. punk scene? How do anti-capitalist musicians mobilize revolutionary history in the present? And how might ethnomusicology theorize the relationship between class struggle and identity-based politics?

I examine the song “Black Jacobins” and its music video by the Tallahassee-based punk band Degenerate State. Shifting between syncopated bass grooves and thrashing hardcore textures, the song references the Haitian Revolution before pivoting to the refrain, “Wake up, it’s a world revolution.” Drawing on participant observation in the Tallahassee punk/DIY scene—including shows, reading groups, protests, and mutual aid events—as well as interviews with band members, I situate the song within a local culture of Marxist-Leninist organizing.

Building on Barbara Foley’s theory of Intersectional Marxism (Foley 2019), I argue that Degenerate State’s work refuses the presumed opposition between class analysis and identity politics. All members of the band identify as Trans or Non-Binary, and their revolutionary aesthetics emerge within a regional political climate shaped by legislation such as Florida’s HB 1069. An intersectional Marxist lens, I suggest, allows ethnomusicology to theorize contemporary musical outrage as both structural critique and embodied survival.

In describing various aggressive styles of dance collectively glossed as “moshing,” participants in the hardcore punk subculture often claim that the music “makes” them move without conscious thought. Such “involuntary” responses to musical gestures echo common descriptions of affect as precognitive or pre-discursive (Desai-Stephens and Reisnour 2020). Drawing from ethnographic research in United States hardcore punk scenes, this paper thus considers how affect might be productively mobilized to theorize music’s capacity to initiate moshing. I argue that affect, in dialogue with subcultural practices and discourses, spurs specific movements in the mosh pit, and that these embodied experiences are integral to participants’ engagement with the subculture. Utilizing Garcia-Mispireta’s concept of “sonic tactility” (2023) and Kapchan’s “aesthetics of proximity” (2021), I suggest that affect acts as conduit between proximal sounds and bodies in the mosh pit. Through specific sonic gestures, musicians engage in a sensory dialogue with audience members to encourage particular, often physically violent kinds of movement, retained in participants through an ongoing process of affective entrainment. I discuss affect’s role in fostering community and intimacy through moshing, while paradoxically normalizing violent behavior. I thus consider how these sonic and affective intensities inform nuanced subcultural ethics surrounding the acceptable threshold for violence in the mosh pit. Following recent scholarship on the “affective turn” in music studies, I posit that a deeper understanding of the music’s affect lends crucial insight into the role of sound in reflecting subcultural politics, which often aim to subvert normative behaviors and cultural formations.

A few nights a month, members of the D.C. folk punk scene gather in a small venue or bar to sing and mosh together to the sound of banjos, mandolins, accordions and horns. Amidst original songs outlining the future anarchist revolution, artists lead the room in impassioned choruses of leftist anthems like “Solidarity Forever” and “Bella Ciao.” Many folk punk artists intentionally reference songs from the past when performing in the district in order to convey a sense of continuity between the subculture and anarchist and leftist movements at large. However, I argue that by also leading group singing about events taking place in D.C., the local band Trash Boat and the Ambush link the notion of an anarchist revolution to actions that can be taken against the U.S. government by scene members in their immediate community. I focus on performances of two of their original songs: “The Ballad of Rahul Dubey” and “Burn it Down,” which are situated in the recent past and imagined future of D.C. respectively. This paper, based on ongoing ethnographic research, makes a significant contribution to scholarship on folk punk, as published work on this topic is limited to one recent article (Fox 2024). It also builds on related scholarship on anarcho-punk (Mattern 2016, Dunn 2012) and dynamics of participatory music making (Turino 2008) as part of a larger project on the intersection of folk punk scene participation and anarchist resistance in the U.S.

Soaked in sweat and rain, my voice hoarse from singing, and my body numb with exhaustion, I came to fully understand the appeal of BaianaSystem’s epic Carnival parades. Every time the heavily political popular music fusion band leads a parade in Salvador’s Carnival season on their pirate ship float—rain or shine—one will see thousands of fans bouncing wildly in synchronized chaos. Partly based on my experience and participant observation of this parade in 2025, this paper will explore how the band carefully calculates moments for sonic and corporeal climactic unity through massive synchronization namely by playing key, unifying melodies that require audience participation during the parade’s most climactic moments. The presentation remarks how BaianaSystem builds their parade upon a desfile de paz (parade of peace) that condemns fighting, pushing, and moshing to the music—which often occurs in many other parades. Instead, the fans are encouraged to jump up without harming others, collectively uniting to manifest the musical-political resistance and release through peaceful demonstration. I argue that this resistance is reminiscent of the Black Radial Tradition initially proposed by Cedric Robinson (1983), that has recently reemerged in ethnomusicology literature (Barson 2025, Harris 2022), and that I argue appears in Salvador’s Bloco Afro movement starting in the 1970s (Case 2024, 2025). Having recently earned a Latin Grammy for their album released in early 2025, right before Carnival, the crowd was especially ready to collectively unite in synchronized chaos and Black resistance around BaianaSystem’s pirate ship.

Ethnomusicology has historically defined itself as the study of “humanly organized sound” (Blacking 1973). While this definition served a purpose in decentering Western Classical Music, scholars in a wide range of fields have recently questioned the figure of “the human,” its function in humanities discourses, and the historical inequities it implies (Boiserron 2018; Haraway 2008; Jackson 2020). Adding to an emergent interest in multispecies ethnomusicology (Silvers 2020; Steingo 2024; Mundy 2018; Feld 1982), this panel asks what a multiplicity of approaches to the role of the human in ethnomusicology might look like, seeking to situate the more-than-human in frameworks as disparate as sound studies, feminist science and technology studies, ecomusicology, Indigenous ontologies, and Black studies. In addition to decentering scientific and colonial conceptions of “the human” that continue to govern ethnomusicological study, this panel is deliberately interdisciplinary with the goal of forging new methodologies, inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s calls for a “new science” to address the complex nature-cultural problems of the 21^st century (2003). Thus while the topic of the panel is non-human engagements within ethnomusicology, its implications for the field are methodological as well as topical, considering the role of academic knowledge-making practices in reifying certain structures through continuing to center “the human.” This panel derives from a 2024 symposium and forthcoming volume titled Ethnomusicology Beyond the Human (Oxford University Press).

This paper examines how Greek American film constructs ethnic identity through sound, attending to the musical materials that make “Greekness” immediately audible. Focusing on the 2002 film My Big Fat Greek Wedding and situating it within a broader diasporic media environment that includes festival promotion, reality television segments, and independent diaspora productions, this paper traces how a small repertoire of sonic elements including bouzouki timbres, syrtaki/hasapiko dance rhythms, and modal melodic figures, circulates across genres and platforms functioning not simply as background detail but as central narrative tools framing characters, shaping emotions, and guiding viewers’ understandings of cultural belonging.

I argue that these sounds operate as ambivalent sonic stereotypes stabilizing legibility for mainstream audiences while opening a “third space” of negotiation (Bhabha) for diasporic listeners. Drawing on Martin Stokes’s work on music, place, and social boundaries, I demonstrate how sound cues perform boundary work—indexing spatial and familiar imaginaries through which Greek American identity is recognized. Building on scholarship in film music and affect (Kassabian), I demonstrate how the same materials that risk flattening difference can also secure powerful diasporic identifications. Methodologically, the paper combines close listening, cue cataloging, and paratextual analysis with attention to production practices that blend “Greek‑coded” sonorities and Hollywood scoring conventions. The result is a theorization of diasporic audibility where stereotype and affective resonance are not opposites but co‑produced sonic signs of “Greekness” that codify and continually remake the terms of diasporic belonging.

Panigýria (summer village festivals) in Pogoni, a region on the Greek-Albanian border and the site of my dissertation fieldwork, are typically analyzed as sites of ritual collectivity and imagined community (Nitsiakos 1995; Alexakis 2001). Yet, existing scholarship offers few musical or phenomenological accounts of for how village communities continually recreate their aesthetic identities at these festivals. I find that the increasingly popular concept of víoma is used to make sense of individuals’ participation in this process. Víoma is a colloquial term used by Greek-speaking musicians and festivalgoers to signify “lived” or “embodied experience.” Functioning as a discourse, víoma indexically links together one’s autobiographical memory, subregional identity, and personal musical-dance aesthetics. My interlocutors insist that “having” víoma is crucial to playing or dancing “genuinely.” In contrast to the standardized, folkloristic “authenticity” of professional dance groups (Kotsouba 1997; Panopoulou 2001), the concept of víoma celebrates and moralizes personal authenticity. A personally authentic musical “style” is said to be co-created through the dancer-musician dialogue. Festivalgoers are expected to be tastemakers in their family village’s community through their paraggelíes (paid song orders) and performative dance-leading, while musicians are expected to meet the dancers’ unspoken desires on the level of ornamentation and stylistic adjustment. However, recently, large-scale shifts toward commercialization, urbanization, and postnationalism are feared for altering which musical choices seem desirable, which are profitable, and whose víoma is authoritative. I argue that víoma both clarifies and conceals the ways in which contemporary individuals have agency in contributing to the process of local stylistic distinction.

Rebetiko is an urban popular musical tradition that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, linked to Greek‑speaking communities within a cosmopolitan and translocal sphere spanning the Greek nation‑state, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States. In this context, phenomena of musico‑cultural amalgamation associated with the musico‑cultural trajectories of rebetiko figures and their work remain inadequately assessed and are frequently confined to ethnocentric and hegemonic readings rooted primarily in the East–West dichotomy and its implicit expressions. Through the lens of historical ethnomusicology and drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as an analytical and interpretive tool, this paper re‑examines the concepts of makam modality and chordal harmony, focusing on how their theoretical incompatibilities are negotiated and transcended through performative practices of rebetiko musicians. Contextualizing the philosophical concept within the musico‑cultural field of rebetiko, heterotopia is understood as a subject‑centered theoretical model: representation-contestation-inversion. This heterotopic framework underlines how the performers enact the representation of modal and harmonic topoi, contest them as they are inverted, thereby engendering a new, other topos: a modal heterotopia as an expression of musico‑cultural amalgamation in rebetiko. To do so, I examine the makam Saba and its pertinent guitar harmonization through musical‑textual analysis of representative gramophone recordings and their interpretation within historical musico‑cultural contexts. The terms "equal‑tempered makam" and "idiosyncratic harmonization," introduced as manifestations of modal heterotopia in rebetiko, illustrate the transcendence of the theoretical incompatibility between makam modality and chordal harmony through rebetiko musicians’ performative practices, offering a fresh lens for decolonizing rebetiko discourse.

This paper examines how musicians from North and South Korea have articulated gestures of reconciliation through the circulation of composed Arirang across the divided peninsula. Recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2012, Arirang embodies the Korean affect of han and historically carried collective sentiments under Japanese colonial rule. Since the Korean War, the song has been continually adapted and reinterpreted on both sides. Rather than treating Northern and Southern musical practices separately or framing them within ideological binaries, this study highlights works that cross borders, including performances in the opposing regime, transnational exchanges, and inter-Korean collaborations.

Three case studies illuminate these dynamics: (1) North Korean composer Choi Sung-hwan’s Arirang Fantasy (1976), which premiered in Japan, was later performed in South Korea, and conducted by Lorin Maazel with the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang; (2) Handol’s Arirang Alone (1989), sung during Cho Yong-pil’s 2005 Pyongyang concert at North Korean request and later performed by a North Korean art troupe at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics; and (3) the 2019 “Arirang Medley” collaboration between South Korean haegeum performer Jeong Gyeo-woon and North Korean so-haegeum performer Bang Dal-hwa.

Through score analysis, performance reviews, and interviews, the paper argues that Arirang functions not only as shared cultural memory but also as a medium of empathetic listening—one that invites gestures of unity by challenging boundaries between tradition and modernity, nationalism and transnationalism. Its transborder trajectories exemplify a “deterritorialized cultural flow,” (A. Appadurai 1996) fostering new affective communities despite enduring political division.

Baleganjur is a traditional Balinese gamelan genre featuring drums, gongs, and cymbals, long used to accompany cremations and other rituals. This paper examines how Korean rhythms influence Balinese contemporary baleganjur composition. Putu Hiranmayena (2022) discussed the cross-cultural resonances of baleganjur with metal music, though scarce musical analysis has been conducted to explain how such aesthetic fusions operate. Additionally, there are other emerging cross-cultural influences in contemporary baleganjur, namely the presence of Korean samulnori rhythms in recent compositions by I Wayan Sudirana, I Wayan Diana, Dewa Gede Wijaya, and myself.

In this paper, I explain how this trend began and how it has developed through a generational approach. Focusing on baleganjur ngarap—a ceremonial cremation processions genre—I analyse works from the four composers and identify distinctive ways that these composers incorporate samulnori rhythms due to their different degrees of exposure to Korean music. To do so, I introduce four Balinese terms––nyuang, ngidih, nyemak, and nuduk––as emic categories for levels of rhythmic transmission.

Through McGraw’s (2013) adaptation of Sperber’s (1996) concept of an “epidemiology of representations,” I argue that these rhythmic ideas spread not only from formal study, but also through mediated processes of listening, imitating, repetition, and embodied practice. As these rhythmic ideas circulate, musical forms change and gradually lose their direct connection to original sources. The analysis shows how Korean rhythmic ideas have been transmitted, transformed, and localized into Balinese musical practice. Rather than threatening tradition, this process is crucial in supporting ongoing creativity in baleganjur.

Beompae, a collective term for Korean Buddhist chant used in specialized rituals, is an oral tradition that has been transmitted since the 9^th century, when it was first introduced from the Tang Dynasty. Comprised of long melismatic phrases, it is often performed solo without any accompaniment. In a recent study, I devised a hybrid notation to transcribe several beompae songs, enabling more effective analysis. It combines the conventional staff notation with digitally generated line notation, thus providing detailed musical information and a visually enhanced representation. I demonstrated its efficacy as an analytical tool by addressing seemingly arbitrary rising pitches in a structural framework. In this paper, I aim to explore the hybrid notational system’s potential beyond serving as an analytical tool for beompae. First, it is well-suited for transcribing various vocal traditions, in which sounding precise pitch is not a priority. It can contribute to cross-cultural comparative analyses of Buddhist traditions, such as Japanese shōmyō and Tibetan dbyang, which have rarely been discussed in ethnomusicology. Second, it offers pedagogical benefits for beompae, as its initial design was mindful of beompae practitioners’ learning method of using line-notated supplements. With close collaboration with active practitioners, I consider various practical and conceptual aspects of the hybrid notational system as possible learning supplements for beompae.

Kim Jun-Geun's genre paintings, produced for Western buyers at Korean open-port cities during the late nineteenth century, constitute an underexplored visual archive of Korean musical life. This paper contends that Kim Jun-Geun's paintings serve as rare and vital ethnomusicological documents of late Chosŏn Korea. Through close visual analysis of samhyun youkgak (traditional six-piece instrumental ensemble), kisaeng (female entertainer) performance, sadangpae itinerant entertainers, and religious and shamanistic ritual music, this paper reconstructs sonic practices, organology, and gendered musical space that written records have largely overlooked.

While these paintings have attracted some scholarly attention, existing studies have examined Kim Jun-Geun's work from art historical, postcolonial, and cross-cultural perspectives; the musical dimensions embedded in these images have remained rarely investigated, particularly in English-language scholarship. This paper addresses that significant gap, offering the first systematic ethnomusicological examination of music, gender, and ritual performance as documented in his visual archive.

Drawing on close visual analysis of specific paintings, this paper reveals how women musicians — kisaeng, sadangpae performers, and ritual specialists — occupied contested performance spaces that Confucian social order sought to suppress, yet Kim Jun-Geun's brush preserved. Beyond performance, this paper also investigates how music intersected with women's daily labor and marriage rituals, illuminating the broader sonic landscape of women's lives across social classes in late Chosŏn Korea. This paper reframes genre painting as primary ethnomusicological sources, advancing methodological conversations about visual evidence in music historiography while recovering silenced women's musical agency in Korean history.

This panel brings together three papers that examine how identity, memory, and expression are negotiated across what we call the Cantosphere—the transnational cultural and sonic world of Cantonese‑speaking communities in Hong Kong, East Asia, and Canada, building on Shih Shu‑mei’s “Sinosphere.” Focusing on Hong Kong and its North American diasporas, the panel examines how Cantonese sounds persist or change as communities navigate assimilation pressures from shifting cultural regimes, religious norms, and dominant “Chinese” identities. The first paper examines early twentieth-century Hong Kong through the lens of gongchepu, a traditional notation system for Cantonese regional instrumental music. Yau Hok-Chau's deliberate modifications of gongchepu amid the rise of cipher and staff notation demonstrate how musical notation became a contested site where cultural identity, caught between Western cultural influence and mainland Chinese ideologies, was actively negotiated. The second paper turns to contemporary Protestant worship in Hong Kong and migrant congregations in North America. Through unpacking ethnographic and historical accounts surrounding the reappropriation and popularization of Cantonese opera music for religious practices, this paper shows how the conception of Cantonese sociolinguistic identity is entwined with local sonic memories, regional Cantonese language, and global Christianity. The third paper traces a fifty‑year history of Cantopop in Canada, drawing on ethnography and archival work to show how it circulates, takes root, and sustains cultural continuity within the Canadian Cantosphere. Together, these papers show how Cantonese sound anchors memory and identity across the Cantosphere, revealing how everyday musical practices carry connection and continuity as communities move across regions.

For decades, jazz studies has largely operated within secular-modern analytic frameworks that presume a separation between sound and spirit, art and cosmology, improvisation and metaphysics. Such tendencies have shaped what counts as evidence, agency, and musical meaning in the field, often muting African and African diasporic ways of knowing as structuring realities rather than culturally expressive themes. This panel contends that jazz cannot be fully apprehended within these inherited epistemic boundaries. Rather than treating spirituality as biographical context, cultural residue, or symbolic or metaphoric content, we examine African and African diasporic cosmologies as ontological systems that organize improvisation, collectivity, temporality, embodiment, and sonic practice itself. Across diverse geographies of the African diasporas, musicians articulate jazz as relational practice, a practice grounded in reciprocity, presence, and ways of knowing that exceed secular-materialist accounts of creativity. These cosmological orientations do not merely inform musical expression; they shape the conditions under which sound becomes meaningful, efficacious, and socially operative. By highlighting cosmology as structuring ontology, this panel reframes jazz as diasporic formation constituted through metaphysical commitments as much as aesthetic innovation. In doing so, we challenge the secular assumptions that continue to delimit the field and propose analytic approaches attentive to relationality, interdependency, ritualized sound, and the porous boundaries between visible and invisible domains. Taken together, the papers model methods for theorizing jazz beyond the epistemic constraints of Euro-American modernity and toward frameworks that take African diasporic ontologies seriously on their own terms.

In 1927, Brazilian novelist and (ethno)musicologist Mario de Andrade undertook a journey to northern Brazil. The journey was meant to culminate in a visit to the Wari’, inhabitants of the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Land. When this visit proved impossible, Andrade wrote a fictional ethnography, imagining the encounter. The highs and lows of this venture appear in O turista aprendiz, a travelogue that merges memories and fiction. Rather than offering an amusing tale about the curious behavior of the Other, Andrade's fiction estranges Western norms of sonic propriety and parodies positivist ethnography.

This talk examines these issues in two parts. Part I considers Andrade’s earwitness account of a world where sound “is the ultimate sexual gesture.” Andrade’s insertion of polite society’s mores into this imaginary world opens a space to interrogate how sound governs sexual practices and hygienic imagination. In analyzing the practices dramatized in the fiction, I introduce the notion of “sonic propriety” to describe civilizing regimes that discipline bodily noise. Part II turns to the fiction’s parody of late 19th-century ethnographies, revealing how ethnographers translated Western fascination with the Other’s sexual practices into scientific knowledge. The fiction, thus, points to an ethnopornographic tradition (Sigal, Tortorici, and Whitehead 2020) in which the erotic practices of those deemed Others became objects of inquiry. By positing ethnopornography as a constitutive formation of scientia sexualis, I suggest that the latter developed not only in Europe (Foucault 1976) but also in sites of (neo)colonial extraction. Nevertheless, as Andrade’s parody indicates, these discourses were inevitably contested.

Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion formed through historically uneven entanglements of African diasporic cosmologies, indigenous epistemologies, and Euro-Christian spiritist frameworks, unfolds ritually in the terreiro - the communal space where mediumship, drumming, and pontos cantados (sung chants) organize sacred interaction. In this setting, sound is not symbolic accompaniment, but the very constitutive of presence. Taking this claim seriously, however, requires rethinking how ethnomusicology has theorized ritual sound. The field has moved beyond representational models toward embodiment and participation (Friedson 1996; Csordas 1994), yet music is still often treated as experiential grounding rather than ontological practice. Drawing on long-term lived experience as both ritual singer and medium in Southern Brazil, I argue that, in Umbanda ritual life, listening does not simply decode meaning but organizes the relational conditions under which sacred presence becomes possible. Building on Nancy’s (2007) listening as resonance and Ingold’s (2011) dwelling as relational practice, I conceptualize Umbanda ritual music as an embodied sound practice in which pontos cantados do not merely represent entities but call, sustain, redirect, and withhold presence. In a historically unequal “triple heritage” (Freyre 1933/2003; Prandi 1996; Flor do Nascimento 2017), sacred presence depends on cultivated openness and relational discernment. By reframing ritual listening as ontological practice rather than expressive medium, this paper intervenes in debates on music and world-making, Afro-diasporic sacred arts, and the ontological turn in ethnomusicology. Here, listening is a mode of being-with through which living and spiritual presences come into relation.

Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork in Brazil, this paper examines bailes de corredor (corridor events) hosted in the 2020s, focusing on sound and attendee sensorial structuring; sound and masculinity; and the effects of sounds associated with criminal governance on attendee behavior. Organized since the 1990s, corridor events feature fighting between two opposing sides separated by a space called the “corridor.” Each side is comprised of galeras (crews), groups of dozens of people who represent neighborhoods and, in perpetuity, Lado A (A-side) or Lado B (B-side). After the state criminalized events in 2000, organizers moved them to areas under criminal governance. During contemporary events, criminal groups often order the shutting off of music and, also, fire gunshots in attempts to control attendee behavior in a setting of overlapping sovereignty with the state—a setting in which criminal groups hold disciplining power but fail to command absolute authority. This lack of absolute authority shapes attendee responses to gunshot sounds and structures attendee sensorial capabilities while supporting attendee opposition to criminal groups. Engaging scholarship on sound and criminal governance (Cavalcanti 2008; Gilsing 2020; Lippman 2021), this paper shows how participation in contemporary corridor events shapes attendee sensorial capabilities in settings of overlapping sovereignty in areaas under criminal governance, framing attendee interactions with criminal groups.

This paper examines the globalization of Brazilian funk through a case study of Anitta’s 2024 album Funk Generation, analyzing how a historically marginalized genre rooted in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas is re-signified within transnational pop circuits. While genres such as samba and bossa nova have long projected curated images of Brazilian national identity, funk carioca has often been criminalized and framed as “sonically illegal.” Building on the cultural analyses of Hermano Vianna and Débora Costa de Faria, and drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of identity as negotiation, this paper argues that Funk Generation functions simultaneously as cultural memory and strategic global branding.

Through close musical and visual analysis of tracks such as “Cria de Favela,” “Double Team,” and “Ahi,” I examine how Anitta mobilizes foundational elements of baile funk (funk ball)—such as the tamborzão beat, multilingual code-switching, and ostentação (ostentation) aesthetics—while adapting them to global pop markets through collaborations, smoother production, and digital cultural translation (e.g., her “Dicionário do Funk”). This negotiation raises critical questions about authenticity, class mobility, commodification, and gatekeeping within global music industries.

Methodologically, the paper situates itself within ethnomusicology by foregrounding funk as lived cultural practice, attending to sound, embodiment, circulation, and discourse rather than treating the music as text alone. By tracing how local sonic identities travel and mutate, this study contributes to ethnomusicological debates on hybridity, globalization, cultural memory, and the politics of representation in contemporary popular music.

This paper studies the engagement of urban elderly adults with popular music from their youth as one mode through which they negotiate the multiple personal and social shifts associated with aging. It draws upon ethnographic research in the city of Ahmedabad, India, with senior citizens who listen to and sing ‘old’ Hindi film songs (‘puraane gaane’)—the repertoire of Hindi film songs from the mid to late twentieth century. For these participants, the repertoire evokes nostalgia, offers solace and animates music-centered sociability. The paper has two related concerns. One, it explores how these senior citizens actively attempt to redefine their identities in their old age by cultivating singing and listening as ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 2001), even as they manage societal and domestic expectations related to age/gender, personal losses, and empty nests. Two, it examines the diverse modalities through which these songs—which are anywhere between thirty and eighty years old—have sustained as a cultural resource for almost two generations of elderly Indians. More broadly, the paper locates these musical activities within the present moment which brings together recent music-related technologies (mobile phone Karaoke apps, small Karaoke studios), and implicit discourses about ‘successful aging’ that encourage senior citizens to turn towards leisure activities (Samanta 2023).

The film, My Brother's Keeper, was produced by Rikshaw Films in 2025, is in English and is 17.5 minutes in length. This documentary is the personal account of an American musician’s life-journey in becoming a tabla performer. A former student of mine, a percussionist, experienced grief over the 1970 death of his older brother in the Vietnam war. Seeking relief by traveling there, he encountered awesome tabla playing in India. Upon returning home he entered the Indian music performance program at the University of Minnesota. The visiting tabla teacher encouraged him to continue study in India and this activity served as mental health therapy, preparation for attaining a professional level of Indian musicianship, and a bonding with his teacher. This film is a moving document of this musician’s transformation and healing through the rigors of tabla study and career. The soundtrack is his tabla playing as he expressively narrates his life story. The film visually portrays his performances with many musicians and includes scenes of his brother’s military experience in Vietnam. This draws the viewer into understanding the deep personal loss to the narrator and how he found the musical solution to his grief. It is gratifying for the ethnomusicologist to experience this transformation of the narrator’s state of mind through his engagement in becoming a musician of another culture. The full showing of the film leaves time for discussion.

Within the U.S. performing arts ecosystem, dance companies rooted in culturally specific dance forms are more often categorized as “traditional” or “ethnic,” labels that can obscure their artistic experimentation and innovation. Founded in 1992 in Minneapolis and led by the mother-daughter Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, Ragamala Dance Company has spent over three decades navigating this representational framework, creating new theatrical works grounded in Bharatanatyam, a classical dance form of South India, that circulate beyond culturally bounded audiences and invite cross-cultural resonance. Drawing on archival research and a year-long ethnographic study of Ragamala’s in-studio practices, this paper argues that the company’s creative process is structured by a productive interplay between mobility and what I term “immobility.” While diaspora scholarship often privileges movement, circulation, and hybridity as markers of transformation, Ragamala’s creative practice demonstrates that immobility–understood as disciplined grounding in lineage, technique, and embodied knowledge–functions as a generative force. Tradition here operates not as constraint but as enabling infrastructure that supports aesthetic expansion, interdisciplinary collaboration, and institutional negotiation. Through analysis of the Ramaswamys’ representative works across different phases of creation and production, I show how rigorous engagement with inherited forms produces new choreographic vocabularies and institutional possibilities. In this formulation, creative freedom emerges not despite grounding but throughout it. By foregrounding (im)mobility as a methodological lens, this paper proposes a model of diasporic artistic practice in which rootedness and reinvention are mutually constitutive.

The Indian Farmer’s Protest of 2020–2021 has been recognized as one of the longest and largest in the history of independent India (Moliner and Singh 2024). For over a year, hundreds of thousands of farmers and supporters are said to have participated in what has been hailed as a victorious mass movement of unity and resilience. Thousands of protesters camped for months at the outskirts of the Indian capital in harsh weather conditions until the government repealed the three “farm bills” that farmers argued would put them at the mercy of large corporations capable of manipulating grain prices to maximize profits at the cost of farmers’ incomes, resulting in impoverishment that would only exacerbate the huge current social problem of farmer suicide in India. At the camps, amateur and professional musicians chanted and sang poetry for spiritual nourishment and as caustic critique of the government (Abbi 2022; Moliner 2024). They also played protest song-videos recorded by popular musicians since before the encampments, with over five hundred songs released over the course of the movement; these garnering hundreds of millions of YouTube views (Kalra 2024). Reporters and scholars have commented on how the songs enlisted and represented people across social and political divides such as religion, caste, landownership, gender, age, ableness, and border. In this paper, I analyze the sonic, musical, lyrical, visual, cultural, and historical tropes in these songs—live and studio-produced—and building on sound, sensory, and phenomenological studies, explore how sounds carry meaning, across time and space.

This panel explores the enactment of Indigenous sovereignty through sound, focusing on how communities reclaim, reshape, and revitalize sonic practices in diverse cultural contexts. Featuring case studies from Mesoamerica, the Colombian Andes, and Native North America, the panel situates collaborative initiatives at the intersection of institutional collections and community-driven musical projects. Two papers consider the role of archaeological sound objects in museums, highlighting how community-negotiated access and the creation of three-dimensional replicas of prehispanic instruments facilitate Indigenous-led sounding, recording, composition, and pedagogical transmission. Rather than equating replication with repatriation, these analyses position replication as part of broader efforts to restore material knowledge, technical skill, and production capacity. The third paper examines contemporary musical practice as a site for the articulation of sovereignty, foregrounding sound as a medium of jurisdiction, resurgence, and future-making. Together, the panel demonstrates that Indigenous sovereignty is materialized through active community engagement with sound as it is reproduced, reinterpreted, and circulated to support cultural continuity and future-oriented practices. By centering practice, material engagement, and governance, the panel advances ethnomusicological debates on rematriation, sovereignty, and Indigenous sound studies.

What constitutes African music and how it is encountered, both in and outside Africa, keeps changing, reflecting its temporalities (Agawu 2014; Kubik 2010; Omojola 2012). These dynamics make African music a living, shifting and historically situated form, shaping how people produce, live and experience it across spaces and times. Our panel explores the present dynamics of African music through the frameworks of liturgy and pedagogy, practice and paradigm. In doing so, we draw on ethnographic research in Africa, Europe and USA to advance conversations about the contemporary experience of African music in educational, religious and migratory contexts. By paying attention to the issues of agency, localities, transnational mobility, power relations and neoliberalism, we investigate why African instrumental music is absent from the musical practices of African diaspora churches and how this erasure perpetuates colonial legacies. Also, we examine how African music is currently experienced as a tokenistic, inclusive practice in Africa’s tertiary music institutions and chart a path forward for an African music curriculum that transcends such tokenism. Furthermore, we investigate the contributions of non-African, particularly Europeans to African choral music and transnational music making in Germany. We aim to contribute to ethnomusicology theories on African music’s circulation across diasporic linkages, its adoption in intercultural contexts and its appropriation in ritual and educational spaces. Together, our panel demonstrates the ways that the ‘present’ presents new paradigms to encounter the past and look forward to the future of African music.

At Virginia State University (an HBCU), a student’s singing voice rarely stays the same from Sunday worship to Monday voice lesson. Faculty state classical technique “provides a foundation for all singing” and is necessary to “compete with students from Julliard” a framing that establishes an ideological hierarchy. Drawing on two years of ethnography, I examine how VSU music students use singing style to articulate individual identity, orient towards specific forms of Blackness, and navigate institutional pressures. Adopting approaches from linguistic anthropology (Harkness 2014; Lie 2022), I employ sociophonetic recordings and vowel mapping to analyze how students phonetically distinguish classical and gospel singing, and the social values attached to each. Through participant observation of students and interviews with faculty, I trace students’ deployment of singing style in day-to-day interactions as well as the institutional ideologies attached. Classical singing is framed as a professional pre-requisite, yet for many students it conflicts with gospel singing which enable their expression of faith. Students strategically shift between styles to access different social and professional opportunities. I contend this vocal flexibility, what I call vocalized style-shifting, is a form of embodied social navigation. Phonetic choice becomes a site of Black identity negotiation indexing competing orientations towards respectability, faith, and the HBCU community. Building on Newland’s “racialized vocality” (2014) and approaches from voice studies (Eidsheim 2019; Meizel 2020) this paper foregrounds an agential approach to students singing Blackness and answers the call within music studies (Hadley 2025; Kernodle 2025) to center HBCUs as sites of knowledge production.

Black musical traditions have long served as sites of resistance, community formation, and political expression. This paper examines the founding of the University of Virginia’s Black Voices Gospel Choir and its 50-year history to highlight its integral role in cultural placemaking during the University's era of racial integration. Founded in 1972 by Nehemiah Brown after he was denied entry into the University’s all-white glee club, Black Voices emerged amid campus hostility, racial exclusion, and limited institutional support for Black students. Using archival research and oral histories, this paper connects the choir to broader histories of Black student activism. It emphasizes the role of Charlottesville, Virginia, a small, urban-suburban Southern city often overlooked in gospel research, which typically focuses on metropolitan centers.

I argue that Black Voices was not only a vehicle for spiritual and cultural expression but also served as a mediator between the University and local Black community members, complicating traditional “town-gown” dynamics. The choir’s multiple roles give rise to what I theorize as a “church space,” an environment that evokes community and deep spiritual intensity without being confined to a church building or an exclusive Christian framework. This term provides insight into how relationships between students and the choir have evolved. Lastly, this paper highlights how Black people have utilized Black musical traditions to produce place, identity, and political meaning despite institutional structures that try to render them placeless.

The question of community, unity, and continuity in the context of ruptures experienced by Indigenous populations—such as oppression, genocide, forced displacement, and cultural erasure—has been widely debated across fields including ethnomusicology, musicology, sociology, and anthropology. Scholars have argued that inclusive music-making can contribute to the creation, maintenance, and sustenance of community (Perman and Fiol, 2024; Harris, 2020). However, the relationship between music and community within the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) marching band tradition has been underexplored. This paper, grounded in African and African American philosophy, offers a nuanced examination of how a sense of belonging, interconnectedness, and unity is manifested and reinforced through active participation in an important ritual of HBCU marching band culture, “The Tunnel.” How does one become fully human in a society that does not recognize them as fully human? How can African American youth culture express individual and collective “somebodyness” through movement and music-making in a marching band setting? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the “Magnificent Machine” of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, this paper suggests that ways of learning and understanding what it means to be in community with others are embedded in the active processes of music and movement. Invoking the South African philosophy of “ubuntu,” which emphasizes the duality between the individual and the community, this paper considers the HBCU marching band tradition as a cultural phenomenon rooted in ancestral traditions and in the understanding of the self within and through a collective identity.

In her recent book How We Write Now (2024), Black feminist critic Jennifer Nash considers how Black feminist writers, in the face of profound Black loss, have cultivated a singular voice that is beautiful. Nash articulates a kind of “living-with” this reality of loss that is “about an ethic of companionship that … animates the Black feminist archive." In this roundtable, we are inspired by Nash’s engagement with loss, beauty, and creativity to imagine how we might live with one another and this moment as ethnomusicologists. Specifically, we are curious about how ethnomusicologists—through our research and writing, teaching and mentorship, and curation and collaboration—can work together in a context of mass deportation, transphobic policy, expanding imperialism, global antiblackness, ecological catastrophe, and dystopian technologies. We speak from diverse institutional and geographic positions in the field, both within and outside of the university, in order to: consider histories of intellectual censorship in higher education, revisit artists’ responses to related crises in the 20th century, propose collective avenues for applied ethnomusicological work today, and share strategies from the music classroom that strive to meet students’ current needs. Throughout, we listen to Nash’s Black feminist archive to resist exceptionalist renderings of our current moment by historicizing contemporary trends, foreground humility and collaboration through tough questions rather than providing quickly satisfying answers, and encourage acts that interrupt the imperative to continue with business as usual in higher education in these times. Together, we ask: What is the work of the ethnomusicologist in times of crisis?

This panel explores how musicians use popular and folkloric musics to “sound” silenced histories and systemic concerns in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. In these settings where epistemological divisions structure musical categorization and functions, practitioners engage creative sonic strategies to disrupt hegemonic discourses and resist preconceived binaries of rural/urban and traditional/modern musics, among other structural problems. These three ethnographic studies foreground the materiality of musical practices, detailing how various sound systems, labor logistics, and instrument histories inform the circulation and reception of these musical cultures. Paper #1 examines how Peruvian cumbia norteña musicians “sound” popular concerns about the growing citizen insecurity crisis without singing about it explicitly. This paper examines how musicians and audiences alike mobilize popular media to make political interventions in a context where government institutions have proved inefficient. Paper #2 considers the recontextualization of ‘traditional’ African musics in Barranquilla, Colombia, examining how the circulation of these repertoires challenge racial and ethnic imaginaries. Centering the characteristic sound systems (picós) as the sites where these identities and histories are negotiated, this paper demonstrates how musicians engage ‘foreign’ repertoires to make sense of highly local identities and resist epistemologies of purification. Paper #3 details how practitioners of Mexican son jarocho provide an acoustemological intervention through their engagement with the quijada instrument. This paper centers the quijada as both object and discourse that counters the erasure of Afro-Mexico. This panel ultimately demonstrates the varied strategies for exerting creative agency to make silenced histories audible.

This panel features three groups of musical instrument makers and technicians—violin repairers, piano technicians, and Fender guitar factory workers—to highlight the skills required in each specialized craft. We build on ethnomusicological scholarship on labor and material culture to bring needed attention to musical instrument making, maintenance, and repair. While these workers make musicking possible, their skills are often extra-musical in that they extend beyond sound-making. Moreover, their practices are sometimes near-invisible in terms of both musical practice and physical trace, meant to disappear inside instruments’ bodies. We consider the following questions: What are the multisensorial and relational skills that contribute to musical instrument making and maintenance economies? How do workers learn and teach these embodied skills? How do such skills and practices intersect with gendered and racialized identities, hierarchies of authorship, and our understandings of musicking more broadly?
Our papers investigate: 1) contemporary violin makers’ practices of learning and using visual techniques to craft and evaluate instruments in the Northern Italian city of Cremona; 2) the emotional labor that piano technicians perform when mediating relationships between piano owners and their often beloved instruments; and 3) the labor of Latina workers at the Fender Factory who wound electromagnetic pickups, drawing in part on their gendered expertise with sewing machines. Diving “under the lid,” we attend to these workers and their highly specialized embodied skills and knowledge—often distinct from the embodied skills of music performance—to argue for a broader understanding of the intersections between musical labor and craft.

This paper listens to the deaf machine—and to those who sing before it. In South Korean noraebang (karaoke rooms), the transmediated voice is scored by rating systems whose quantitative assessments bear no systematic relation to vocal performance—scores are generated randomly, unconnected to any measurable quality of the sung voice. Yet despite widespread awareness of this arbitrariness, scores continue to orient performance, inciting competitive transformations as singers modify their vocal delivery to appease what they believe the algorithms of deaf machines can discern. Drawing from fieldwork in Seoul, I examine how the persistent sociality of random scoring extends the pervasive audit culture (Shore & Wright 2024, Strathern 2000) that infiltrates Korean subject-formation through compounding regimes of examination, ranking, and spec accumulation (Cho 2015). As the neoliberalization of language reduces communicative faculties to assessable skills (Park 2021, Urciuoli 2008), and semiocapitalism abstracts language from affective bodies (Berardi 2018), I trace how even leisure sociability—where the voice might otherwise exceed productive functionalization—becomes saturated with the competitive logics of quantitative comparison. Singers perform simultaneously for the machine and for the room, compressing the poetic intensities of sung language into discrete, machine-legible aesthetics that double as competitive display. Such logics go largely unremarked in the ordinary sociality of noraebang. Yet when my interlocutor, Seohyeon, disabled the system to sing without numerical subjection, her quiet refusal (Campt 2017) of the quantitative assessment momentarily reactivated the affective excess of poetic language and the communal intimacies of song otherwise obscured by Korea’s broad culture of audit and comparison.

This presentation explores how online retro gaming communities reconstruct the aesthetic value of sonic glitches, shifting them from technological errors to coveted musical artifacts. While traditional ludo-musicological frameworks largely analyze video game sound through the lens of intended player input and deterministic design (Collins 2013; Summers 2016), this approach overlooks the vibrant, participatory culture of "glitch hunting" and speedrunning. Focusing on Pokémon Yellow Version (1998), this digital ethnography investigates how player communities across both English and Japanese online spaces evaluate and celebrate audio anomalies, specifically the "Red bar glitch" and encounters with glitch entities like "MissingNo." and "C1."

In Japanese RTA (Real Time Attack) communities, where system exploits intersect with the culture of urawaza (secret tricks), and within English-speaking speedrunning networks, unpredictable sonic phenomena are not discarded as programmatic failures. Instead, stochastically generated timbres and emergent rhythmic complexities are actively encouraged and prized. They serve as coveted auditory markers of successful systemic manipulation and shared community knowledge. Drawing upon actor-network theory (Latour 2005) and extending concepts of "vibrant matter" (Bennett 2010) into digital social spaces, I argue that the glitch engenders a distinct, cross-cultural value system.

By analyzing transnational community discourse and shared gameplay recordings, I demonstrate how players collectively renegotiate the boundaries of the intended ludo-sonic environment. Ultimately, this presentation illustrates how these communities construct a post-humanist sonic aesthetic where the deterministic architecture of the game code is subverted, and the technological "error" becomes a celebrated site of shared cultural meaning.

How are localities represented when technofuturism, nationalism, and traditionalist revivalism converge? Macau 2049, a large-scale stage performance directed by Zhang Yimou, combines robotics with Chinese traditional performance arts and offers a compelling case study. This paper advances two main arguments. First, I interpret the show as symbolically staging China’s pursuit of modernity in its most contemporary and idealized form. Scholars have already noted that China’s modernity is marked by the celebration of national milestones and the reform of traditional performing arts. Macau 2049 is examined as articulating these themes while also embodying a newer trajectory in which the incorporation of AI and robotics into traditional performance marks the latest stage in a modernist narrative that celebrates technological innovation as the means of reforming tradition. Second, I analyze how locality is reconfigured within this technological, artistic, and ideological assemblage. Although Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China, is invoked in the show’s title, serves as its exclusive performance site, and is cited as the home of several performers, the city itself remains curiously elusive on stage. Drawing on Ackbar Abbas’s concept of “disappearance,” I argue that the intersection of technofuturism, nationalism, and traditionalism situates localities such as Macau in a simulacral mode of existence: they are signified, yet what they signify remains ambiguous, functioning as a circulating sign within a broader techno-traditional-national imaginary. In doing so, the performance gestures toward a projected future for China’s localities, where technological spectacle rearticulates their signification within a broader modernist national vision.

How do Syrian musicians performing with German musicians and for German audiences selectively alter their music to accommodate Western musical sensibilities? How do encounters between Arabic and Western musical traditions generate new aesthetic expressions for both Syrian and German musicians? This study addresses these questions through a case study of the Syriab Ensemble, a group of Syrian and German musicians performing diverse musical styles. While existing research has examined Syrian popular music in Germany and musical practices in refugee contexts (Brunner 2022, Pistric 2020), little attention has been paid to the strategies Syrian musicians use to adapt to new cultural and professional environments, or to the ways Arabic musical practices shape German performers’ approaches. As an Arab scholar and ‘ud player, I offer a perspective often underrepresented in European-dominated scholarship. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, including performance observations and interviews, this study explores how Syrian musicians reshape their repertoires for German audiences and how German musicians learn to engage with maqam-based music. Musical examples from the ensemble’s repertoire are compared with performances from Syria to assess the effects of migration and intercultural collaboration. The analysis focuses on harmonization techniques, maqam theory, rhythm, genre, style, and performance context. I argue that the ensemble’s musical practices reveal complex processes of negotiation, adaptation, and reciprocal exchange rather than one-sided assimilation. By highlighting these dynamics, the study contributes to broader debates in ethnomusicology, world music analysis, and minority music studies, emphasizing migration as a site of creative transformation and mutual influence.

This paper focuses on musical exchange between Germany and the Mashreq region from the 1950s until present time. The emphasis is on music exchange and “music diplomacy” (Davenport 2009) that emerged through long-term interaction at the personal and institutional level in the second half of the twentieth century. These forms of music transfer manifested themselves in the diverse exchange and migration of musicians, texts and objects (Fosler-Lussier 2010). Taking into account formal and informal cultural and knowledge exchange, selected musical actors and institutions are examined as examples of the driving forces behind these interactions. Although music diplomacy between Germany and the eastern Mediterranean region has a long history (Öğüt & Prieske 2024), it has only been researched to a limited extent to date. In my paper, I argue that state-funded institutions like the German Goethe Institutes or German schools in the Eastern Mediterranean act as cultural hubs for international music networking. In countries where there are few state-funded cultural activities, these German institutions play an important role in the local music scene, promoting music in line with Germany’s cultural policies. These processes of music diplomacy and exchange in the Mashreq region are being researched for the first time using archival sources on German and Arab music diplomacy as well as interviews with musicians and former government staff. By combining methods of historic musicology with field research in the Mashreq and Germany, the research highlights the history and continuity of German-Arab cultural ties that are often unknown or have been forgotten.

Who is recognized as a composer - and why does the category so often appear gender-neutral until women enter it?

This paper interrogates the cultural construction of “composer” through a comparative analysis of Germany and South Korea, examining how musical authority is historically produced, institutionally maintained, and discursively marked. Drawing on archival research, institutional histories, and contemporary discourse analysis, the study shifts attention from the recovery of marginalized figures to the normative assumptions embedded in the category itself.

In German art music traditions, canon formation and aesthetic ideologies of autonomous authorship have consolidated a masculinized model of compositional authority that remains structurally unmarked. In Korean contexts, the position of historical figures such as gisaeng complicates Western-derived distinctions between composition, performance, and authorship, revealing alternative configurations of musical agency that have not consistently been integrated into modern art music historiography.

The persistent labeling of “female composer” exposes the asymmetry of recognition and raises broader questions about how musical value and legitimacy are assigned. By situating naming practices within broader regimes of cultural validation, this paper argues that “composer” is not a neutral descriptor but a historically contingent category shaped by power, pedagogy, and canon formation. Rethinking who gets to be called a composer invites a reconsideration of musical authority and the epistemological foundations of ethnomusicological scholarship.

This paper develops “screened listening” as an ethnomusicological analytic for understanding how installation art structures how people hear and move within exhibitions. Building on Blesser and Salter’s concept of aural architecture (2009), I argue that the screen in installation environments functions as an acoustic boundary that organizes movement, access, and authority in space. Focusing on works by three Asian diasporic artists, I ask how feedback systems, caption infrastructures, and museum acoustics compose perspective for differently positioned listeners. In Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha (1974), the camera–monitor loop encloses visitors within a tightly regulated “now,” converting gallery noise and electronic hum into an intensified mode of listening. In Christine Sun Kim’s Close Readings (2020), which I encountered at the Whitney Museum, Deaf-authored captions overwrite studio subtitling norms, redistributing sonic authorship across competing textual soundtracks. Wu Tsang’s Anthem (2021), experienced through participant observation at the Guggenheim, suspends Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s voice in the museum’s spiraling rotunda, where circulation along the ramp continually recomposes the mix. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, I show how visitors describe these installations less through musical style than through shifting sensations of proximity, legibility, and collective presence. By bringing ethnographic method into dialogue with sound studies, Deaf and disability scholarship, and media-infrastructural approaches, the project reframes installation art as a site of infrastructural listening. It advances new directions for ethnomusicology in museums and galleries, foregrounding how exhibition technologies calibrate intimacy, access, and diasporic collectivity in contemporary public culture.

In 2021, Ez Mil went viral with his single “Panalo,” a rap song that smashes together text in three languages, a trap beat, and a Philippine folk dance. The song has garnered over 87 million views on YouTube; however, a historical error in its lyrics highlights existing tensions between the Philippines and Filipino Americans (FilAms). Twenty years earlier, Apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas sampled the first verse of a political song by the Filipino folk group Asin in his “The APL Song.” Two years later, he released “Bebot,” which re-emerged in 2026 as a Tiktok trend but triggered conversations about racism. The Philippine subject matter in these songs has made waves throughout the diaspora with comments praising them for engendering pride while also serving as flashpoints for complex issues.

This paper analyzes these songs through the framework of diasporic consciousness, engaging with a wider scholarly debate about the theorization of a specific FilAm diaspora (Espiritu 2003; Okamura 2013) vs. FilAm ethnicity amid multiculturalism. At issue is the degree to which FilAms identify with a Philippine homeland and whether this bilateral imaginary extends to the reality of a global diaspora. I contend that recapturing the word “diaspora” from its ubiquity and narrowing its usage based on consciousness allows for a productive definition of FilAm diasporic music implicating US-Philippine history. In our current moment of anti-immigration, this consciousness is as much about homelessness as it is about home and the ability of music to nurture a sense of rootedness.

Punake—poet, composer, and orator—bear the responsibility of sustaining language, history, and culture in Tonga and around the world. While the punake in Tonga have long served as cultural stewards, their work in diaspora settings takes on new urgency as communities confront linguistic erosion, generational shifts, and changing relationships to tradition. Drawing on extensive interviews with the punake and community members across nine U.S. states, this paper examines how contemporary punake navigate creativity, responsibility, and cultural preservation in the U.S. diaspora. I explore how the punake conceptualize their creative process, particularly the significance of original compositions as vessels for genealogy, language, collective memory, and spiritual meaning. Original compositions are not only creative expressions of culture but also acts of service that honor ancestors and strengthen communal identity. The study further highlights how diaspora contexts reshape the work of the punake through community expectations as linguistic translation becomes more complex, and support networks shift as the punake collaborate across distance and negotiate gaps in cultural knowledge. By foregrounding the voices gathered through individual interviews of three punake, this paper shows the diverse pathways through which they learn, create, and teach. Their experiences demonstrate how musical creativity becomes a strategy for cultural and language continuity, allowing Tongan communities abroad to hear, feel, and embody their heritage. Ultimately, this research shows that the punake in the diaspora serve as both culture bearers and innovators that bridge the past and present.

After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the ban on female solo singing in Iran became a form of political violence against women artists as an effort to shape a new national-religious identity for Iranian society. It not only restricts women’s artistic expression but also sends a clear message that women’s voices should not be publicly heard, reinforcing gender inequality and male dominance in Iranian music. As a form of symbolic and hidden violence, this policy has had deep psychological and social consequences, including the suppression of artistic identity and repeated experiences of marginalization and trauma. Although feminist ethnomusicologists have discussed the general impact of this ban, fewer studies frame it through trauma studies, particularly within the wartime context of the 1980s. This project addresses that gap by examining how female musicians responded to these structural injustices and political violence, focusing on the social consequences of their decisions to emigrate or remain.

Under these conditions, female solo singing itself becomes a form of resistance. Over more than four decades of restriction, women have developed various strategies to maintain their presence in music production. With the expansion of the internet and social media, new platforms have allowed women to amplify their voices collectively, contributing to recent social changes, especially the women-led movement “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Overall, this research explores the relationship between gendered sound and political power, highlighting how artistic resistance challenges political restriction and also serves as a vehicle for trauma recovery.

This presentation examines women's resistance in contemporary Iranian public space, focusing on the dome of the Shah Mosque in Isfahan. It explores this symbolic structure, celebrated since the Safavid era as an architectural masterpiece and acoustic space designed to amplify religious sounds and male religious authority, and argues that this site has become an important stage for sonic and political resistance. Drawing on how recent actions, particularly women singing beneath this dome and circulating videos on social media, have transformed the space's symbolic meaning and traditional function, this presentation demonstrates how these performances, which directly challenge the post-1979 restrictions on women's public singing, are not merely artistic acts but constitute a socio-political gesture. Methodologically, this research analyzes the Shah Mosque dome not as an architectural structure, but as an active medium whose acoustic properties have become a tool for resistance, allowing historically excluded voices to resonate. This qualitative study is positioned at the interdisciplinary intersection of ethnomusicology, sound studies, spatial theory, gender studies, and media studies. It draws on an interview, autoethnography, analysis of sonic-spatial situations, and a case study of a widely circulated social media performance. The theoretical framework builds on Brandon LaBelle's concept of "Sonic Agency," showing how sound becomes a tool for resistance and negotiation with systems of domination, and is extended through Laudan Nooshin's work on Iranian musical cyberspace to account for the online dimension of these performances.

This paper discusses how Iranian musicians navigate continuous crises in successive waves of protest, repression, and war since 2022. I argue that an increasingly radicalized political atmosphere has pressured Iranian artists to take a side in a perceived binary of “overthrow” versus “reform.” This paper centers on the music and reception of Shervin to trace these shifting political conditions shaping music-making in Iran. He first rose to almost instant fame when he released “Baraye” (“Because of”), whose lyrics are a collage assembled from tweets posted under #MahsaAmini, a viral hashtag through which users articulated their reasons to protest during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Through rapid circulation, the piece became a sonic emblem of the uprising, even as Shervin was immediately arrested and pressured to delete it from Instagram. This placed Shervin’s subsequent online presence and musical releases under heightened attention. Since then, Shervin has faced not only state surveillance but also close scrutiny from dissident audiences unwilling to tolerate any perceived compromise with the regime—whether in his songs, social media contents, or career decisions such as applying for official permits. Drawing on an ethnography of social media, I ask what it means to sustain a musical persona amid persistent uncertainty shaped by arbitrary state restrictions and shifting public expectations. Building on Miriam Cooke and Lauren Berlant, I listen to the ways that musicians negotiate music-making, dissidence, and the affective politics of contested claim-making in Iran.

The past decade has witnessed the consolidation of authoritarian forms of governance within formally democratic frameworks across multiple contexts. Within this reconfigured political landscape, regimes stage authority through spectacle and affective saturation, while oppositional actors craft sonic and aesthetic forms that render dissent collectively audible. This paper asks what becomes of such oppositional sonic forms when political transformation stalls yet their aesthetic force endures.

Taking Turkey as an analytic lens, I trace a repertoire of oppositional sonic practices that emerged with particular intensity during the 2013 Gezi protests. Although the protests dissipated and authoritarian consolidation deepened, this repertoire persisted as a recognizable aesthetic of dissent. It includes football-style chants sung at police lines (“Sık bakalım… biber gazı sık bakalım” / “Spray away… pepper spray away”); contrafacta such as the adaptation of the folk song Kızılcıklar Oldu Mu into “Çapulcular Oldu Mu” in response to Erdoğan’s labeling of protesters as çapulcu (looter); and viral music videos including Everyday I’m Çapuling, which riffed on the protest’s musical vernacular, and Tencere Tava Havası, which drew on the cacerolazo practice of banging pots and pans.

I argue that the continued circulation of these carnivalesque forms today—long after the protests dissipated and political horizons narrowed under intensifying authoritarianism—signals a condition of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) in which aesthetic attachment to change endures beyond its material feasibility. Framing Turkey not as a regional exception but as a paradigmatic site, this paper advances a musical account of political aesthetics under entrenched authoritarian consolidation.

Polyphony has famously served as a metaphor for fields of postcolonial difference (Bakhtin 1984, Said 1993). More recently, scholars have explored polyphony as an agent of European colonization (Irving 2010, Irving 2024). But can polyphony itself become a site of difference? In this paper, I explore that question in the context of modern Turkey. Modern Turkey’s secularist bourgeoisie promoted polyphony (çok seslilik)—as embodied in Western art music and contrasted to traditionally heterophonic Turkish musics—as a means to clarify and cultivate secular modern domains such as the democratic public sphere and (neo)liberal economy. Drawing on the method of global concept history and recent rethinking of secular myth (Sartori 2008, Keum 2025), I argue that a distinct concept of polyphony emerged from changing global structural conditions to become integral to Enlightenment governmentality in modern Turkey. Through analysis of early Turkish Republican era music journals and pedagogical materials as well as participant-observation ethnography with listeners to WAM, I show how a myth of polyphony as figure of ordered complexity was mobilized to codify individual polyphonic bodies with a bourgeois, subject-object orientation to the world and a polyphonic body politic oriented by secular Enlightenment values such as rationality and progress. This paper thus brings foundational ethnomusicological insight to invocations of polyphony in canonical cultural theory and the emerging field of global musicology: where theorists have mobilized implicitly universal concepts of polyphony to open fields of postcolonial difference, I reveal polyphony itself to be a conceptual site of cultural difference in modern Turkey.

The incorporation of Turkish makams into polyphonic forms through the equal-tempered approximation of microtonal inflections remains among the most fraught issues in Turkish music discourse: to what extent can modal affect and identity survive into the structures and conventions of Eurocentric polyphonic art music; what is lost in the process of abstraction and resignification? This article addresses these questions through the history and afterlife of the ilâhi (Sufi hymn) “Şol Cennetin Irmakları,” which Ahmed Adnan Saygun adapted as “Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni” in his oratorio, Yunus Emre (1942). Building on Turkish makam theory, recent musicology, and post-colonial theory, the article argues that Saygun’s makam-inspired style in Yunus Emre must not be reductively framed as a “confluence of East and West,” but rather as a political and aesthetic negotiation in which makam is isolated from its Ottoman-Islamic associations and rearticulated as a disciplined, modern, and internationally legible sign of Turkishness. The author seeks not only to elucidate a specific historical and analytical case, but also to contribute to ongoing debates about the politics of musical translation, the invention of tradition, and the paradoxes of cultural modernisms in the post-Ottoman world. In tracing the ironic trajectory of “Şol Cenettin Irmakları," the article aims to demonstrate that musical authenticity in modern Türkiye is neither stable nor singular.