This paper theorizes Mongolian musical practice in Inner Mongolia as a form of ecological mediation that challenges dominant separations between culture and nature. Rather than approaching sound as symbolic representation, I argue that musical practices actively produce relationships among humans, animals, land, and governance under conditions of accelerating ecological transformation.

Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, interviews with musicians and instrument makers, and documentation of ritual and performance contexts, I examine how ecological knowledge is embedded in vocal production, instrumental timbre, and material practices. Vocal forms such as long song and throat singing enact modes of listening attuned to wind, animal movement, and spatial openness, while rhythmic structures resonate with histories of nomadic mobility. These music practices articulate relational ethics grounded in interdependence with the grassland.

At the same time, musical sound becomes a site where environmental disruption and regulatory intervention are negotiated. Under intensified grassland management policies and shifting economic structures, narratives surrounding music register dispossession, constraint, and uneven power relations. The story of Suhe and his white horse is a folk story often linked to the morin khuur, can be read not simply as folklore but as an acoustic response to loss and territorial rupture.

By positioning sound as a material and political force, this paper explores how music, as a material and political force, carries ecological knowledge that can support or question contemporary environmental practices.