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.