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.