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

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

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

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

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

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