The Tai Dam, or “Black Tai” due to their traditional black clothing, are an ethnic minority with sizable communities in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, China, France, and the United States, and khap is their main vocal genre used in both sacred and secular contexts. While studies have analyzed Tai Dam khap and music through the lens of preservation and identity (Chansri and Burusphat 2017), transmission and categorization (Lissoir 2016, 2015), instrumentation (Iamsin, Roongruang, and Nanthachak 2012), and social function (Jarusopon 2008), none have specifically focused on timbre. Based upon original fieldwork, I analyze the timbre of twenty-four secular Tai Dam khap documented from nine communities in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and the United States, focusing on the non-lexical vocable. Spectrograms are used to provide acoustic support for my timbral conclusions. I argue that the vocables in all twenty-four khap share a timbral concordance expressed through the bright [œ] vowel, as in the British English word “bird” or the French word “fleur”, which consistently delineates the larger sections and/or smaller phrases. In addition to the primary [œ] vowel, other secondary language sounds often appear such as the bright [I] and [i] vowels and the darker [ŋ] nasal. These are plotted against geography to reveal timbral correspondences between secondary khap language sounds and specific Tai Dam communities.

In this paper, I build on scholarship in Buddhist ethnomusicology (Douglas 2020; Greene et al. 2002) to examine the pedagogical processes at work in an ordination ceremony and training program for novice Buddhist nuns (samaneri) in central Thailand. Following Cupchik (2015), I approach the ordination ritual as performing art, attending to how it engages the senses and shapes monastics’ aesthetic standards. Using Mross’s (2022) description of ritual as “multisensorial,” I show how insights from dance, music, and performance studies (Wong 2001; Hahn 2007) provide useful tools in understanding the mechanisms of monastic training, which is also an education of the integrated body-mind system. Based on participant observation as a lay volunteer and temporary novice, as well as semi-structured interviews with nuns and laypeople, I demonstrate how the ordination ritual and training link mind, body, and community in a process I term “attunement of the senses.” I employ autoethnography and feminist sensory ethnography (Guzman and Hong 2022) to relay the embodied and sonic components of the ordination, showing how training the senses is integral to training the mind, which is considered the sixth sense in a Buddhist framework. In so doing, I contribute to a more wholistic understanding of the sensorium and lived practices of Buddhist traditions, which have historically been represented as the silent contemplation of a solitary (male) monk (Sykes 2018). Finally, this “attunement of the senses” gains additional significance within the broader Thai national context in which Buddhist nuns are not automatically heard and seen as religious authorities.

Although composed by a Ukrainian in the late 1880s, the Thai royal anthem, “Sansoen Phra Barami,” occupies a central place in Thailand’s politics and culture. Contemporary vocal arrangements of the anthem show how performers use ornamentation to incorporate a Thai musical identity into an otherwise Western composition. More broadly, in Thai SATB choral repertoire, ornamentation influenced by the language’s linguistic tones serves as a strong marker of a Thai musical identity within a Western style. This paper will compare multiple performances of “Sansoen Phra Barami” and the classical song “Lao Duang Deuan,” investigating how choral performances incorporate ornamentation. Tanese-Itō (1988) and Swangviboonpong (2003) have outlined structural rules governing ornamentation in Thai classical singing, and List (1961), Ho (2006), and Tanprasert and Rockwell (2021), discuss treatment of falling and rising tones in Thai popular music’s text-setting practices. I will show how ornamentation in Thai choral music is different. For example, Tanese-Itō's formula for Thai classical singing, which is a highly ornamented style, predicts that a word with a falling tone will insert notes after and below the primary pitch. My analyses, however, show that in Thai contemporary choral music, the ornamentation will occur before and above the primary pitch for a falling tone. The cross-fertilization between Thai and Western musical styles creates a unique sound world with distinct ornamentation norms. By preserving traditional musical markers in a post-contact environment, Thai musicians create a new musical style, incorporating a Thai identity into traditionally Western contexts.

On January 7, 2023, videos of audience members booing the Thai royal anthem—played with an on-screen request to stand silently in respect to the King—at the opening of a Blackpink concert in Bangkok went viral online. This incident marked the first widely recognized case of a collective vocal reaction to the anthem in Thailand. If participation in the ritualization of the national anthem materializes a unisonous sense of belonging to an imagined community (Anderson 1983), what identities were expressed, and through what forms of belonging, when collective booing clashed with conventional silence? Following Abe’s (2018) framing of human sonic expression as socially embedded across sedimented histories, I analyze online reactions to the incident alongside archival research on the anthem’s history. Rather than a planned protest, the boos signaled audiences’ discomfort with the anthem as a symbol of Thainess that did not resonate within Thai Blackpink fandom, particularly as fans expressed their pride in welcoming the group’s Thai member, Lisa, home. As noted by K-pop scholarship (Siriyuvasak and Shin 2007; Wee 2021; Lee and Kao 2021), the genre generates imagined communities through shared consumer culture, complicating historically constituted national identities and boundaries. Through booing, audiences contested the royal anthem, which has long been an emblem of Thai royal nationalism since the formation of the Thai nation-state in the late nineteenth century. This vocalization reverberated in a space celebrating a stylish, glossy Thainess shaped by inter-Asian pop cultural circulation.