When sound is broken in half, what takes place in the cut? This paper examines a sound-based literacy program implemented in northern China in the 1910s and 1920s, where medical staff at the London Missionary Society hospitals taught illiterate Chinese patients a new phonetic shorthand during their post-surgery recovery. This shorthand script operated through a two-part spelling principle, whereby the pronunciation of a Chinese syllable was split into an initial and final sound. Drawing on missionary writings, reading materials, and medical reports, I link this phonetic procedure to the surgical cutting performed in the hospitals. I argue that the parallel pursuit of phonetic dissection and medical care hinged on the kinds of semi-anesthetized experiences that came to characterize modernity. Attending to incisions made on the Chinese syllables and the flesh, I listen for a fractured, mechanized modernity at a time when the encroachment of western imperialism was understood as a traumatic cutting up of China’s body politic. Building on Brian Fairley’s critique of “dissected listening” (2023), I suggest that the notion of dismemberment not only guided early ethnomusicological listening—in the way that Erich Moritz von Hornbostel approached recordings of Thai court music as though a vivisection—but also described, literally, the concurrent parsing of Chinese sounds and bodies in the foreign missionary hospitals. The phonetic wounds left by the scalpel thus share a caesura with ethnomusicology’s past, a cut seemingly too distant, too anesthetized to be addressed within the current ambit of medical ethnomusicology.

As both an architectural element and instrument, the carillon (a set of stationary bells played manually by a keyboard in a bell tower) creates and disseminates meaning through its sonic and physical presence. I examine this dual presence in the context of the Mayo Clinic’s Rochester Carillon in Rochester, Minnesota, the only such instrument owned by a hospital in North America.

Despite the instrument’s standing as a primary cultural symbol of the Clinic, I argue the Rochester Carillon, encompassing both the carillonist and the building, negotiates an alternative aliveness through routine clashes with expressed bioethical principles of the clinical setting. In examining power relations both through and from the instrument, I interpret how the carillon becomes a site of clinical and public bioethics, where notions autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice are destabilized and reinvented.

The Rochester Carillon’s power lies in its position as a highly concealed instrument within the Plummer Building, an icon of the city’s public biomedical consciousness. The instrument’s operation and performance remain largely exclusive to the Clinic’s carillonneur and the Humanities in Medicine division, one that employs roughly three full-time staff members out of the Clinic’s 76,000-person workforce. While the building reflects an aesthetic representation of the Clinic’s values framework and emphasis on beauty, the instrument shrouds a complex politics that complicates the practiced principles of western bioethics.

Maternal mortality remains a pressing global challenge, particularly in Africa and Nigeria. While efforts to reduce maternal mortality have primarily emphasized biomedical interventions, the role of music as a form of care in maternal health remains under explored. This study is situated within medical ethnomusicology and examined musical activities in Adeoyo Maternity Hospital, a government-owned facility, and Christ Apostolic Church Oke-Ibukun, a faith-based maternity home, both located in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Grounded in Rosenstock et al.’s Health Belief Model, the research draws on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, in-depth interviews with healthcare providers and expectant mothers, and analysis of songs employed during antenatal sessions. In the faith-based maternity home, music is deeply rooted in spirituality, with hymns, thanksgiving songs, and warfare songs forming the core of antenatal sessions. In contrast, music in the government hospital primarily serves therapeutic functions. Both settings, however, utilize music for health education, exercise, and prayer. These results underscore the multifaceted role of sonic care in shaping emotional, social, and spiritual well-being among expectant mothers. By documenting these practices in the Global South, this study contributes to medical ethnomusicology and offers insights for integrating culturally grounded music into maternal healthcare interventions internationally.