The courtroom is an acoustic and spatial environment where law is enacted through regulated listening. As ethnomusicologists increasingly encounter legal institutions as expert witnesses and as scholar-activists, the courtroom demands clearer theorization as a critical listening space within the discipline. Drawing on Season 3 of Surviving R. Kelly (2023), which features federal court proceedings of sexual abuse by the R&B artist, this paper analyzes how architectural design, courtroom protocol, and surrounding courthouse soundscapes shape what can be heard, withheld, or (mis)understood in legal settings. Microphones, sound systems, white noise generators, architectural materials, and ambient disturbances shape the courthouse as a layered soundscape. Media coverage constitutes a parallel soundscape that recontextualizes courtroom speech as legal narratives circulate in real time. Testimonies delivered under oath are excerpted, replayed, and reframed, while press conferences outside the courthouse transform legal argument into performative statements designed for broadcast. The courtroom thus becomes a site where voice, emotion, and institutional power converge, and where testimony functions as both narrative and performance shaped by acoustic conditions and psychological expectations. Drawing on Gelbwasser’s discussion of courtroom noise and privileged communication (2001) and Blesser and Salter’s theory of aural architecture (2007), this paper argues that courtroom acoustics structure access to information, condition credibility, and influence how justice is experienced by witnesses, legal actors, and listening publics. By theorizing juridical listening through mediated soundscapes and aural architecture, this intervention expands ethnomusicological approaches to power by locating law as an underexamined but increasingly consequential site of listening, governance, and public meaning.

Title: Sounding the “Kawthoolei” (in progress)
Year produced: 2026 (in production)
Estimated total length: 75 minutes
Language: English

This film is part of my ongoing practice-based PhD project on the music and sound of Karen refugees along the Thai-Burmese border, displaced by the Burmese civil war. The Karen are an ethnic minority group, with the majority originally residing in Burma. Many of them have been persecuted by the Burmese military junta for several decades and have settled in Thai border areas. I study the sonic world of the Karen through the theoretical lenses of displacement, ethnicity, and war, examining how Karen music and sound shape and express ethnic identity, construct and present their cultural memory, and engage with themes of war.

The research produces a multimodal and multisensory ethnography, including a thesis, an ethnographic film, soundscape compositions, and a participatory artwork co-created with my participants. For this conference, I would present an excerpt of the film, highlighting Karen youth rap. It centers on oral stories of Karen people’s homeland, “Kawthoolei,” and documents Karen rap music production, interweaving several individual narratives with related Karen music videos. The film explores the senses of the Karen people, such as hearing, vision, imagination, memory, fear, and hope. I have completed my fieldwork and am currently experimenting with different approaches to editing.

Preview excerpt (work-in-progress):

https://vimeo.com/1097677512?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

In many ways, the complexity of composer freelancing in Los Angeles is an intensification of conditions previously observed: musical tradition is interwoven with networking strategies and challenging working conditions. Yet the city’s history of musical eclecticism and desacralization, as described by historian Kenneth Marcus, clearly influences the flavor of artistic activity. Professional opportunities extend beyond a variety of classical music scenes, spilling over to the cultural businesses of film and television (Taylor 2023). At the same time, considerations of musical tradition, ethnic diversity, histories of immigration, economic precarity, and gendered dynamics contribute to artistic profiles and professionalization trajectories. Here, notions of multiculturalism, musical hybridity, and what Andrea Moore has called the “incorporation aesthetic” (2016) become intertwined with contemporary classical music’s connections with entrepreneurialism, the marketplace, and American-based ensemble strategies (Pippen 2014, 2022). Based on my fieldwork, I argue that composers based in Los Angeles operate within a distinct, global “new music” field of cultural production, where professional advancement is influenced by themes of entrepreneurialism, multiculturalism, and social identity. By articulating Los Angeles’s contemporary classical music production in terms of working conditions and cultural diversity, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how freelance musicians engage with and strategize within large, multicultural metropolitan areas.