Abstracts

(Last Updated 3 March 2025)

Keynote Lectures

  • Mark KATZ (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
    Modern Analog Listening and the Transculturation of the Japanese Jazz Kissa
  • Kozo HIRAMATSU (Kyoto University)
    Why Noise Was Defined as ‘Non-Musical Sound’ in the Mid-19th Century?

Themed Sessions

Session 1a: Music, Sound, and Storytelling in Digital Spaces

Friday, March 28, 11:00-13:00

Chair: Mark KATZ (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

11:00–11:30 Yi Eun CHUNG (Hanyang University), Global Challenges and the Evolution of Korean Local Music Platforms

11:30–12:00 Stefan GREENFIELD-CASAS (University of Richmond), The Politics of Virtual Voice

12:00–12:30 Kristopher HILBERT (CUNY Graduate Center), Reel-to-Real: The Material Logic and Political Ecology of Magnetic Tape

12:30–13:00 Teerath MAJUMDER (Columbia College Chicago), Streaming Immersion and the Isolation of the Listening Space

Yi Eun CHUNG (Hanyang University)
Global Challenges and the Evolution of Korean Local Music Platforms

Music is one of the various phenomena that reveal how digital technology is reshaping human life and culture. However, even in this phenomenon, as Georgina Born points out, “music decentralizes the digital” (Born 2022). Music streaming services, which have become a type of platform industry, allow us to observe the interactions of various human and non-human actors around music, while revealing social agendas in a unique way that is different from other platform industries. Observing and analyzing such actions that take place within these music streaming platforms will eventually provide a clue to understanding the new practices of music that take place in the digital space.

This study focuses on the changes experienced by Korean platform companies, particularly Naver and Kakao, in response to challenges from global music streaming platforms, as well as the resulting shifts in the music market. These two companies, which have long held a near monopoly in the Korean digital market, are now facing increasing competition from global services such as YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Spotify. The challenges posed by these global platforms and the ensuing changes within local platforms have significant implications for music creators using Korean local platforms, as well as for music listeners. Through this, the study examines the implications of the dynamics between various global and local music platforms on the current media landscape.

Stefan GREENFIELD-CASAS (University of Richmond)
The Politics of Virtual Voice

Since 2020, VTubers—streamers who use motion capture character models while they stream—have taken the internet by storm. While these VTubers are, as with most streamers, well-known for playing games on stream, many of the most popular VTubers are known for another reason as well: their status as “idols,” and the songs they produce and sing. In this paper, I interrogate the politics of vocal representation with these VTubers, especially in a transnational and global context. Drawing on Akiko Sugawa-Shimada’s (2020, 2023) theorization of the 2.5D—a space between the fictional 2D and the real 3D—I argue that these streamers’ voices make real their otherwise virtual presence (and with actual consequences). My case studies consider how the cultural soft power of these VTubers’ voices is implemented, whether intentional or not: from Japanese VTubers performing at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, to an agency’s formal apology issued when Chinese netizens were enraged that two VTubers referred to Taiwan as its own sovereign nation when reviewing YouTube analytics. At a more individual level, I am interested in cases when corporate VTubers leave an agency and rebrand with a new character persona—though with their same (own) voice. Here, I consider how the agencies and the VTuber fandom both react to these rebrands. For instance, it was initially considered taboo to talk about a VTuber’s “past life” (previous VTuber persona), but, increasingly, this culture has changed. Following this new change in philosophies, I examine the politics of who “owns” the remnant voice.

Kristopher HILBERT (CUNY Graduate Center)
Reel-to-Real: The Material Logic and Political Ecology of Magnetic Tape

This presentation examines the relationship between the material logic and the political ecology of magnetic tape recording. Although normative histories of recorded music characterize tape as just another determinist improvement in the development of audio recording technologies, its material logic is distinct. Unlike the wax cylinders, acetate discs, and wire spools that preceded it chronologically, magnetic tape is non-inscriptive—its data is only stored onto its surface, not etched into its substance. This materio-logical difference actualizes the possibilities of cutting, splicing, looping, erasing, and reusing that Peter McMurry contends “allow sonic data to be preserved, but they also call attention to the fact that not everything that was preserved (i.e., recorded) should be preserved forever (i.e., saved)” (McMurray 2017, 27). However, as Kyle Devine demonstrates is his political ecology of recorded music, the production, distribution, and consumption of recorded medias don’t always account for these media’s limited cultural lifespan or inevitable physical disposal. In this way, magnetic tape is not unique from other musical media formats; it is also deeply entangled with globalized forms of environmental and labor exploitation.

This research intends to elucidate the tensions between magnetic tape’s materio-logical claims and its material consequences. To do so, it traces both the historical and contemporary production of magnetic tape from the extraction of its raw materials to its manufacturing processes, distribution, uses, and its eventual disposal—understanding magnetic tape itself as an assemblage of materials, technologies, and practices that exist within, while also themselves constituting, chemical, environmental, cultural, economic, and political forces.

Teerath MAJUMDER (Columbia College Chicago)
Streaming Immersion and the Isolation of the Listening Space

The sound of modern film has almost invariably been part of a constructed realism much like its visual counterpart. Contrary to conventional wisdom, film sound hardly plays a supporting role in giving credibility to this fabrication; it rather uses the image to conceal its own meticulous construction. At every step, the industry has adopted technologies that allow more separation between sounds during documentation and more elaborate temporal and spatial placement of those sounds in post-production and reproduction. As such, film sound is an autonomous image that presents itself as reality, thereby engendering separation between production and reception. I postulate that emerging spatial audio technologies and the private viewing space that streaming has given rise to perfect this separation by lending ever more credibility to the sonic image through immersion and the negation of the social space that arises from collective viewing.

I begin by identifying design principles that have governed the development of spatial audio technologies and contextualizing the recent proliferation of object-based spatialization systems on various media platforms. I then argue that such systems fundamentally require a listener to be isolated for them to experience the immersive qualities promised by their developers, and that the marriage of personal mobile devices and object-based spatialization has created the perfect conditions to satisfy this requirement.

Session 1b: Acoustic Ecologies and Sonic Interventions

Friday, March 28, 11:00-13:00

Chair: Kozo HIRAMATSU (Kyoto University)

11:00–11:30 Boris WONG (SOAS, University of London), Heartbeats or Noise? Negotiating Military Band Sounds in Singapore’s Urban Soundscapes

11:30–12:00 Katrin LOSLEBEN (UiT The Arctic University of Norway), Sonic Temporalities

12:00–12:30 Federica NARDELLA (Independent Researcher), Vocality and Indigenous Epistemology in the Man-Eagle Partnerships of Post-Soviet Kyrgyz Eagle Hunting: Voicing Heritage, Negotiating Agency, and Mediating the Human-Wildlife Conflict

12:30–13:00 Kate McQUISTON (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), Negotiating Spectacle: Sonic failure and transformation in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Boris WONG (SOAS, University of London)
Heartbeats or Noise? Negotiating Military Band Sounds in Singapore’s Urban Soundscapes

This paper challenges the prevailing interpretation that the military band—a colonial legacy repurposed for postcolonial nation-building—effectively projects sonic presence to shape the soundscape and serves as an uncontested symbol of state power and authority. Using an ethnographic case study of school marching bands in Singapore, it examines how the soundings of military bands within the city-state’s urban soundscapes have potentially become focal points for contesting and contending state-promoted cultural and moral ideologies. Central to the dispute are the drumbeats produced by the ensembles, regarded by musicians as the “heartbeats” of their marching band practices. These drumbeats not only sonically embody the core aesthetic focus of synchronising movements and music-making but also symbolically represent the musicians’ esprit de corps and stamina. However, they are also a source of contention in residential neighbourhood, where these persistent sounds are heard as noise and disruption. The issue is further exacerbated during rehearsals that rely on amplified pulses from electronic metronomes, which are essential for marching band training. By examining local discussions and conflicts surrounding the drumbeats and electronic pulses, this paper explores the multiple, discrepant logics of public space (Eisenberg 2013) in postcolonial Singapore. I approach the city-state’s urban soundscape as a contested affair “constituted by negotiations between [individuals or collectives] with differing sonic ideologies” (Sykes 2015). I argue that these disputes exemplify the hegemonic processes shaping Singapore’s urban soundscapes, where dominant narratives and values are continually challenged and reinforced.

Katrin LOSLEBEN (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
Sonic Temporalities

The project Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North (RCN 2021-25) seeks to deliver innovative interdisciplinary, empowering and democratic listening strategies to understand how individuals and society, more broadly, experience places through sound. Based on that knowledge, it helps cultivate radical imaginations of futures beyond environmental anxiety. However, even in a place like Tromsø (N), which is historically, culturally, and economically permeated by water (Neimanis 2017) and concerned with the unsettling consequences of climatic changes both in and over the water surface, participants of the research project often feel distant from water worlds. With sound walks and sound sittings, we engage in poly-sensory, poly-temporal listening experiences that are collective with human and non-human others (MacBride 2021).   

These sonic encounters allow us to explore their role in what Ashon Crawley (2020) coined ‘otherwise possibilities’. In sound, past, present and future coincide in non-predictable ways and create spaces of possibilities needed for imagining futures (Macharia et al. 2023). This presentation works on the three levels of Françoise Vergès’ notion of “multiple temporalities of reparation” (repairing the past, the present and the future, Vergès 2022) to explore societal transition through new relations to land, earth and water in the irreparable. 

Federica NARDELLA (Independent Researcher)
Vocality and Indigenous Epistemology in the Man-Eagle Partnerships of Post-Soviet Kyrgyz Eagle Hunting: Voicing Heritage, Negotiating Agency, and Mediating the Human-Wildlife Conflict

his paper explores interspecies vocality as political ecology and heritage. In Kyrgyz eagle-hunting, eagles are trained to return to their masters through vocalisations (Nardella 2025; McGough 2019;  Soma 2015). The practice, intimately tied to Kyrgyz ethnic identity, leans on Indigenous ecological knowledge and epistemology. The vocal weaving of these interspecies bonds fosters human/non-human interconnection and the possibility for coexistence, dialogue, cooperation. However, voice is also potentially a tool to assert dominance over the non-human (Harrison 2021). The sound kyittuu, used to summon eagles, is passed down from master to apprentice as ‘the sound of our ancestors’ (Rinat Mirlanov, personal communication, August 2024). It connects hunters and eagles to ancestry as a bridge across species and time. It links humans to non-humans through chains of mastership and apprenticeship. Vocality thus emerges as a means to preserve heritage and as an intangible infrastructure to connect to the (non-human) Other (on othering, Casanova and Cortés 2022). Traditionally, a falconer is recognised as a master upon proving his eagle has learnt and agreed to listen to him (Master Nursultan Kolbaev 2019). Negotiating and achieving mastership thus challenges the notion of the human voice as source of authority. The ‘leading’ voice depends on its ‘subject’. Exploring renewed approaches to human/non-human agency (Bennett 2010; Steingo 2024), this paper addresses the centrality of Indigenous stewardship and interspecies vocality in mediating interspecies conflict (see Dolar 2006) whilst connecting both human and non-humans to heritage in the postcolonial space (see Weston 2024). 

Kate McQUISTON (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)
Negotiating Spectacle: Sonic failure and transformation in Jordan Peele’s Nope

The story of Nope, Jordan Peele’s 2022 neo-Western, horror/ science-fiction film, centers on OJ and Emerald, siblings struggling to maintain their family’s horse handling business in California. After OJ sees what he thinks is a flying saucer, he leads a plan to film it to become famous. The characters soon realize the flying object is not a ship, but a predatory creature. A summer monster blockbuster film with strong elements of Westerns and horror, Nope critiques the treatment and erasure that minorities face as workers in industries of spectacle, which it unveils as the ultimate predator.

The soundtrack nominally meets expectations of a summer monster movie in its array of pop songs from the 1960s through the 1980s, original music by Michael Abels, which echoes Western and horror scores, and inventive sound effects by Johnnie Burn. Sound effects lead the way in thematizing the senses and the transformative processes experienced by the creature and the characters. Manipulations of borrowed songs calls attention to the limitations of technology and the human costs of spectacle. Likewise, contextual failures involving Abels’s cues point back to the dangerous allure of spectacle, for both its creators and consumers.

Using sound-ecology paradigms I offer an in vivo perspective on the soundtrack of Nope. I show how the soundtrack articulates the progress and challenges of the characters through a novel array of technological manipulations and failures.

Session 2a: Technology, Perception and Musical Innovation

Friday, March 28, 14:30-16:00

Chair: Hye-yoon CHUNG (Korea National University of Arts)

14:30–15:00 Emerson VOSS (University of Pittsburgh), A New Music Critique of Neoliberalism: Arts Funding and Fake Feces in Norway

15:00–15:30 Luiz Ribeiro FONSECA (Federal Fluminense University), Listening to Amazônia Verde Viva: Intersections of Music and Non-Human Voices in the Global South

15:30–16:00 Julin LEE (University of Music and Theatre Munich), (Inter-)Facing the Music: Engaging with Television Series Soundtracks in the Streaming Era

Emerson VOSS (University of Pittsburgh)
A New Music Critique of Neoliberalism: Arts Funding and Fake Feces in Norway

As theorized from Hannah Arendt’s conception of public space, publicly funded art is a mirror, allowing a society to craft and evaluate its definition of freedom beyond the reach of neoliberal private interests. The reception history of Norwegian composer Trond Reinholdtsen’s publicly funded, music-theatrical piano concerto Theory of the Subject (2016; Theory) stands as a particularly strange and self-reflexive example of this mirroring effect.

Blending elements of concerto, performance art, art theory, art installation, live video, and political messaging, Theory levels an institutional critique, not so much at the institutions of New Music in which the artwork is positioned, but at the world which creates the conditions for the failures of these institutions. Theory’s theatrical narrative is the story of New Music piano soloist Ellen Ugelvik’s struggle (and failure) to play truly new and socially transformative music within a neoliberal world.

Through its ridicule by the right-leaning, Norwegian Facebook group “Sløseriombudsmannen” and its inclusion in Morten Traavik’s theater work Sløserikommisjonen (2021), Theory helped bring Norway into ongoing polarizing (though important) debates about the status and role of public art in Norwegian society.

As exhibited in Theory, Reinholdtsen’s political stance aligns with Berlin’s Dadaism yet differentiates itself by embracing sincerity and vulnerability. Theory expands the typical political scope of New Music, exemplifying the ability of public art to be a powerful, self-reflective tool within a society.

Luiz Ribeiro FONSECA (Federal Fluminense University)
Listening to Amazônia Verde Viva: Intersections of Music and Non-Human Voices in the Global South

This paper explores the intersection of sound, ecology, and technology in the context of climate change, focusing on the Brazilian album Amazônia Verde Viva (2021) by Thiago and Albery Albuquerque. It uses the concept of “ecological sound work” examine how artistic practices in the Global South address the Anthropocene through non-human voices and innovative soundscapes. Drawing from perspectives in post-humanism, acoustemology, and Indigenous epistemologies, the study critiques the culture-nature binary and investigates the role of technology in mediating human and non-human agency.

Through an analysis of Amazônia Verde Viva, this work interrogates the technological frameworks underpinning interspecies compositions, including the use of field recordings, virtual instruments, and compositional software. It identifies tensions between ecological awareness and technocolonial paradigms, situating the album as a counter-colonial gesture while acknowledging its entanglement with global technological hegemonies. By emphasizing the relationality of sound, the paper reveals how Amazonian voices—animal, environmental, and technological—emerge as agents of resistance and coexistence.

This research highlights the importance of geolocated sonic practices in amplifying marginalized ecological narratives and offers a critical reflection on the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of sound art in the Global South. Positioned at the nexus of art, science, and environmental activism, Amazônia Verde Viva challenges listeners to rethink their engagement with the more-than-human world amidst the escalating climate crisis.

Julin LEE (University of Music and Theatre Munich)
(Inter-)Facing the Music: Engaging with Television Series Soundtracks in the Streaming Era

Streaming technologies have fundamentally changed how we consume television series and consequently how we engage with their soundtracks. Careful closed captioning and subtitling supply an additional interpretive layer in real time by revealing not only the names of artists and titles of pre-existing songs used but also their lyrics. Episode recaps jog not only viewers’ narrative memories but also their musical ones. The skip-intro and post-play functions appear to curtail engagement at two prominent sites of extended musical occurrences: the opening title and the end credits sequences. However, careful examination of a growing body of television series reveals a much less uniform deployment of these platform-specific features, evidencing that they can be strategically employed to play crucial narrative roles.

Drawing on approaches in critical platform interface analysis (CPIA) (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2024), I aim to highlight how streaming platform technologies shape viewers’ sonic reception of contemporary television series in their platform- or media-specific habitats. Taking Disney+’s The Mandalorian, Prime Video’s The Rings of Power and Fallout, and Netflix’s Bridgerton as case studies, I map out the bespoke musical strategies contemporary series utilize to maximize the narrative impact of their streaming platforms’ interfaces, thereby significantly influencing fandom reception practices. Ultimately, I aspire to contribute to a better understanding of how streaming platforms’ interfaces expand our opportunities to engage with series soundtracks through the lens of their drillability (Mittell 2015) and spreadability (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013).

Session 2b: Music, Voice, and Political Resistance

Friday, March 28, 14:30-16:30

Chair: Yongsik KANG (Andong National University)

14:30–15:00 Diogo SALMERON CARVALHO (Marywood University), “Open the Bruise Up”: Identity and Memory in Steve Reich’s Music

15:00–15:30 Yechan MOON (Yonsei University), Sound and Access to Information: The Political Implications of the Loudspeaker Broadcasts to North Korea

15:30–16:00 Leila TAYEB (Northwestern University in Qatar), The Sound of a Checkpoint: Making Islamo-Masculine Space in Post-Revolutionary Libya

16:00–16:30 Andrew IRVIN (University of Melbourne), Both heard and unheard – Sound in Culture & Control

Diogo SALMERON CARVALHO (Marywood University)
“Open the Bruise Up”: Identity and Memory in Steve Reich’s Music

The year of 2020 saw another resurgence of racial tensions in the US. But police violence and white-supremacist demonstrations are not unique to these times. In 1964, police officers harshly beat Daniel Hamm, whose recorded testimonial was used by Steve Reich to compose Come Out (1966), a minimalist piece that further established a new compositional technique and granted those events a permanence in time. The analysis of Reich’s early pieces is enriched by incorporating the narrative content, which is directly linked to the civil rights movement and racial identity.

Come Out alludes to the 1960s events in two levels: the subjugated boy and the cultural memory of African American struggles. Using Margaret Somers’ narrative identity studies as a catalyst for Paul Ricoeur’s concepts on time and narrative, I suggest that Reich’s elimination of the text’s semantics reveals the musical subject, the suppression of the man’s identity. Come Out deconstructs Hamm’s identity, but carries a deeper message that reconstructs a distant past every time the work is performed. In essence, Reich makes the struggles of the past a living presence through his music.

Yechan MOON (Yonsei University)
Sound and Access to Information: The Political Implications of the Loudspeaker Broadcasts to North Korea

This study examines the political role of sound and access to information in inter-Korean relations, focusing on the loudspeaker broadcasts directed at North Korea. These broadcasts delivered external information and South Korean pop culture to North Korean citizens, directly challenging the North Korean regime’s controlled soundscape and monopolized information structure. Grounded in media ecology and information asymmetry theory, this paper explores how loudspeaker broadcasts restructured the asymmetry of information and positioned sound as a tool for power and resistance. The research investigates how the loudspeaker broadcasts expanded access to information for North Korean citizens, thereby weakening the effectiveness of regime propaganda and influencing its surveillance and counter-strategies (e.g., blocking broadcasts, intensifying internal propaganda). Furthermore, it highlights the political interplay of sound between the two Koreas, examining how loudspeaker broadcasts reshaped the dynamics of information and power. By doing so, this study demonstrates that sound functions as more than a medium of communication—it serves as a central mechanism for political control and resistance in inter-Korean relations. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of how sound and media technologies play a pivotal role in the power dynamics between North and South Korea, offering a fresh perspective on the role of information and sound in contemporary international politics.

Leila TAYEB (Northwestern University in Qatar)
The Sound of a Checkpoint: Making Islamo-Masculine Space in Post-Revolutionary Libya

Late one 2014 evening, a musician in Benghazi was stopped at a militia checkpoint and recognized. The young man closest to his car asked for his papers gruffly, and added accusatorily, “Are you Mohammed Lawshayesh who sings?” With a clever rejoinder — “Yes, I sing… I even sing tala’ al-badru ‘aleina!” — the musician elicited laughter from the militiamen and was let go, evading what he feared might be a violent policing.

In Libya, as elsewhere, the checkpoint is a privileged site for the performance of sonic-territorial authority, a site in which the theatricality of these performances renders them easier to observe. These checkpoints began in 2011 as markers of territory controlled by revolutionaries, but over time came to signal a wider range of possible realities: the presence of armed conflict over a contested area, the stable control of one militia throughout a neighborhood, the visible establishment of police functions in the wake of a political accord. With all of these possible meanings, and with the diminished visual information of face-covering balaclavas and generic military fatigues, sound at the checkpoint comes to be an especially important sensory field for meaning making and contestation. In instances like the one above, these processes are accented as performances of what Shenila Khoja Moolji calls Islamo-masculinity. This proposed presentation explores how, through the realm of sound, checkpoints in Libya during the 2010s became sites for the negotiation of religious and political authority.

Andrew IRVIN (University of Melbourne)
Both heard and unheard – Sound in Culture & Control

Both heard and unheard, sound permeates our atmosphere – the only habitable space for our species, even in apparent silence, still holds a latent resonance of various frequencies. We do not live in a vacuum, and humanity selectively creates and curates its aural space within a broader environment over which it cannot fully exert control.

This research examines depictions of sound in non-auditory media (i.e. – illustrated imagery), a comparison to sound animation methods, and the motifs and expressions used to convey favorable or unfavorable performance of, or response to, music in a broader societal and environmental context.

The Universal Spikes is an illustrated, sequential science fiction narrative – a comic book – which provides an allegorical framing for the ways in which sound may be used as a means of manipulation and colonization of spaces. As the story appears on the page, the plot is able to incorporate influences of both hypersonic and subsonic frequencies upon the human population as propagated by various actors, witting and unwitting.

How does music carry intent? How can this be expressed in lieu of notation? How do sonic experiences both within and beyond the bounds of the human aural range impact our society and surrounding environment? What tools do we have for communicating ideas of this nature beyond an audience of acoustical engineers, environmental psychologist and music theorists? The Universal Spikes seeks to explore these boundaries, and this discussion paper will provide a guided tour with comic as companion in broadening this dialogue.

Session 3a: Music, Artificial Intelligence, and Creativity

Saturday, March 29, 9:30-11:30

Chair: Kyoung Hwa KIM (Hanyang University)

09:30–10:00 Katsushi NAKAGAWA (Yokohama National University), What happened to Environmental Music in 1980s Japan when it was reevaluated as Kankyō Ongaku in 2010s Japan?

10:00–10:30 Xingyu JI (Peking University), Shuttling Between Music and Sound: The Manifestation of Phonography in Samson Young’s Sound Art Works

10:30–11:00 Rafael LOPES DOS SANTOS (University of Évora/CESEM), The Brazilian indigenous sonic culture through music: a study based on the discography of Egberto Gismonti

11:00–11:30 Sohyeon PARK (SoundWolf Co., Ltd.), Sonic Materialism and Sonic Nostalgia: Designing Immersive Soundscapes for Memory and Emotional Well-being

Katsushi NAKAGAWA (Yokohama National University)
What happened to Environmental Music in 1980s Japan when it was reevaluated as Kankyō Ongaku in 2010s Japan?

In “Audible Futures,” the conclusion of The Audible Past (2003), Jonathan Sterne argues that “all histories embed stories about the future in their stories about the past” (342). In this presentation, by discussing examples from the 1980s and 2010s, I aim to examine one of the Audible Futures in relation to “3. Sound Art and Music.”

Following Sterne’s approach, this presentation examines the environmental mode of listening in the 21st century through Environmental Music in 1980s Japan and Kankyō Ongaku in 2010s Japan. In the 1980s, Brian Eno’s ambient music, Max Neuhaus’s sound installations, and R. M. Schafer’s soundscape theory influenced Environmental Music by YOSHIMURA Hiroshi, ASHIKAWA Satoshi, and others. Two decades later, Environmental Music gained new recognition through used record stores and YouTube’s recommendation system, being reevaluated as Kankyō Ongaku in 2010s Japan. What happened to Environmental Music and the concept of environment?

This presentation examines this problem by referring to several key factors: the 100 Soundscapes of Japan project (1990s), the popularization of the internet and MP3 format in Japan (2000s), the changing meaning of “environment,” and the emergence of vaporwave and city pop as new forms of environmental music.

This presentation, which addresses Sound Art and Music, aims to investigate what happened to Environmental Music in Japan between the 1980s and 2010s and to provide a hypothesis about its evolution from avant-garde music to recorded music and its rebirth as vernacular avant-garde.

Xingyu JI (Peking University)
Shuttling Between Music and Sound: The Manifestation of Phonography in Samson Young’s Sound Art Works

This paper analyzes the sound art practice of Hong Kong-Based composer and sound artist Samson Young, focusing on how his work navigates between sound and image, music and noise, landscape and soundscape, and score and transcription, creating a unique artistic language. The concept of “phonography,” proposed by Christopher Cox, provides a valuable lens for understanding Young’s cross-disciplinary practices. It reveals how his work navigates the intersections of music, visual art, and technology, creating a dialogue between sound and image.Young’s art challenges the boundaries between traditional music and visual arts by combining the materiality of sound with its visual representation through his “sound drawing” technique and field recordings, revealing the musicality in sound works.

Young’s works not only disrupt conventional artistic boundaries but also offer a profound critique of the socio-political dimensions embedded in sound and music. For instance, in the “Muted Situations” series, he highlights the exclusionary hierarchy of classical music by advocating for the equal recognition of all sonic phenomena. Moreover, in Liquid Borders, he uses field recordings re-contextualize natural sounds and geographical spaces into novel artistic forms. Furthermore, his approach to notation dissolves the temporal distinctions between score and transcription, reconfiguring their theoretical and practical applications. The paper emphasizes that understanding Young’s sound art requires a musical perspective, showcasing not only the practice of sound art in the field of music but also exploring the political, cultural, and aesthetic issues behind sound (music), offering a new perspective for the study of sound art.

Rafael LOPES DOS SANTOS (University of Évora/CESEM)
The Brazilian indigenous sonic culture through music: a study based on the discography of Egberto Gismonti

This study investigates ways of representing Brazilian Indigenous sonic culture through musical composition. To this end, we analyze the discographic work of Brazilian instrumentalist and composer Egberto Gismonti, focusing on the period from 1969 to 1989. Through an interdisciplinary lens that combines ethnomusicology, sound studies and musical analysis, this research examines selected examples from this repertoire that express and represent elements associated with Brazil’s Indigenous peoples. Broadly speaking, the 20th century in the arts was characterized by a search for and appreciation of defining aspects of Brazil as a nation, fostering the emergence of several artistic movements in the country. In this context, following the work of authors such as Mário de Andrade and Heitor Villa-Lobos, Gismonti positions Indigenous peoples as central to the construction of a national imaginary. Whether as homage, allusions to ceremonies and festivities, or representations of soundscapes, sounds of Indigenous cultures are incorporated into his discography. These sounds are crafted using a variety of creative techniques that alternately communicate atmospheres and spaces in a literal and descriptive manner, as well as recreate certain environments in a more metaphorical and subjective way. Considering compositional and production processes as well as the social contexts involved, this study argues that these musical representations not only serve as cultural artifacts illustrating aspects of Indigenous peoples but also contribute to the preservation, communication, and resistance of these sonic cultures in modern society.

Sohyeon PARK (SoundWolf Co., Ltd.)
Sonic Materialism and Sonic Nostalgia: Designing Immersive Soundscapes for Memory and Emotional Well-being

This study examines Sonic Materialism as a methodological framework for “Sonic Nostalgia”, presenting an artistic and technological approach to sound design and composition that explores how the material properties of sound and musical elements evoke memory, emotional resonance, and anxiety reduction. Through projects like Sound Plants—a sound installation integrating natural elements with sound modules—and ROOM—a customizable ambient noise app, the research investigates how sonic materials transform everyday auditory elements into immersive and nostalgic experiences.

Key areas of analysis include:

  1. Materiality and Memory: Physical sonic materials (e.g., rhythmic heartbeats, delicate clinking of teaspoons, resonant water droplets) evoke sensory familiarity by recalling rhythms and textures associated with comfort and safety, triggering personal and collective memories. These soundscapes foster emotional resonance, reducing anxiety and enhancing focus.
  2. Techniques and Tools for Auditory Engagement: Integrating field recordings with Ambient Music techniques such as minimal rhythms, tonal ambiguity, spatialization, this study employs tools like Ableton Live and Max/MSP. Using textural layering, rhythmic repetition, and binaural audio, the process crafts evolving soundscapes that balance artistic intent with technological precision.
  3. Applications Across Multi-Modal Platforms: Implementing “Sonic Nostalgia” in the ambient noise app ROOM and the sound installation Sound Plants, this study demonstrates how personalized soundscapes enhance participants’ focus, evoke nostalgia, and reduce anxiety in diverse settings, including user testing of installations, exhibitions, and apps.

By bridging sound materiality with emotional resonance, this research contributes to sound art and immersive technologies by demonstrating how personalized auditory experiences can enhance memory recall, technological integration, and emotional well-being.

Session 3b: Media, Music, and the Shaping of Experience

Saturday, March 29, 9:30-11:00

Chair: Kyung Young CHUNG (Hanyang University)

09:30–10:00 Anna YU WANG (Princeton University), Inter-Ideological Acoustics: A Model of Listening for a Divided Society

10:00–10:30 Anandit SACHDEV (Shiv Nadar University), The Anatomy and Political Currency of Indian Sound Systems

10:30–11:00 Dario GALLEANA (University of Turin), Endangered Sounds: Participatory podcast and immersive sound for political resistance in internal areas

Anna YU WANG (Princeton University)
Inter-Ideological Acoustics: A Model of Listening for a Divided Society

In both musical and political settings, sonic utterances that appear perfectly well-formed by the ideologies of one community can sound illegible or outrageous to other ears. Take, for example, the Anglophone music critics who, for decades, dismissed the sound world of Chinese opera as chaotic, mechanical, and animalistic (Rao 2022); or sound bites from the 2024 US presidential election cycle that drew a whiplash of contradicting affective responses. These cases reveal how, in polarized spaces, the aesthetic and affective dimensions of listening are more than individuated experiences but yield deeply relational, political, and ethical consequences.

To articulate the stakes and mechanisms of listening in such fraught social environments, this talk brings theories of intermaterial vibration (Eidsheim 2015), vibrant matter (Bennett 2010), and intercultural musical semiotics (Yu Wang 2023) into dialogue with insights from a dozen practitioners of cross-ideological listening from community activism, politics, and law. Ultimately, I offer an ecological model of listening as acoustic feedback. Listening extends the vibrating surfaces that receive and reproject sounds back at their makers. Revisiting my earlier case studies through this framework, several speculative insights emerge. In each scenario, listening tempers how the initial musicians or speakers hear themselves. Like the sensuous quality of an acoustic space—“live,” “dead,” or distortive—that causes a singer to luxuriate in the sound of their voice or flinch at its jarring alienness, acts of listening conceal a similarly existential edge, compelling one to lean further into the discourse or to withdraw into narrower, more hospitable acoustic spaces (i.e., echo chambers).

Anandit SACHDEV (Shiv Nadar University)
The Anatomy and Political Currency of Indian Sound Systems

The past decade has witnessed an exponential growth in anti-Muslim and anti-minority violence in India. Hindutva – a Hindu nationalist political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India – has gouged at the pre-existing communal and social rifts in Indian society, making the divide even deeper. Here, sound systems have served as an imperative technological tool in advocating for or against the dominant political discourse of otherization across the country. While on the one hand soundsystem technologies have been utilized for relaying antagonizing content and disseminating right-wing propaganda, on the other hand, sound systems have equally been utilized to spread knowledge against such propaganda and ideology. Sound systems in India hence end up occupying an interesting space between different ideological systems and need to be understood as part of a larger socio-political fabric – one which is equally informed by technology and mediality. Yet the fact that these sound systems dwell on the threshold of an ambient-physical violence cannot be ignored. My research will shed light on how the Indian sound systems as technological and political tools and as socio-cultural assemblages are thought machines/ apparatus capable of catalysing imagination and mobilizing movements through sound and sonic media. I further shed light on how these sound systems utilize sound as a tool of ambient violence. In doing so, I highlight how these sound systems have ritualized ambient urban violence as a show of power in India’s political landscape.

Dario GALLEANA (University of Turin)
Endangered Sounds: Participatory podcast and immersive sound for political resistance in internal areas

The urgent matter of isolated internal areas fractures Europe into two competing soundscapes: the loud mediatised cities and the silent disconnected villages(Scanu et al. 2020). However, sociology, political science and geography focus on macro policies and ignore the people’s living voices(Carrosio 2019; De Rossi 2020; Meloni 2015; Tantillo 2023). As a result, broad analyses neglect local struggles to redefine internal areas (Palmieri 2023). My paper addresses internal areas with special attention to voice and the role of sound technology in participatory research(Hilder 2023; Stoecker 2023). Endangered Sounds is a participatory podcast that challenges the city-countryside dichotomy and unearths the liveliness of the Alpine village of Cevo. Using immersive audio, the voices of Cevo merge with their soundscapes into an archive of community sounds.QR codes throughout the village share the podcast with travellers.I argue that the participatory podcast(Barbarino 2022; Smith 2021; Wilson 2018) is a tool for political resistance and critical consciousness(Freire 2021; Hofman 2020) and that immersiveness emphasises the authors’ positionality within the territory, exposing the power dynamics of audio technology. In conclusion, this project gives a new voice to the neglected soundscapes of internal areas by using the participatory podcast and immersive sound as tools for political resistance and the preservation of marginalised sonic cultures. 

Special Session: National Asia Culture Center

Session 4a: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Music and Media

Saturday, March 29, 9:30-11:00

Chair: Kyung Myun LEE (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

14:30–15:00 Irene Eunyoung LEE (Hoseo University), Chrysalysis: The Metamorphosis of Experiential Sound Art

15:00–15:30 Dylan Diego BRADBURY (University of Manchester) and Oliver JONAS (Independent Researcher), Digital Archiving and Listening In/To Acoustic Space: Patterns of User Contribution to the Sound Mapping Project AudioSpaces

15:30–16:00 Aaron LIU-ROSENBAUM (Laval University), Political resistance through experimental music and sound art

16:00–16:30 Suin PARK (Hanyang University), Messiaen’s Ecological Listening and the Performativity of Musical Temporality

Irene Eunyoung LEE (Hoseo University)
Chrysalysis: The Metamorphosis of Experiential Sound Art

Since 2003, the pursuit of a distinctive sound art style has unfolded within the challenges of contemporary artistic and cultural contexts. Influenced by regional, cultural, and systemic factors, the philosophy guiding this work has required time-intensive exploration rather than immediate results. Over two decades, the Sound Diary project series has been developed as an open platform rooted in “Experiential Sound Art,” where daily life serves as both artistic practice and artwork, intrinsically linking creative output with lived experience.

This methodology has yielded five official works that integrate sound narratives with multidisciplinary elements, presenting the spectrum of human emotion through a comprehensive creative framework. As these projects evolved alongside personal growth, their expanding scale and complexity necessitated longer development periods.

The current project, From Tillandsia to Nabillera, began in Hong Kong as an ambitious exploration of artistic reinvention and self-realization. However, it now confronts significant challenges, including societal indifference, economic constraints, and political turbulence, necessitating profound transformations in both process and perspective. Thematically, the work explores metamorphosis, survival, and resilience, structured around the three developmental stages of a butterfly.

Currently in its third transformative phase, this work examines the alienation experienced by non-mainstream art, the perseverance and disillusionment inherent in a seeker’s artistic journey, and the healing found through human connection. Despite ongoing struggles, the project aspires to culminate in a final stage performance, embodying the ultimate realization of its narrative and artistic vision.

Dylan Diego BRADBURY (University of Manchester) and Oliver JONAS (Independent Researcher)
Digital Archiving and Listening In/To Acoustic Space: Patterns of User Contribution to the Sound Mapping Project AudioSpaces

In recent years, the increasing ubiquity of digital audio technologies has enabled non-specialist listeners and recordists to engage with the complex politics of documenting and (re)signifying acoustic space. Such technologies shape the way that sound provides a “relational means for registering social contact and feelings for place” (LaBelle 2010). Launched in 2023, AudioSpaces is an open mobile-based cartophonic project which—following platforms such as Echoes, Aporee and local examples such as the Montreal Sound Map—allows users to build their own sonic archives using audio files pinned to an online map. In contrast to other comparable projects, often designed with specific themes, geographies or audio quality standards in mind, AudioSpaces’ single limiting parameter is that contributions can only be played back in their specific physical location. This configuration between, on the one hand, the virtuality of digital archives, and the highly place-based conditions of listening on the other, has shaped how contributors conceptualise their engagement with sounds around them and how they imagine their listening publics. This, in turn, has had implications for how users relate to the spaces around them in terms of sound, according to a number of overlapping interests—most significantly, everyday soundscapes, local sonic heritage, and the capturing of “sonic memory material” (Voegelin 2006). By analysing patterns of contribution to the map and drawing from semi-structured interviews with a selection of users, in this paper we examine how people from various backgrounds navigate the overlaps between sonic archiving and potentials of digital technologies for intervening in and (re)signifying space.

Aaron LIU-ROSENBAUM (Laval University)
Political resistance through experimental music and sound art

In this paper I will discuss the creation of a soundwork I composed titled, E pur si muove (“And yet it moves”), whose objective was to creatively transform the sounds of a protest into an aesthetically appealing oeuvre. With the seemingly growing worldwide civil unrest in recent years, along with the media coverage that inundates us, as well, with sound, the profound connection between sound and protest became apparent to me. It has been both a political and ecological awakening.

In 2022, I decided to take field recordings of a protest that had been portrayed in the media as especially noisy and disturbing—this was the single most repeated reason politicians gave to suppress it—and to transform it into an audiovisual work of art. I wanted to balance the media’s exploitation of sound as a political excuse to silence protest with the sound of my composition as a form of political resistance.

The title is a quote attributed to Galileo, who supposedly muttered them to himself (his own restrained sound of protest) during the Inquisition upon being forced to “abjure, curse and detest” his own “opinion” that the earth moved around the sun (rather than stood motionless at the center of the universe, as was thought). By evoking a time of oppression in the past, I hope to underscore how fragile our current state is, and how sound can be a double-edged sword, while showing that we always have the power to listen.

Suin PARK (Hanyang University)
Messiaen’s Ecological Listening and the Performativity of Musical Temporality

This study explores how Olivier Messiaen’s Ecological Listening a mode of listening that transcends — anthropocentric auditory frameworks operates as a performative act that shapes a new conception of — musical temporality. More than passive perception, Messiaen’s Ecological Listening was a performative engagement with non-human temporality, enacting an alternative mode of experiencing time. This study analyzes how Messiaen’s birdsong transcription was not merely documentation or musical material collection but a repetitive performative practice through which a distinct mode of listening was shaped. To explore this, the study examines Messiaen’s transcription process and interprets it through performativity theory and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO).

This study argues that Messiaen’s approach mediated between nature and human composition,
fundamentally challenging conventional perceptions of linear musical temporality. From this perspective, Ecological Listening can be understood as a performative practice that disrupts anthropocentric notions of musical time while embodying and internalizing the temporality of non-human sonic entities such as birdsong. In this view, rather than merely imitating birdsong,
Ecological Listening is a relational engagement with sonic agency, suggesting that musical temporality emerges as a co-constructed process.

Ultimately, this study positions Ecological Listening not as a mere act of representation but as a transformative practice that constructs temporality. By demonstrating that musical temporality is not an inherent, fixed property embedded within a composition but rather a construct shaped through performative practice, this research contributes to the broader discourse on temporality in music studies.

Session 4b: Sonic Representations of Place and Memory

Saturday, March 29, 9:30-11:00

Chair: Hee Seung KYE (Hanyang University)

14:30–15:00 Nina GOODMAN (University of Chicago), Sounding Out a Unified Korea at the Borderland

15:00–15:30 Golo FÖLLMER (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), Streaming Sound Ecologies. Case studies on Ecoacoustic Musicking

15:30–16:00 Jiarui Jerry HU (Independent Researcher), The Songs of Cicada: The Dong people’s Diverse Imaginaries of Cicadas in Dong Music

Nina GOODMAN (University of Chicago)
Sounding Out a Unified Korea at the Borderland

How does a divided people use sound to imagine its reunification, even when the prospect thereof remains volatile? One notable instance of national reunification—a political process that induces social reconciliation, cultural reorientation, and economic reparation—occurred abruptly in 1990 in Germany. Nach der Wende, techno—appropriated and practiced in the temporary autonomous zone of East Berlin—was made a cultural symbol and identity of German reunification (Gutmair 2014; Schiller 2020). In a still-divided nation like Korea, the sounds that symbolize its reunification are unknown but broadly imagined. Over the past twenty years, scholars have postulated the importance of shared language and songs in “preparation” for Korean reunification (Chung 2013; Kim 2017; Lee 2022; and others). Some studies approach a unified Korean future by attending to soundscapes at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) region (Kim et al. 2019; Moon 2019; Lee et al. 2021; Kim et al. 2024). Focusing on the latter, I review these soundscape studies that are also realized in and curated as recordings, sound exhibitions/installations, and documentaries. Then, I explore the affordances of media technology in these projects, as well as their ecological bent. Lastly, I analyze how these idealized soundscapes at the borderland differ from sounds of reality. Ultimately, I argue that if the borderland serves as a sandbox to imagine a unified state, sound can operate as the sand—the very object by which such work can take shape.

Golo FÖLLMER (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
Streaming Sound Ecologies. Case studies on Ecoacoustic Musicking

This paper presents case studies of experimental sound practices in the context of ecoacoustic art and music in networked scenarios. The paper draws on my own early study of networked music (Föllmer 2005), extending it through Christopher Small’s understanding of ›Musicking‹ as societies means of collectively exploring highly complex matters (»…in engaging … in a musical performance, we are articulating matters for which words are not only inadequate but … unnecessary.« (1998)) and Palmer/Hunter’s concept of ›Worlding‹ as a »process of human-non-human enmeshment« (2018).

Following a theory of practice approach, case studies are being done by scholars as well as students as hands-on field research using methods of Deep Hanging Out (Geertz 1998) with artists and Reenactments (van der Heijden/Kolkowski 2022) of given or extended forms of ecoacoustic and environmental art and music practices.

The cases of a 22-hour streaming sound performance by the transnational collective ›Rural Development‹, the environmental streambox listening practice of Udo Noll’s open Telegram Group ›radio.earth‹, and bioacoustic experiments with plants as done by Marcus Maeder and others are questioned concerning their capacity to open experimental music to non-experts and to reframe (post)human enmeshment with different types of natural habitats based on technically mediated forms of deep listening.

As the depth of scholarly understanding of this matter of research is deeply bound to theory of practice’s somatic, hands-on understanding of Worldmaking (Goodman 1978), I’d like to consider, if organizationally possible, to parallel the paper presentation with a small sound exhibit installed in the conference’s coffee area or similar.

Jiarui Jerry HU (Independent Researcher)
The Songs of Cicada: The Dong people’s Diverse Imaginaries of Cicadas in Dong Music

This paper dissects the Dong people’s diverse imaginaries of cicadas in Dong music, and further seeks to show how the sonic features of cicadas help construct Dong people’s ecological consciousness. Additionally, the songs of cicadas are a medium for communication of personal sentiments and transmission of knowledge. This includes its function as a calendrical technology to the Dong people, for example, signaling the time at which farmers should perform sowing and harvesting practices. The analysis mainly draws on over 18 one-on-one interviews conducted with Dong-ethnic interlocutors of various professions and age groups, including national and regional Dong music inheritors. It is complemented by ethnographic observations as part of field trips to the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Guizhou, China. Through the perspective of ethnic identity, the paper also demonstrates how the performances of songs of cicadas strengthen the cultural engagement of the Dong people within the community, and cultural recognition from the outside world.

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