هيHeya Collective: precarity sounded through networked music performance

Our practice-led research engages Networked Music Performance as a methodology of sonic cyberfeminisms. Since 2018 the project has excavated specificity of place mediated by the materiality of internet musicking between Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut and Europe, which acts as a metaphor for precarious lives; from traumatic events to structural relations of unequal access to technology, skills, and infrastructures. In the last year, two members have relocated from the Middle East to Germany. This performance lecture explores how diasporic memories, trauma, belonging and ideas of home are conveyed and received through improvised musicking across geographical distances. Probing the potentialities of nonlinearity and opaqueness in music practice-led research that pierces through colonial epistemological predispositions, Heya’s NMP practices, the interplay between locality, the network, improvised musicking, listening and bending to unknowing, are acts of sonic cyberfeminisms. The inhabiting of speculative spaces of unknowing act as localised sonic conduits to sound out these positionings, rather than seek definitions of subjectivities. Heya’s durational processes bound in NMP, serve to nurture kinship, empathy and care, departing from the conclusivity bound in the binary of knowing. This performance lecture, then, presents Heya’s expressions of precarity and reciprocity as an example of NMP as an intersectional methodology.

Online performance lecture. Authors/performers: Dr Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (İTÜ MİAM, Istanbul), Yara Mekawei (Berlin), Jilliene Sellner (Goldsmiths University of London, PhD candidate, UK), Nour Sokhon (Berlin)

Heya is a research project and experimental ‘musicking’ collective which aims to bridge women who make sound and experimental music in the UK, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey with each other and a global audience. Live networked performances and collaborative sonic works between Nour Sokhon (LE), Jilliene Sellner (CA/UK), Yara Mekawei (EG) and Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu (TR), mixing and reacting to each other’s field recordings and sonic experiments, have evolved to become a horizontal and egalitarian method of decolonizing musicological research, circumventing top down, traditional methods and conclusions.

Thinking music on musical terms or political terms?

This paper examines the relationship between sound and emancipatory politics with a focus on the political economy of music, labour and caste in India. I analyse musicianship central to an anti-caste revolt in modern western India to understand the evolution of a cultural movement. Today, the evolution and the dynamic status of hereditary musicianship symbolises the history of a caste-mandated service, which is at the same time labour undertaken within current market conditions, whether in the context of the music industry, ritual performance, activist work or as art. Through an examination of genres such as bhimgeet, buddhageet, vidrohi shahiri jalsa, and saamna, I look at the ways in which musicians navigate professionalisation, musical production, activism and enable an anti-caste spirit, when the market has appropriated both music and political action. In navigating these spheres, actors produce accounts of musico-political authenticity (e.g. why certain sounds, styles, and repertoires are more progressive/radical/revolutionary than others) that play a central role in laying claim to musicianship as (revolutionary) art. In engaging with these accounts, this paper offers philosophical remarks on the function of sound/music/art as such and its relationship to emancipatory politics.

Dr Rasika Ajotikar is a Junior Professor at the Institute of Music and Musicology and at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. She was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Development Studies at SOAS. As an ethnomusicologist, her research examines issues of labour as they relate to caste to look at how musicianship as a service has evolved into a performance art in modern India. Her work with activists and musicians in anti-caste spheres in contemporary western India explores the links between emancipatory politics and art, particularly music or sound, and at the same time, focusing on issues of citizenship and state repression. Dr Ajotikar is also a singer trained in the North Indian classical music tradition. She has been experimenting with various genres of music and along with her research, collaborating on several projects with musicians from an anti-caste collective in Maharashtra.

Institutional Affiliation: University of Hildesheim, Germany

Look Closer, Into, Through: On Priya Ragu’s “Good Love 2.0” and “Chicken Lemon Rice”

Tracing the affinities between sound studies, performance studies, visual culture, and affect theory, this paper visually and aesthetically analyzes two music videos by Tamil-Swiss singer-songwriter Priya Ragu. Blending samples from Kollywood (Tamil-language) films with the R&B music she grew up listening to in Switzerland as the daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, Ragu creates a unique listening community that is mediated by the platform of YouTube. Taking up the theoretical framework and analytical tool of “sensation” as explicated by performance scholar Amber Jamilla Musser, I ask, how does Ragu sense differently as a diasporic subject through the medium of the music video? In what ways does she embody and extend the interdiscursive and transnational potentialities of her music by troubling the categories of language, gender, nation-state, and cultural inheritance(s)? And finally, what might her music videos illuminate about sonic belonging through the realm of the visual, thereby (re)defining what the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora sounds like? Framed as a paper presentation, this essay argues that Ragu mediates a larger cultural and sociopolitical conversation on how South Asian female artists in the diaspora embody desire and pleasure in their performance practice to challenge structures of gender, power, and capital.

Archita Arun (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and singer from India. She is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. As part of her artistic practice, Archita works with oral histories to ponder questions of (be)longing, memory, love, and loss. In her research, Archita studies the performance of desire and pleasure across music, performance art, visual culture, and popular media in the South Asian diaspora. By centering the fleshiness of sound, her work explores the ways in which minoritarian subjects perform refusal. Her areas of research include sound studies, affect theory, queer of color critique, diaspora studies, and minoritarian performance theory. Archita holds a B.A. in Theater and Creative Writing from NYU Abu Dhabi and an M.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

Histories of Workers’ Songs: Between Communities and Representations

In this lecture I will trace two possible histories of workers’ songs: a history of music practices of workers’ communities, or organized parts of the working class, and a history of representation of working class in songs. The statement that labour movement is on its historic low has become a common statement across political spectrum.  Though not the loudest, a cultural argument has been one of the widespread to address this phenomenon – that the communal experience of the working class, from trade unions activities, benefit societies, to cultural institutions and shared urban quarters, have all but disappeared. However, by tracing histories of workers’ songs I will show that disregarding workers’ communities as living practices is not only a contemporary phenomenon. I will particularly argue how the ideas of “socialism from above” and conflating workers’ movement with antifascist movement have contributed to readiness to substitute practice for representation. Finally, I will discuss how we can reflect these lessons to current music practices in the organizing on the left.

Srđan Atanasovski is a Research Associate at the Institute of Musicology SASA in Belgrade, lecturer at SIT Study Abroad Balkans program in Belgrade and member and vice-president of the Centre for Yugoslav Studies in Belgrade. His research topics include music and nationalism, urban soundscape studies and music in workers’ movement in Yugoslavia. Atanasovski was engaged as a fellow of international research projects funded by Swiss Science Foundation and he has received research scholarships from the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research. His articles have appeared in Southeastern Europe, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Südosteuropa, Musicological Annual, etc., as well as in different edited volumes published by Brill, Ashgate, Transcript and other international academic publishers. He has published two books, Mapiranje Stare Srbije (in Serbian, trans. ‘Mapping Old Serbia: In the footsteps of travel writers, tracing the folk song’, 2017, Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek) and Šubert i rivalstvo kao stvaralački princip (in Serbian, trans. ‘Schubert and rivalry as a creative principle’, 2023, Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga).
 

Underground Communities: Listening to the Soil

This proposal offers delegates the opportunity to spend time listening to the sounds from the soil from around the Hotel Marienhof. Using practice-based methods it asks how a sonic experience might foster relationships with the living and non-living collective activity underground.

Soils are often viewed as simply dirt, as inert material, but soils have a genesis and a lifespan. They originate from rocks, transformed over millennia by climatic conditions, geological movements, chemical processes and the actions of organisms, at all scales. Soils include ‘structures within structures within structures’[1]. They are the product of highly complex evolving relations supporting and often teeming with life. Yet most people spend little concentrated time trying to relate to what lies, and is buried, beneath our feet.

Participants are invited to sign up for individual sessions during the conference period, facilitated by myself using field recording equipment. Drawing on Povinelli’s work critiquing  division of life/non-life[2] and Oliveros’ deep listening practices[3]. The aim of these phenomenological engagements is to challenge where we frame and how we identify communal activity.

[1] G. Monbiot, Regenesis  Alan Lane, Penguin Random House 2022 p23

[2] E.A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism Duke University Press 2016

[3] P. Oliveros, Deep Listening Practices iUniverse 2005

Biography of Michelle Atherton

I am an artist, researcher and academic. My current art practice explores the inter-relation of sound, matter and social contexts. The work considers the complex relationships at play in day-to-day experiences and phenomena. It looks again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, politics and new imaginaries. I use a remix aesthetic, incorporating sound, image and text, creating fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world. The Arts Council and UKRI supports my artworks which have been shown across European galleries, museums, festivals and publications. I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art teaching postgraduate students and have been awarded a ECRI Fellowship at Sheffield Hallam University.

Listening to the Sonic Sea: Creating Ties in Time of Change

The oceans have been described before as “The Silent World” (in reference to the book Le monde du silence (1953) co-authored by biologist and documentarist Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Frédéric Dumas). Advances in acoustic research have made it possible to revisit the supposedly silent world of oceans as imagined by many of us and as proposed by Cousteau in his film also titled The Silent World (1956, co-directed by Louis Malle). Even if we do not perceive them, we now know that these aquatic worlds are full of sounds. With the help of a hydrophone, or underwater microphone, which acts like a mediator or transducer, it is possible for humans to listen to underwater sounds. It becomes also possible for humans to listen to the sounds of motorboats, cruises, or other industrial vessels several kilometers away. Their presence in the underwater space is disconcerting. Led by underwater sound recordings in various locations, and on multiple sessions of listening, this presentation discusses how listening to the sounds of the oceans can help build new forms of relationships with the aquatic worlds, a relation that is not easily accessible to humans without the mediation of technologies. Through an in-depth listening of the underwater sounds, deep connections emerged between humans and non-human beings. This presentation proposes to reflect on the ontological, methodological, and ecological dimensions of listening to create complex relationships that speak to pressing issues related to climate change and anthropogenic transformations taking place in our oceans.

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include media infrastructure, sound, aquatic world, electronic music, digital data consumption and circulation in Cuba as well as in Canada. She is the director of the Acoustic Innovative Research (AIR) studio located at the University of Victoria. She wrote the book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2020), co-edited the volumes Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (2021), and Urban Encounters: Art and the Public (2017). Since 2019, Alexandrine is the Editor-in-Chief of Anthropologica, the Canadian Anthropology Society journal. She directed the film Golden Scars (2010), in part funded by the National Film Board of Canada, and co-directed the film La Tumba Mambi (2022), which received the best Ethnomusicology Film Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival (2023).

Sonic collectivity and communal sorrow: Hajipour’s song ‘Baraye’ and Hatami’s album 35.256031, 47.013321, 27.081979   

How is sonic creativity employed to articulate sentiments shared across diverse spaces, individual experiences, and collective postmemory? What forms of community are created when such articulation crosses boundaries of space and time, as well as social and ideological divisions? This paper explores these questions through the examples of two Iran-based artists working in different musical genres, the singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour and the experimental sound artist Porya Hatami. Hajipour’s 2022 song ‘Baraye’, the anthem of a current uprising in Iran, was awarded the 2023 Grammy for Best Song for Social Change. The song’s lyrics are a collection of tweets from around Iran, which dream of a desired state, reflect on injustice or lament unbearable circumstances. Hatami’s 2020 album, despite its different sonic approach, also creates ties of shared grief and unresolved sorrow. 35.256031, 47.013321, 27.081979 refers to the coordinates for a site in Iran’s province of Kurdistan, and 27 August 1979, the day eleven men were executed there. The album sonically evokes decades of collective grief, the emptiness that follows loss, and the ways everyday life is constantly accompanied by postmemory. This juxtaposition draws on theories of translocality (Peterson and Bennett 2004), cultural intimacy (Stokes 2022), and musical postmemory (Kabir 2004).

Dr Gay J Breyley is an adjunct senior research fellow and lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University and convenor of the Central and West Asia and Diasporas Research Network. Her research focuses on links between music and communities, memory and sociocultural change, especially in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. She has published widely in this field.

Sonifications of Sensations of Crisis:  Embodied Resistance and Sonic Warfare

At rights-based protests, music and sound can communicate feelings of crisis. As different feelings about crisis come together at demonstrations, their meaning is translated into reduced sonic expressions (Gould 2010). Simultaneous speeches, chants, songs, and sounds create a sonic tapestry that resembles the sound of battlefields.

This research explores the sensory tactics of affective mobilizations through the lens of a sonic stand-off that occurred when opposing left- and far-right social movements met in the streets of the city Dresden, in Germany, in early 2020. Through the lens of affect theory, I discuss observations from the ethnographic data in which differently felt anger, despair, fear, and exhaustion mobilized people to form or join provisional sound collectives. At the center of this discussion are the kinds of affective mobilizations that took place when the opposing movements employed their “‘acoustic machinery”’ to make bodies move to the tones of different conceptions of crisis.

This paper sheds light on the question how sonifications of crisis affect protest modes and sonic ties in the streets. How do people sonify different senses of crises, and how do these sonifications affect the visual- and audiospheres in the city?

Carolin Müller is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society at the Hebrew University Jerusalem. She has held positions at the Technische Universität Dresden, the Central European University, and earned a PhD in German Studies from the Ohio State University. Her work investigates the role of performance and aesthetic forms as a means of expressing belonging and identity in activist settings. Her dissertation examined creative acts of citizenship-making through street music, music education, and music as a form of cultural diplomacy in Germany. Currently, she examines soundscapes of conflict, mobility studies, performative ethnography, the sound of images, and collaborative narrative archiving.

The Memories within Haitian Voices: Vocality and Ritual Mounting in Haitian Vodou

“The Memories within Haitian Voices: Vocality and Ritual Mounting in Haitian Vodou,” explores how the devotees’ singing (voye chante) of liturgical songs circulates Haitian ancestral memories, inviting spirits into ceremonial space as “lwa monte chwal li” (ritual mounting). Vocality acts as a medium between physical and spiritual voices which manifest in devotees’ embodied reactions to the verbal and nonverbal sonorities experienced during a “fèt.” Devotees produce various sound qualities, textures, voice modifications, and untethered utterances, and buttress them with the aural and spontaneous language of the vocalizing body. The sacred vocality in Haitian Vodou ceremonies transcends the flesh, manifesting through the material makeup of the instrumentation. Devotees utilize their bodies and instruments for sacred communication, illuminating the transtemporal echoes of the past and allowing devotees to stretch forward and backward in time.

Collin Edouard is a second-year ethnomusicology Ph.D. Student at Yale University researching the vocality in a Haitian Vodou ceremony. He is an adjunct professor of music at the University of Bridgeport and created a course called “Music of the Global South.” In this course, students survey several cultures, building connections within several diasporic communities. Collin focuses on expanding access to music and music education, particularly with music less frequently circulated. He is a contributing author in The New Teacher’s Guide to Overcoming Common Challenges, Curated Advice from Award-Winning Teachers. He taught music in Spain, Uganda, Turkey, India, Iraq, England, and the United States. Collin has initiated music festivals, created choirs, adjusted music curricula, and continues to advocate for BIPOC lives and voices.

Listening to Music in India in the Age of Platforms

Aditi Deo (with Vebhuti Duggal, Ambedkar University, India)

Practices of music listening have always been located – in time, in place, and filtered through techno-cultural bodies. While this is an old argument, concepts such as ubiquitous music or technological shifts such as algorithmic recommendations intermittently draw the discourse back to an implied homogeneity in listening practices. Simultaneously, in recent decades, literature in Sound and Music Studies has reformulated postcolonialism and de-centred the Euro-centric universality through lenses such as the Global South or decoloniality, reminding us of the specificities of music cultures, of technological and infrastructural adoptions, and of musical content itself.
This paper builds on the above literature to take a recent technological shift—the ubiquity of platform-based consumption of music—to ask: how do we approach the specificity of being a listener in India? How do territorial boundaries and/or contiguities affect acts of listening and participation? Instead of treating platformization as a symptom of deeper industrial reconfigurations (Isthurbide), we wish to examine how listening, a quotidian practice, is configured through these platforms. In order to address our questions, we look at the case studies of two
platforms: Starmaker and YouTube. Across these platforms we deploy various acts of musical engagement and affective connections to function as ‘listening’ – by understanding listening to be akin to ‘musicking’ in Christopher Small’s terms, where listening exceeds the paradigms of hearing with the ear, alone.

Aditi Deo is Assistant Professor in the Division of Performing and Visual Arts, School of Arts and Sciences, at Ahmedabad University. She is an ethnomusicologist (PhD, Indiana University Bloomington) with research interests in the music of the Indian subcontinent, especially Hindustani Khayal music, Hindi film music, and vernacular folk traditions. Her work addresses conceptual questions related, among others, to performance practice, technologies, pedagogies, circulation, and heritage.

Vebhuti Duggal, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, India

Listening to Dolly Parton’s Elusive Race Politics

It is a truism of contemporary US-American social life that just about everyone loves Dolly Parton—or is supposed to. Her engaging, warm persona, self-deprecating homespun humor, widely acknowledged nonjudgmental support for marginalized identities, and generosity as a philanthropist and businesswoman, as well as, of course, her high-profile entertainment business activities (as songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, actor, show producer, and theme park creator-owner) have rightfully earned her many accolades and adoration over the past six decades. And, that adoration is not restricted to the US: for example, her immense popularity throughout Africa is well-documented. But with the exception of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s acclaimed 2021 essay “The Dolly Moment: Why We Stan a Post-Racism Queen,” relatively few writers engage with the racialized dimensions of Parton’s own music and her thinking about it. This essay draws inspiration from Cottom’s work, using musical analysis and a growing literature on race in country music to enrich the conversation around Parton’s music, which could help to address questions of race and racism within its Nashville orbit and beyond.

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has written or co-edited books on the ringtone industry (The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form, 2013), mobile music studies (The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2014), and the music of Steve Reich (Rethinking Reich, 2019). He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.

Abstract: Recovering the 1980s and 1990s London lesbian club scene

During the 1980s and 1990s, Black and white lesbians disrupted the heteronormative map of London’s nightlife by creating their own spaces to get lost in music. London’s lesbians worked in a cultural contraflow to provide their own spaces of pleasure. Designing, and distributing their own flyers, lesbian promoters and DJs worked collaboratively to secure these fragile club nights on the peripheries of the straight and gay club scenes, upsetting the city’s gendered spaces (Massey).

The music of the Black Atlantic played on this scene offered imaginings of hope and redemption (Gilroy). The messages in the music offered a sonic and imagined escape from the oppressive and threatening environments that women faced every day.  The music played was repurposed and refashioned by the lesbian dancers and DJ’s, creating alternative imaginary worlds, and offering ‘wiggle room’ (Ahmed) for women to expand into and express themselves.

This paper offers ephemeral items (flyers, mixtapes) as a method to recover the history of the cultural activism that lesbians were involved in. Connecting these archival fragments with queer oral history accounts, the resulting stories disrupt (Summerskill et al) existing histories of nightclubbing, centring on the experiences of queer women to tell a vibrant musical history.

Katherine Griffiths is a former and some-time DJ. She played ‘rare groove’ at gigs and parties in London, Manchester, and Paris in the 1980s and 1990s on the lesbian and straight club scenes. She is currently reading her PhD in history at Royal Holloway University of London – tentatively titled ‘Going Out, Coming Out, Playing Out’. Using queer oral history, cultural geography, and an engagement with archives and material culture, this is an exploration and recouping of the lesbian club scene in London in the 1980s and 1990s that Black and white women created on the margins of this vibrant city.

Sounding feminist resistance – on resonances of recent feminist mobilisations in Poland and Iran

How do social movements sound? (How) can you use sound to affect change? This presentation explores sound as a form of resistance, bringing together two recent case studies of the Polish Women’s Strike in 2020/21 and the 2022 Iranian Feminist Revolution.

In both localities, recent triggers caused hundreds of thousands of protesters, led by feminists, to take to the streets. In Poland it was the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling effectively banning abortion on 22 October 2020. In Iran, it was the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini by the morality police on 16 September 2022.

In the study of social movements, sound is often neglected, with the visual dominating both academic research and the digitised-mediatised news cycle. The affective power of sound, however, has the potential to bring communities together (Segal, 2018; Butler, 2015) through the creation of collective memory, as well as offering a rendering of the moods and ideologies permeating through the movement in real-time.

By sketching the sonic landscapes of each movement, this presentation explores the limits and potentials of sonic agency (LaBelle, 2018), (utopic) sonic fictions (Eshun, 1998; Schulze, 2020) created during a protest, and what resonances of social movements can tell us about the effects (and affects) of taking up public space – particularly by those who are often excluded from these spaces.

Hanna Grześkiewicz is an independent researcher and curator working with sound and words. She works at the intersection of academia, art, and activism, aiming to create mutually enriching connections. She writes, facilitates workshops and collective projects, and creates work for radio, which includes the monthly show morning stories on Warsaw’s Radio Kapitał. Hanna is the Discourse Curator for IMPULS Festival (East Germany) and was part of transmediale festival’s 2022 research group. Her work has appeared in a range of publications including APRJA, Positionen, Gramophone Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and openDemocracy. She has presented her work, among others, at the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), CTM Festival (Berlin), University of Copenhagen, and Freie Universität Berlin. Hanna has degrees from the University of Cambridge and the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Female soundwalk: Chinese female immigrants and public space in Hong Kong

Soundwalk practice began in the last century, developing from a methodological tool to include recent artistic approaches (Paquette & McCartney, 2012). Soundwalking has also been used as a feminist methodology to explore females’ sensory engagement and embodiment of hidden contexts (O Keeffe & Nogueira, 2018), through its possibility to move us from “distant panorama to vibrating immediacy” (Loveless, 2020). Gender relations are significant to space construction (Massey, 2013), feminist research explore the public space as a gendered, sexualized and racialized arena(Scraton & Watson,1998). The research for this paper puts Chinese female migrants at the centre of the creative soundwalking process, an artist-led soundwalk project being conducted in urban public spaces in Hong Kong. It aims to investigate these questions: What role does sound in urban public space play from the perspective of Chinese female migrants’? Secondly, how do Chinese females re-experience and understand public space through soundwalks, and how will they re-understanding the sounds in their familiar spaces after the soundwalk? Thirdly, what is the relationship between sound, the female body and public space?

GUI Ren, with a background in Media and Music applications. Now, she is a Ph.D. student at City University of Hong Kong, focusing on soundscape studies, and sound art.

Ryo Ikeshiro is an artist, musician and researcher exploring possibilities of meaning and context in sound and its materiality in relation to audio technologies. He has exhibited at M+, Hong Kong, and contributed to Sound Art: Sound as a medium of art (ZKM Karlsruhe/MIT). He is Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong.

“I Will Rescue You”: Musical Saviors and The Anti-Trafficking Movement 

In 2018, contemporary Christian singer-songwriter Lauren Daigle released “Rescue,” a song that subsequently inspired Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a U.S.-based anti-trafficking NGO. Coinciding with “World Day Against Trafficking in Persons” in 2020, two OUR-affiliated “Rescue” music videos dropped online. These videos showcase the dubious notion that millions of women and children are being trafficked/enslaved today. What does it mean to claim, as OUR does, that there are more slaves now than at any other point in history? Where did this assertion arise? What purposes does it serve? And how are NGOs recruiting and using musicians? In this paper, I analyze OUR’s videos and consider their musical contributions to the anti-trafficking movement or “rescue industry”—a Global North alliance that seeks to save victims by prosecuting traffickers (Chuang 2014). Although this carceral strategy hasn’t proven effective (Berstein 2018; Lee 2019), it has succeeded in enlisting artists who believe they are fighting the good fight. They’re not. Drawing on critical trafficking studies literature and my research on erotic dance, I show why “trafficking” is a problematic approach to sexual commerce. Individuals intent on saving victims through music are fighting the wrong fight, with potentially devastating effects.

Beth Hartman (she/they) is a lecturer in the Writing Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music. An engaged public scholar, Hartman has written pieces for the Burlesque Hall of Fame Museum in Las Vegas and for artist Monica Sheets’s The Feminist Strip Club project, supported by the Weisman Art Museum. Hartman is also a member of the Americana band The Gated Community, a Minneapolis red light district tour guide, and a burlesque performer and instructor.

Musical Leisure: Sonic Ties against Commodification and Exploitative Forms of Lives

I this talk, I engage with musical leisure as the framework that helps us to understand the potentialities and limits of sound and music in shaping alternative ways of collective engagement and organizing. Considering the historical and contemporary examples of the involvement in the amateur, non-monetized music/sound-related activities, my goal is to open discussion on the waged and unwaged productive time in ethnomusicological explorations. Starting from the question of what does it mean to be connected through/by music and sound in our leisure time, I discuss the potential fields of resistance to the precarity and exhaustion caused by exploitative modes of existence. I focus on the practices of politicization of a field of leisure and their potentials and limits in resisting the contemporary neoliberal work-leisure misbalances in order to show how the perspective of musical leisure is missing historical knowledge and experience that can intervene in the ongoing critical conversations about the corporate, privatized and deeply individualized consumerist ethos.

I would address three specific topics: 1) critical engagement with capitalist commodification, alienation, and exploitation and its dismissal of class perspective to understand the social relations 2) the role of musical leisure in mobilizing people to live, persist, and resist to the precariousness, labour instability and feeling of uncertainty 2) the ways communal leisure activities can serve as emancipatory vehicle for building new forms of solidarity across national borders.

Ana Hofman is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. Her research interests include music, sound, and politics in socialist and post-socialist societies, with an emphasis on memory, affect, and activism in the present-day conjuncture of neoliberalism and post-socialism in the area of former Yugoslavia. She has published two monographs, Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011), and Music, Affect, Politics: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2015), dealing with contemporary musical recuperation of the World War II Yugoslav antifascist resistance.  She served as co-editor (with Federico Spinetti and Monika E. Schoop ) of a 2020 Special Issue of Popular Music and Society, titled “Music and the Politics of Memory: Resounding Antifascism across Borders” She recently edited the volume (with Tanja Petrović) Affect’s Social Lives: Post-Yugoslav Reflections (2023).

Dr. Hofman teaches at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School, Ljubljana. She was a Visiting Researcher at the School of Music, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany and the Department of Music, University of Chicago. She has also been appointed as Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Graduate School of City University of New York in 2018. The same year, she received the Danubius Mid-Career Award from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Institute for Central Europe and Danube Region. Dr. Hofman is currently working on a monograph on strategic amateurism, politics of leisure and musical afterlives of socialism after Yugoslavia (Oxford University Press).

Nyaudzosingwi the Onomatopoeic factor in ‘Toyi-toyi and Zhii riots of 1960 Bulawayo

Nyaudzosingwi is Shona for onomatopoeia. It’s root Nyau means to arouse/provoke. The extensive use of onomatopoeiae in Shona and other Bantu languages proposes sound as the acoustic progenitor of knowing. This paper will explore the use of onomatopoeiae in liberation war choruses and protest chants in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe and South Africa with a focus on Toyi-toyi and its sonic mutation in various transnational settings. Toyi-toyi is a high-stepping ‘dance’ or knee to chest energetic marching routine associated with the anti-Apartheid protests of the mid-1980’s  South Africa’. Its origins however can be traced to ZIPRA Liberation fighters in Zimbabwe around 1965, years later it would evolve into a township protest ritual. Attention will also be paid to the sonic dynamics that shaped the Zhii-ii riots of Bulawayo 1960. This study will invoke a methodology of “Listening on an Ancestral Continuum”, a positionality of multi-sensorial, poly-locative listening in ancestral continuous tense as practiced by Mbira players. In conclusion the study will introduce, the concept of ‘acoustic shadows’ which are areas in Bantu languages where words fail to reach and where clusters of fricatives, explosives and other sounds replace words in various settings such as protest, celebration and civil disobedience.

Masimba Hwati, MFA from the University of Michigan is a PhD Candidate at Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien. He studied sculpture at Harare Polytechnic in Zimbabwe. He works in Sculpture, sound and performance, his work deals with issues of everyday forms of resistance and the politics of sound in revising and modifying dominant narratives. Recent exhibitions include: Black Skin, White Masks, Galerias Municipais, Lisbon, 2023; Sokunge, Leeds Culture Trust, Leeds, 2022-2023; Papierkampf Ensemble, Kulturhaus Brotfabrik, Vienna, 2022; I see you, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos, 2022; States of Becoming, Africa Center, New York, 2022; British Textile Biennial, Lancashire, 2021; Witness, El Espacio 23, Miami, 2020; Face To Face, Montreal Museum of Fine Art; 2018; Venice Biennale, 2015. Collections Include University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Iziko-South African National Gallery. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Scott White Contemporary-San Diego, Jorge M Perez -Miami Florida, Publications include: Sokunge (2021); der Seeteufel (2022).

Experimenting Sonic Ties: The Transdisciplinary Collaborative Practices of Shanghai Community Radio (SHCR)

Founded in 2017, Shanghai Community Radio (SHCR) is a community-driven live broadcast platform supporting, promoting, and documenting Shanghai’s underground and experimental music scenes. Aside from music-driven programs (DJ sets, music performances, live-streaming club events), SHCR has also offered alternative programs, including talk shows, interviews, and workshops. SHCR’s digital practices have greatly extended to a transnational network during the pandemic-impacted years. Their live-streaming programs during the lockdown in 2020 were included in the exhibition “No Dancing Allowed,” shown at frei_raum Q21 in Vienna in 2022. In March 2021, when covid-related measures still impacted cultural events in most parts of the world, SHCR presented the “Out of Touch Broadcast Festival,” connecting international multi-genre artists. In June 2022, SHCR teamed up with Munich-based Radio80000 and did a three-day streaming program for the Documenta 15 exhibition. By analyzing the diverse media materials of the mentioned various cases with Andy Bennett’s scene perspective, this paper argues that SHCR adopts an independent and experimental programming approach that has not only fostered a sense of community for the local creative practitioners but also suggested the potentials of globally-connected transdisciplinary collaborations in today’s digital media landscape.

Tianyu Jiang (they/she) is a PhD candidate at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Their doctoral project is an ethnographic work that aims to delineate the recent years’ proliferating underground music scenes in Shanghai, particularly the feminist and queer scenes. Their main research interests include urban space/place and electronic dance music culture, underground creative scenes, digital literacy. They hold an MA in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University (2019) and have been an active member of the program group of Cinema Queer Film Festival in Stockholm since 2018.

Re-thinking the Indigenous Song Performances of the Rajbanshi Community: Contrapunctuality of Mnemonics, Orality and Indigeneity

The Rajbanshi community is a component of a multiethnic society with multicultural dimensions. With a population over a million, these indigenous people have spent centuries in establishing themselves in the northeastern region of India, particularly in the Western part of Assam and the northern section of West Bengal. This paper endeavours to illustrate how the Rajbanshis interact with various indigenous song performances to shape their collective identity and communality through sonic legacies, and also to preserve their memories. Such cultural expressions are, at their core, cultures of memory in which the body serves as a medium for the articulation of memories passed down through the generations; performances of varying kinds serve as the exhibition of such memories, spreading them through their use of language, gesture, and other forms of performance. It is not implied by the assertion of this mnemocultural force that rural India does not use modern, advanced communication technologies; rather, the dominant communication technology is mnemocultural in both form and essence. This study attempts a critical empirical technique to investigate various indigenous song performances that vibrate and inspire every aspect of the performative life of the Rajbanshi community.

Dr. Sukanya Kar is an independent researcher. She has completed her Ph.D. from the Department of English, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, West Bengal, India. Her thesis focuses on the performative traditions of the Rajbanshi community of North Bengal. Her area of interest includes oral tradition, cultural studies, Mnemoculture, indigenous studies, folk studies.

Frost on the Bell: Relating through Resonance

Often illustrated by a string vibrating in tune with its neighbour, 感應 ganying translates loosely as inviting responding. This Chinese cosmological concept of correlative resonance has operated since ancient times as a framework of universal interrelationality. Instead of mechanistic cause-and-effect, affinities resonate between all things, however distantly and indirectly — this logic has guided studies of phenomena ranging from magnetism to health. My artistic research considers the possibilities of transposing correlative resonance as a framework for re-configuring subjectivity, and gathering through diffuse affinities.As resonance, sound exists immanently, prior to audible presence. Listening to sound in the muted, ’shadow’ register encourages broader receptivity and opens possibilities for interrelational sensitivity, beyond subject-object causation. Gravitating towards speaking nearby as invoked by Trinh T. Minh-ha, I will describe various artistic experiments with lighting, sound, scent, and touch, through site-specific collaborative processes. As practices of decolonial aesthesis, after Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, this research responds to Stuart Hall’s call to imagine “new positions of speaking” through diasporic cultural production. Echoing this, I ask, how might 感應 ganying correlative resonance generate new positions of listening?

Serena Lee plays across aesthetic, martial, and sonic practices to map how things come together and apart. She engages with communities, artist-run organizations, cultural institutions, and cinema festivals, often working in collaborative and alleatoric constellations that stretch language and geography. Serena holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute (NL), and an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (CA). Born and raised in tkaronto/Toronto, Canada, Serena is currently based in Vienna as a PhD-in-Practice candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.

YouTube, Vernacular Music Theory, and Marginalized Communities

This paper explores the YouTube musico-theoretical community from three angles. First, I demonstrate the commonalities between public-facing and academic music theory. Synthesizing Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledge” (1980) and Howard’s placement of the vernacular as the hybrid product of institutional and non-institutional agencies (2008), I argue that the continuities in content and approach between the vernacular and academic musico-theoretical worlds belie differences in priorities, structuredness, and perceived authority and authenticity. Second, I explore how this YouTube musico-theoretical space reinscribes demographic biases in the field (Ewell 2020, Hisama 2021, Maus 2020), in that the music and musico-theoretical thought of cisgender, heterosexual white men are overrepresented. To explain this reproduction of hegemonic social structures, I adapt Bourdieu’s field theory (e.g., Bourdieu 1983) to a commercialized participatory culture serving corporate interests (Jenkins et al 2016) regulated by technologies of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019). Last, I discuss three YouTubers (Adam Neely, Rhythm in Africa, and Patricia Taxxon) who have bucked the trend by creating content reflecting the concerns of marginalized communities. I contrast their musico-theoretical approaches while considering how these creators’ identities, rhetorical strategies, and political positions shape their content’s reception. As with academia, the YouTube musico-theoretical community recognizes and grapples with equitable representation.

Cheng Wei Lim is a lecturer in music theory at Columbia University. The primary themes of his research are subjective and communal experiences of music, the sociopolitical implications of cultural modes of engaging music, and the politics of knowledge production. Although he maintains a keen interest in performing and studying the standard Western art music repertoire, he has also worked on early music, film music, and video game music. His research has been published in the journal Nineteenth-Century Music, and he has presented his research within the United States and abroad.

Occupy Wall Street’s “Human Mic”: A Sonic Embodiment of Solidarity

During Occupy Wall Street protests, the “human microphone” was a technique whereby anybody wanting to speak to a crowd would speak in chunks of repeatable phrases, which would then be repeated by the entire crowd—a method for amplifying speeches in New York City’s Zuccotti Park where electronic amplifications of sound were prohibited. By listening and then reproducing with one’s own body and voice the speech of another, it became impossible to listen detachedly—the words penetrated one’s body, coalescing into an embodied participation. As Urban Studies scholar Rosanna Reguillo describes, “It required an enormous communicative willingness on the part of the speaker to fit their ideas into a rhythm reproducible by the people, and to listen and interpret the rhythm, the spirit, and the emotions that emanate and that are co-produced by the relationship between him/her and the people.” The human microphone contributed to the configuration of a subjective transversality that, through speech, transformed an aggregate mass of people into a political community. While being careful to eschew romanticization, this paper explores the transformative potential of the human mic as a sonic embodiment of horizontalism and solidarity; as well as its shortcomings, such as its inability to impart intricate or “fragile” speech.

Andrea Liu is a New York/Paris/Berlin-based visual art critic (and artist) who received fellowship awards from Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Award (Banff Centre), Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Center for Experimental Museology (V-A-C Foundation) and is a 2023-2024 fellow at Zurich University of the Arts. She received her undergrad education from Yale University and was curator of Counterhegemony: Art in a Social Context. She wrote for Afterimage, ArtMargins, e-flux, Social Text, New Museum, Movement Research Journal, and has book chapter contributions to IN Works 931-14209 (Edition Fink), Deste 15th Anniversary (Deste Foundation), An Anthology on Failure (Genderfail), The Ooze (Kunstverein Munich Companion Series) and The Furies (Cassandra Press/Kandis Williams).

The reproduction of hegemonic social structures in the post-Yugoslav community: Turbofolk and gender identity

Turbofolk, characterized as an authentic, hybrid genre of music that intertwines folk, ‘kitsch’, and modern pop elements, originates from Serbia and has started to grow immensely throughout the entire ex-Yugoslav region since the late 80s, and became predominant in the 90s. Turbofolk is strongly influenced not only by the ethnic-folk rhythms of the Balkan area but also by Greek, Turkish, Romani, Hungarian, and Russian folk music, and it is frequently employed as a derogatory epithet that amalgamates the afflictions and pathological behavior in Serbia under Milošević’s rule throughout the 1990s. By incorporating a literature and lyric review, the paper aims to address the following: How can we recognize and examine patterns of patriarchal values in turbofolk music? Because the genre fosters a collective ex-Yugoslav identity that’s not exclusively connected to only one nation, turbofolk has directly affected the regional masculinity constructions and become part of the intangible heritage of ex-Yugoslav countries. Often, some individuals perceive turbofolk as the epitome of sexist and consumerist music, and others believe it’s a unique Balkan gender, a one-of-a-kind cultural and artistic expression.

Gala Naseva (Skopje) is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies (University of Graz) who works with soundscape and audio production for contemporary performance and theatre. Her research is based on the relationship between performing arts, gender identity, gender politics, and labor rights of marginalized categories, especially in the context of post-socialist Southeast Europe. Her most recent soundtracks were for the theatre plays “A summer without you” at the Theatre “Trajko Prokopiev” Kumanovo, and “Largime” at The National Albanian Theatre in North Macedonia.

“Sound affect and public space in the case of the Athenian apartment building, ‘polykatoikia’”

‘Cohabitation’ and a situated we-ness are met in the articulations of inhabitants in Athens when discussing about acoustic experiences from their homes, elements indicative of a nexus of affects conditioned in the ‘polykatoikia’. Such affects often reside in matters of power dynamics, vulnerabilities, territoriality and dominant yet elusive milieus. They are inscribed in the voices of the residents and, at times, in articulating different ways of sensing and modes of listening within multiple entries of ‘noise’. The ‘public space’, within the private space of a residential apartment building in Greece exists as the common areas used by its residents. The lecture will delve into the matter of ‘public space’ not as a legal but as a relational entity while thinking through how it can be formed by sound affectivities regardless of small ownership duly constituted boundaries. Paying attention to the microscale of the everyday, it will focus on different levels of affordances and response-abilities to sound and vibration. The lecture draws from the field work the artist conducted from 2011 to 2021, (“Sound and listening in the Athenian polykatoikia as artistic practice”, PhD, Department of Theory and Art History, Athens School of Fine Arts).

Thalia Raftopoulou is an artist and researcher based in Athens, Greece, working on the intersections of contemporary art and sound studies. While paying attention to affectivities within orality and matter, vibrations and vocalization, she is concerned with issues of public space and the in-between art and everyday life. Her creative process unfolds with drawing, lectures, video and installations.

Her studies include: visual arts in the Athens School of Fine Arts, ‘Public Art and New Artistic Strategies’, MFA, Bauhaus-University, Weimar and PhD, ‘Sound and listening in the Athenian apartment building as artistic practice’, Department of Theory and Art History, ASFA, 2011-2021.

Resounding Gender: Thinking Through a Feedbacking Scold’s Bridle

This lecture performance reflects on the developments within my artistic PhD research which inquires the relationality between sound, gender, power, and social structures in human-object encounters. My research interest was sparked by Doritos’ (a crisp brand) proposal for a “lady-friendly” crisp, which would crunch less loudly as compared to their regular crisp. The brand claimed that women “don’t like to crunch too loudly in public.”[1] Doritos’ proposal triggered my fascination for more-than-human sounds as participating in gendered subject formation within a gender-normative Western cultural context. Here, one can think of, for instance, the sound of tapping high heels and long nails on various surfaces, growling motor engines in urban or countryside soundscapes, and jingling jewellery in private and public acoustic spaces.

How is gender (per)formed through sound in human-nonhuman entanglements? – is the main research question of my PhD project. Across (auto)ethnographic, semiotic, and artistic methodological approaches, I study a diversity of objects that, in contact with the human body, have a significant presence of gendered sound. Through queer and posthuman theoretical frameworks, the research aims to transcend essentialist conceptualizations of gender and encourages horizontalizing hierarchies between the human and nonhuman. Here, my artistic practice, in which I experiment with (low-frequency) sound, operates as a posthuman and queer matter: sound as vibration materially demonstrates human–nonhuman collectivity, ontological fluidity and highlights the performativity of ‘stuff’.

In this lecture performance, I focus on the insights gained from experimenting with a scold’s bridle (a Medieval torture instrument) replica, which gained a life of its own.

[1] Dubner, S. I Wasn’t Stupid Enough to Say This Could Be Done Overnight. Freakonomics https://freakonomics.com/podcast/i-wasnt-stupid-enough-to-say-this-could-be-done-overnight/ (2018).

Luca Soudant (Maastricht, 1993) is a PhD researcher at the Open University, artist, DJ (ADIË), and theory teacher at the Maastricht Institute of Arts. They graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a research master’s degree in Cultural Analysis and from the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam with an artistic master’s degree in Critical Studies. Luca’s research combines academic scholarship and artistic practice to explore how gender is culturally (per)formed through sound. Working with the queer materiality of sound as it appears and disappears in-between human and nonhuman actors, objects, and environments, Luca proposes thinking through the materiality of sound as both an artistic research method and a trans*formative politics toward non-binary and anti-essentialist conceptions of the worlds we inhabit.

Affective Bodies in Time: Synthesizing Relations of Musical and Social Rhythm

This paper aims for an interdisciplinary theoretical account of rhythm as a processual and relational phenomenon that operates at the interstices between sound and sociality. It inquires about the contemporary intersection of rhythm, affect and the politics of the body that gives rise to new forms of collective experience and sheds light on the temporal dimensions of societal transitions. I will draw on manifold perspectives from the fields of musicology, social theory, cultural studies, and philosophy rooted in poststructuralism and new materialism, to approach examples of popular and contemporary composed music that make use of the synthesizer, featuring as both a material reference point and a figure of interference, connectivity and modulation. Building such relations by way of rhythm allows to weave together the temporality of aesthetic forms and political forces, situating the question of the interdependence of aesthetic experience and an affective, shared experience right amongst them.

Sophie Zehetmayer is a PhD candidate in the Structured Doctoral Programme „Music Matters“ at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She obtained her BA in Creative Writing at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and her MA in Musicology at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on music philosophy and aesthetics and in her current project she is working on a relational understanding of rhythm at the intersection of musical and social phenomena.

The Sonic Ties in Region: The Glocalization of Chinese Mongolian Rock Music

Rock music first emerged in China in the 1980s. As an independent music genre, it is often described as a music against tradition, mainstream ideology, commercial establishment and cultural hegemony. Among the subgenres of Chinese rock music, Mongolian rock from the northern steppe is widely sought after by fans for its unique music style and performance paradigm. Mongolian rock practitioners often aim to present unique elements of national culture in rock music, such as incorporating traditional folk instruments and tunes, or using texts related to folk life or folklore in an attempt to revitalize national culture through hipster expressions.

This paper analyzes the origin and development process of Chinese Mongolian rock music, and studies the performance paradigm of Mongolian rock and roll in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia Province, by referring to the research path of youth subculture theory and through the method of music ethnography. It aims to explore the development of rock sonic as a link in Hohhot’s local culture from the perspective of subculture. This study shows that the geographical environment and social culture have a significant influence on the glocalization development of rock music. In one community, music can condense identity through relevant cultural symbols such as melody, text, clothing and movement of performers, even if the performers and audience have different musical preferences and aesthetic systems.

Zu Lingshan is a second year Ph.D. student at Universiti Putra Malaysia. She completed her master’s degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Sheffield, and now is a lecturer at Shaanxi Fashion Engineering University. Her research interest primarily revolves around the representation of ethnic cultures in pop and rock music, specifically the transmission of culture in music. As the meanwhile, she also focuses on the connection between ethnomusicology and music education, and is committed to integrating music from different regions and styles into music education.