Former Ph.D. Advisees
Jenny Olivia Johnson, Associate Professor, Musicology, herb alpert school of music, University of California LOS Angeles
“The Luminous Noise of Broken Experience: Synaesthesia, Acoustic Memory, and Childhood Sexual Abuse in the late 20th Century United States,” N.Y.U., Composition, 2009.
This dissertation investigates the role of sound in the lives of people who were sexually abused as children. Many survivors of childhood sexual abuse retain only fragmentary memories of what happened to them, yet experience intense physical and mental hallucinations in reaction to certain kinds of music. These hallucinations can perhaps best be described as experiences of acoustic synaesthesia, the involuntary neurological perception of music as colors, images, tastes, smells, or physical and tactile sensations. The sensual qualities of these synaesthetic reactions are often deeply suggestive of sexually traumatic experiences, indicating that for some survivors of sexual abuse, music triggers a highly sensorial and somatic form of remembering and reliving devastating experiences of trauma and violation.
By examining stories of childhood sexual abuse primarily through the sonic (a methodology that Steven Feld has identified as "acoustemology" and Ana María Ochoa Gautier has recently expanded into "acoustemologies of violence"), I foreground the complex place-centered and body-centered traumatic memories that sexual abuse survivors often experience in reaction to the sounds and music that surrounded them as children. I argue that traumatic childhood memories that are allegedly repressed, fragmented, or uncontainable in language, thought, or narrative can often emerge and become intelligible through their sensory and synaesthetic associations with specifically musical or acoustic memories. I also focus in particular on sexual abuse survivors who grew up in the late 20th century United States, a time and place characterized by a remarkable proliferation of musical and televisual narratives about childhood sexual abuse. I argue that these real-life survivors learned to sublimate and displace their fragmented bodily memories of sexual trauma within the luminous noises of the mass media, to the extent that these media can now conjure for these adult survivors deeply synaesthetic memories of being abused as children.
The methodologies I employ for this interdisciplinary project include email communications with sexual abuse survivors, a virtual ethnography of online abuse-survivor Web sites, close acoustic readings of pop songs and films about sexual abuse, musical analyses of pieces composed by survivors, and a historical survey of the child-abuse culture of the late-20th century United States.
Michael Gallope, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
“Musical Technique and Metaphysical Singularity in Bloch, Adorno, Jankélévitch and Deleuze,” N.Y.U., Musicology, 2011.
Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze all use a form of ethical prescription to link modernist musical works with what I am calling a singular event, something absolutely new in the existing world: a concrete, but unforeseen social possibility (Bloch), an afterimage of a nature that has never existed (Adorno), an incalculable leap of faith at the moment of decision (Jankélévitch), or a metaphysical reunion with the virtual potentiality of all there is (Deleuze). All four figure as genuine breaks with history, with what exists, with knowable systems, with actual rules and laws. As it happens, while all four thinkers share this point of departure, endless differences among the four remain, opening up an underlying intellectual history. They disagree as to whether or not an event entails the revelation of a negative or positive utopia (Adorno vs. Bloch), they disagree about whether it is immanent to life itself or if it requires explicit social mediation (Deleuze and Jankélévitch vs. Adorno), and they disagree (writing in the age of mass media) about what music is technically made of. Bloch, for his part, centers his philosophy of music on a metaphysics of der Ton, a discrete and phenomenological musical utterance. Adorno, in broad agreement, famously ratifies this position while expressing a great deal of anxiety about the threat mass media poses to notated musical practices. By contrast, Jankélévitch’s philosophy breaks with Adorno and Bloch’s notated ontology and affirms the multiplicity of music’s technical substrates. For him, scores, performances, records, gestures, interpretations, acts of listening, etc. are all included in the purview of his metaphysics. Finally Deleuze goes farther than all three, equating the technical being of music with the temporal vitality of the universe itself, with the ceaseless rhythms or ritornellos of all beings. In dialogue with works by Wagner, Dvorak, Schoenberg, Satie, and Ravel, this dissertation ultimately investigates why modern music figures as an exemplary medium for an ethical vision that cannot be prescribed through the language of philosophy alone.
Jessica Schwartz, ASsociate Professor, Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California Los Angeles
“Resonances of the Atomic Age: Hearing the Nuclear Legacy in the United States and the Marshall Islands, 1945–2010,” N.Y.U., Ethnomusicology, 2012.
This dissertation analyzes the sonic evidence of the US nuclear weapons testing program in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 and 1958. Combining multi-sited fieldwork, archival research, and oral histories I offer both a sonic history of the early American atomic age (governmental sound design and analyses of American popular music) and an ethnomusicological study of Marshallese music. I contend that nuclear culture created a new and vital, in a literal sense, role for listening and hearing—in short, a new aesthetic sensibility—that would attend to a radically inaudible phenomenon: nuclear weapons. Focusing on the secretive milieu in which nuclear weaponry was developed and tested, I argue that silence emerged as the paradigmatic atomic age sensibility and was instrumental in the management of bodies and information in both countries. In accessing new modes of listening that developed around these sensible voids, I trace the evolution of this aesthetic reconfiguration of United States society and the production of sounds that emerged from this new aesthetic, exploring the ways in which the alignment of a globalizing nuclear culture with the concept of freedom, constructed as a promise, was intimately linked to the ear, the aural, and listening to and for silences in both the United States and the Marshall Islands.
Around the many silences that accrued during this period, new modes of listening and sounding developed such as air raid sirens, Geiger counter clicks, and Civil Defense broadcasts. Analyzing ethnographic data that includes approximately one hundred interviews and hundreds of hours of audio recording and video footage, I dwell at greatest length on a repertoire of Marshallese songs that has developed over the last sixty-five years in response to the deleterious effects of nuclear weaponry and US militarism that pervade everyday life in the Marshall Islands. These songs, I argue, along with religious and contemporary music, performances, and ceremonies, work to transcend the material horrors of nuclear weaponry, contribute to a Pacific politics of indigeneity, and are powerful tools in the reorganization of Marshallese society that followed the nuclear testing program.
StePhan Hammel, Assistant Professor, Department of Music, University of California IRVine
“Music, Aesthetics, Peripherality: Notes on a Philosophy of History of Latin American Music (1910-1973),” UPenn, Historical Musicology, 2013.
This dissertation is a theoretical treatment of the history of Latin American music in the twentieth century. It's central claim is twofold. First, the progressive development of a Latin American music was made possible and meaningful by the region's economic, political and cultural peripherality vis-à-vis the (neo-)colonial metropole: Western Europe and the United States. That peripherality was manifest as an attempt to find in Latin American particularity the grounds for universal significance. Reading this attempt in Kantian terms of conceptual determination, it appears as an aesthetics. Given the failure of imported concepts to adequately schematize the stuff of Latin American experience, that which was native to the region could only be determined reflectively in light of sense-data alone. Throughout the last century, musical compositions, genres, and practices sought to complete that process of determination, or else transcend it altogether. The second part of my claim is that those musical responses to the aesthetic problem of Latin American peripherality were ultimately consumed by the very duality of universality and particularity they sought to overcome. They share an aporetic structure proper to the eruption of geographical difference onto the historical plane.
The dissertation revolves around three case studies. The first focuses on the composer Carlos Chavez, making perspicuous the stakes of his stylistic development in light of the peasant revolution of 1910. The second traces the intellectual history of the musical gauchesca, understanding this genre as turning on the contradictions of Argentine modernity in its identification with song and Nature as such. Finally, the last case study takes up Chilean Nueva Canción as it appeared in the years before the 1973 military coup. It represented a musical movement that sought out a place for aesthetics in the context of a socialist revolution. These three cases form a counterpoint to a philosophical discourse on the history of Latin America - one that demonstrates the shape and import of an idealist musicology.
Stephen Decatur Smith, Associate Professor, Department of Music, Stony Brook University
“The ‘Transfigured Flesh’: Natural History in Theodor Adorno's Musical Thought,” N.Y.U., Musicology, 2013.
This dissertation studies natural history in the musical thought of Theodor Adorno. Beginning with his earliest mature works, Adorno was persistently concerned with the unending entwinement of human history and material nature. His reception in philosophy, literary theory and cultural studies has dealt relatively little with this register of his work, focusing more often on his critique of modern culture, and especially of what he calls the culture industry. His reception in music studies, similarly, has dealt rarely with this theme, tending far more often to understand Adorno's musical thought as a form of hermeneutics that has more to do with contemporary concerns than with his own.
The present study works to address this lacuna, first by reconstructing Adorno's natural historical thought from the perspective of his musical thought, and second by demonstrating the role of natural history in Adorno's philosophy of music. Reading Adorno's natural historical texts with music in mind means, above all, paying persistent attention to the way in which these texts figure the experience of time. Indeed, time and temporality lie at the heart of Adorno's idea of natural history, which he describes as an effort to grasp nature as history and history as nature. In turn, demonstrating the role of natural history in Adorno's philosophy of music will mean showing the manner in which he understands music as site where it is possible to experience this chiasmic entwinement of nature and history. Thus, music can appear as an experience of history within nature insofar as the temporality of music can confront ossified forms of experience with their historical contingency and transience. In turn, music can appear as an expression of nature within history insofar as the ephemerality of musical time serves as an index of the transience of material nature, a transience that this historical human life must share, insofar as it is necessarily entwined with material nature. Finally, for Adorno, the expression of this transience is also an expression of hope, as the same passing away that ultimately means death for the living also means the possibility of the radically new and unforeseen.
Amy Cimini, Associate Professor, Integrative Studies, Department of Music, Affiliate Faculty, critical gender studies, University of California San Diego
“Baruch Spinoza and the Matter of Music: Toward a New Practice of Theorizing Musical Bodies,” N.Y.U., Musicology, 2014.
The notion that musical sound is made by bodies and circulates within and among bodies is axiomatic in both popular and academic accounts of musical performance and listening. My research develops an intellectual history of the mind-body problem in order to theorize the pleasure, intensity and sociality typically ascribed to musical embodiment and embodied knowledge in contemporary thought. Showing that much of music studies' engagement with musical bodies has taken shape as moral opposition to Renéé Descartes infamous mind-body dualism, I develop an alternative ethicalapproach through the thought and reception of one of Descartes' earliest and most radical critics: Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). In his Ethics (pub. pth. 1677), Spinoza theorizes the body as constitutiveof the mind, overcoming Descartes' dualism with a robust account of mind-body unity and interaction. Reconstructing Descartes' dualism through his Compendium of Music (1618), I render its Spinozistic overcoming as a challenge to rethink how music distributes ethical and social knowledge through its material action upon and within bodies.
Delia Casadei, Assistant Professor,Department of Music, University of California Berkeley
“Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974,” UPenn, Historical Musicology, 2015.
This thesis explores the relationship of voice, language, and politics in Italian musical history. I do this through a double geographical and chronological lens: first, the city of Milan, a powerful political and cultural interface between Italy and Central Europe; secondly, the years 1955-1974, key decades in the constitution of Italy’s first democratic government and years of vertiginous anthropological changes across the peninsula. Across the four chapters of my thesis, I sketch a heterogeneous and thickly populated network of musical activities—ranging from high-modernist tape music to opera, neofolk records, to pop hits. I argue the musical production for voice of this time expresses long-standing anxieties about speech and communication through the recurring use of nonsense languages, distorted recorded speech, and para-linguistic phenomena such as laughter as musical materials. The root of these anxieties lies in a version of Italy’s fivecentury-old language question—the question of Italy’s absent common tongue—and at the same time, a European Enlightenment tradition that sets Italy as the southern land of the beautiful voice, and yet also ineffective policies and underdeveloped language faculties. What is at stake in the musical and vocal production of 1950s and 1970s Milan, then, is a potential philosophy of the voice as neither aesthetic excess nor as carrier of language, but as an unresolved multiplicity of articulations, languages, and political subjectivities.
Daniel Villegas Vélez, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven
“Mimetologies: Aesthetic Politics in Early Modern Opera,” UPenn, Historical Musicology, 2016.
In recent decades, mimesis has become a critical term for rethinking relationality, difference, and affect, reconsidered against the notions of artistic autonomy and representation. While music—and sound in general—seldom feature in these accounts, issues of musical autonomy and representation (aesthetic and political) in music studies have given way to a concern with immediacy, relationality, and vibration that bypass a revaluation of the discipline’s own accounts of mimesis, still understood largely as imitation. I propose a radical revision of mimesis away from its traditional understanding to bridge these various gaps and to reaffirm the necessity of thinking of alterity and difference in expanded conceptions of musical relationality. Music is more central in ancient Greek accounts of mimesis, especially in Plato’s Republic, than current musicology acknowledges. In close reading of these texts and drawing on the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida (1975), I elaborate a critical methodology to analyze the logics of mimesis—the mimetologies—as they are deployed in theoretical works and artistic performances. I propose to understand mimesis in music not as imitation but as (1) related to the ancient Greek mousikē—the collective performance of sung poetry and dance; (2) the production of originals out of copies (and not the reverse); (3) the inscription of the ethos and laws of the community through musical practice; (4) a general process involved in the production and negotiation of value, identity, and difference. This revaluation of mimesis challenges narratives of emancipation and discontinuity that continue to privilege a Romantic philosophy of autonomous music and which fail to offer rigorous accounts of music’s social inscription. In close dialogue with musicological and philosophical historiography, I focus on the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy, the Medici intermedi of 1589, and early operas, Peri’s L’Euridice (1600) and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607). As a mimetic performance, music does not mirror or represent social orders but participates in their production and regulation. I conclude that early modern spectacle and opera employed an ethos of allegrezza to inscribe the laws of a patriarchal society in which sovereign power was preserved across Europe through marriage ties and strictly male inheritance.
YONATAN izhak niv, Composer
“Tempos Beyond the Pleasure Principle: 20th Century Composition and the Unconscious,” N.Y.U., Composition, 2016.
The dissertation examines the relationship between privileged modes of considering temporality and corresponding claims to musical knowledge in late 20th century compositional discourse from a psychoanalytic (particularly Lacanian) perspective. Grounded on the presupposition that the Freudian "discovery" of the unconscious is consubstantial with a specific configuration in the domain of art, the dissertation studies the ways in which the unconscious resonates within this discourse. It shows the discursive constitution of a musical object defined by the advent of the unconscious, and it establishes the possible positions within its epistemological horizon. Presented as case studies, each of the three chapters of the dissertation offers a localized analysis and a critical reading of distinct modes of considering the musical object in relation to the unconscious: from the historical materialism of post-serial composer Helmut Lachenmann, through the phenomenological explorations informing spectral composer Gérard Grisey, and to the experimental endeavors of John Cage.
Chapter 1 examines the temporal logic underlying the work of post-serial composer Helmut Lachenmann. Rooted in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and Theodore Adorno’s aesthetic theory (itself much imbued with a reading of Freud), Lachenmann’s musico-theoretical corpus unveils a historical-materialist critique of the metaphysics of presence. I locate in Lachenmann’s work an emancipatory, utopian premise, emblemized in his notion of the "sounding fermata," correlative to Adorno’s notion of the "breakthrough": a violent irruption that suspends the phantasmagoric production of presence, thereupon revealing a moment of truth.
Chapter 2 examines the phenomenological explorations of spectral composer Gérard Grisey in relation to the temporality of the drive. Taking the phenomenological critique of the Cartesian subject as a point of departure, Grisey attempted to formulate a new relation to the sonorous being. I analyze Grisey’s theory of temporality through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the flesh as expressed in his The Visible and the Invisible. Thereafter, I examine Lacan’s adoption of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in his 1964 seminar The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis in order to clarify psychoanalysis’s relation to ontology. Chapter 3 stages an encounter between Lacan and John Cage on the question of the end of analysis. I examine the curious relationship between Cage’s notion of indeterminicity and his correlative turn towards theatricality in the wake of Lacan’s reading of Antigone. Under the sign of a return to Aristotle (particularly the Poetics), I argue for a structural affinity between the Lacanian logic of the cure and Cage’s compositional processes.
Maria Murphy, Associate Director, Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality & Women, University of Pennsylvania
“Bodies, Technologies, Viruses: Music and Social Immunity in Bio-Pop, New York City, 1980s,” UPenn, Historical Musicology, 2018.
This dissertation analyzes the musical and sonic work of Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and Karen Finley from the 1980s to demonstrate how these artists participated in a mode of aesthetic activism that contributed to knowledge production and organization regarding public health, censorship, pornography, national security, and reproductive technologies. In particular, I consider biopolitical tensions in New York City during this period concerning the social stratification of particular bodies defined by the early years of the AIDS epidemic; the practices and systems of new communication technologies, such as voice processing techniques in electronic music performance; the censorship and classification of obscene and pornographic music as determined by the Parents Music Resource Center under Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Taskforce on the Arts and Humanities; and the categorization of personhood in the wake of new assisted reproductive technologies. I argue that Anderson, Ono, and Finley’s performance art and multimedia repertoire address intersections of social and viral contagion, new technologies, and political conservatism at both the national level in the United States and the municipal level in New York City. I analyze the nature of these artists’ interventions into the social field and consider what is at stake politically in musicking’s participating in broader logics of immunity and technology.
JUAN CARLOS CASTRILLon vallejo, gilbert seldes multimodal postdoctoral fellow, annenberg school for communication, University of pennsylvania
“Unfolding Musicking Archives at the Northwest Amazon,” UPenn, Ethnomusicology, 2021.
This dissertation proposes a decolonial revision of the archive consolidated by scholars, travelers and missionaries who previously sound recorded the Northwestern Amazon region, and introduces alternative ways of producing archival artifacts open to non-Indigenous and Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies alike. It studies the formation of sonic archives and points of listening that represented worlds of Indigenous expressivity in sound during the twentieth century in the Vaupés region, southern Colombia. This study focuses on Tukanoan musicking and specifically with the Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa clan, an Amazonian indigenous community living in a village called Camutí located at the Vaupés River Basin. This dissertation aims to reposition ethnomusicological practice in the Northwest Amazon as a collaborative and ethical research endeavor that can contribute new theoretical and methodological knowledge about and from the Vaupés region.
ANDREW NIESS, Independent Researcher, AI Enablement
“Reorienting Sonic Creativity Amid Ecological Disorientation,” UPenn, 2022.
This dissertation offers ecological disorientation as an analytic for making sense of affective experiences of the climate crisis and the epistemological shifts that attend it. It focuses this analytic on a range of thinkers and makers whose reckonings with the climate crisis appeal to sonic creativity. It contributes to the difficult labor of reorienting music studies, the humanities, and higher education institutions to better contend with the climate crisis, for which there is no panacea. Chapter one analyzes the discourse of theorists, critics, scientists, and public officials who deploy sonic figures to make sense of ecological disorientation. The chapter opens this project’s overriding concern—namely, that sonic figures and practices of embodied sense-making can spur action and mobilize affects. Chapter two constellates and analyzes music studies practitioners’ reckonings with ecological disorientation to argue that such reckonings may perpetuate anthropocentric, identitarian epistemologies. Chapter three theorizes parahuman sonic creativity and compiles an archive of practitioners whose creative work in sound contends with, figures, or otherwise relates with the climate crisis and its disorienting effects; it argues that such works aestheticize the climatic, ecological conditions of possibility for their own existence. Chapter four offers a suite of the author’s creative and pedagogical models for reorientation: a breath-controlled instrument linking users’ breath to the real-time air quality of three user-defined cities around the world; a short film demonstrating the instrument; a film about the afterlives of industrial asbestos waste and environmental racism in Ambler, Pennsylvania; a video experiment in “pneumatography”; and two syllabi, available as supplementary files.
BEn oyler, adjunct professor, musicology, School of music, university of puget sound
“Sound Objects: Sonic Labor and the Political Economy of Virtuosity,” UPenn, 2022.
Virtuosity and the virtuoso have together offered a longstanding analytic in studies of music and the performing arts broadly, wherein they have conventionally expressed an exemplary individual ability registered in performance. This model has found compelling philosophical and critical extension outside of these domains in accounts that link demands for flexible and creative work in the post-Fordist economy with virtuosic performance. Integrating these perspectives, this dissertation reappraises the concepts of virtuosity and the virtuoso to account for the ways that they are expressed, valorized, and reproduced within rapidly changing circuits of media, technology, labor, and social relations in the contemporary United States. I employ a Marxian critical framework to address how virtuosity uniquely encapsulates the ways that labor in the contemporary has taken on characteristics of performance; conversely, I examine how transformations in productive and reproductive labor alike work reflexively back on the categories of performance and social practice in the arts. In my analysis, virtuosity and the virtuoso unexpectedly emerge as objects in disparate social practices that I term reproductive economies of virtuosity. The first focuses on jazz “woodshedding” as a distinctively gendered, labor-mediated practice through which individual virtuosity emerges. Characterized by a reflexive domination of reproductive space, the woodshedder-virtuoso’s ability is indexed in a well-honed axe (instrument) and chops (technique) capable of surmounting the competitive socialities and market demands of public performance. The second traces the history of baby monitoring technologies and cognitive development tools and techniques as a homegrown practice of mediated listening aimed at the production of children as virtuosos. Culminating in the crises of social reproduction endemic to the contemporary, this history reveals the unexpectedly intimate relationship between biopolitics and virtuosity in technological transformations of domestic (private) space. The third investigates the networked milieus of social media as a locus of virtuosic performances of self-mediation in which the representation of publicity itself emerges as a structural element of virtuosic performance as social reproduction. This analysis locates virtuosity in longer metamorphoses of mediated publicity in which mobile sound technologies are of pivotal importance, and which have propelled the reproduction of new social forms under capitalism.
xintong (bess) liu, visiting assistant professor, musicology, department of music, kenyon college
“Resonant China: Transnational Music-Making and the Construction of the Public,” UPenn, 2023.
This dissertation examines the history of Sino-Western musical encounters from the second to the third quarter of the twentieth century, arguing for the construction of a music public – a tangible and transnational assemblage of individuals, audiences, institutions, and musical works that politicized Western art music as an aesthetic discourse in China. Through the Chinese sociality, comprised of mechanisms such as quanzi (circle) and guanxi (relation/connection/tie), this dissertation takes departure from the orthodox music historiography based on (de)coloniality and Sino-Western binary; instead, it highlights multi-directional transmission of knowledge and therefore multi-lateral power relations. This project is comprised of four chapters focusing on the overlapping circles of four musicians: the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977), the Italian conductor and pianist Mario Paci (1878-1946), the Chinese cellist and pianist Ma Siju (1920-2014), and the Chinese pianist Fou Ts'ong (1934-2020). This project shows how despite dynamic political changes shaping Chinese society from 1934 to 1958, the music public remained a relatively stable entity that subtly but effectively transformed music-making into an enduring soft power. This historiography uncovers the flirtatious guanxi between the music public and the core of political power, which redefines the essence of politicization of aesthetics in China.
Katelyn Hearfield, Independent Scholar
“Singing Through the Pain: Popstars’ Trauma and Women’s Labor in the Twenty-First Century,” UPenn, 2023.
This dissertation argues for the potential of popular music in the twenty-first century to encompass various forms of affective labor in response to trauma and violence. By focusing on popstars, I explore the global reach—and limitations—of their affective labor by attending to their music’s reception amongst fans, trauma survivors, and general audiences. For the performers discussed in this dissertation, their traumatic experiences are connected to musicmaking and gender: Ariana Grande’s response to the Manchester Arena bombing (2017), Kesha’s allegations of assault by her producer (2014), and Lady Gaga’s recovery from a performance injury (2013). Through these examples in which there is a traumatic impetus to create, perform, or listen to music, I demonstrate the potential of pop songs to function as affective labor and promote a cooperative experience of healing that I term “collective processing.” Music is an ideal mode for collective processing because of the interconnection of its lyrical and sensual meaning, allowing for the accordance of meaning and feeling as embodied knowledge. Through collective processing, the embodied effects of music become socially diffuse; making music, in other words, can transform healing from an individual to a communal experience. I conceive collective processing as a mode of musicmaking in which individual participants prioritize certain emotions within a group while retaining their privately felt emotions. The burden of care is thereby distributed among participants. Thus, they may productively engage with difficult emotions without fixating on their individual recovery, evading prescriptive or goal-oriented paths of healing, which remain unachievable for many trauma survivors. Making or listening to music can in this way serve as productive response to trauma and unprecedented violence. The project imagines the reparative possibilities of listeners and singers engaging together through music related to trauma and violence. Through analysis of trends in fan activity, social media engagement, and community musicmaking I theorize the phenomenon of collective processing as an intervention in how musicology and cultural studies broadly can think about the nexus of music, violence, labor, and community.
Winnie Lai, Ethnomusicology
“Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces”
“Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong’s (Post-)Protest Spaces” is an interdisciplinary and intermedial study and archive of the dynamism of sound, what I call “agentive sonic matters,” in Hong Kong’s urban spaces where protests appeared and now have disappeared. It focuses on the biopolitics of sound and muted sound in Hong Kong protest and everyday spaces during and after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Protests (Anti-ELAB Protests) in 2019 and 2020. Taking on intermediality, my project weaves sensory experience with the interplay of materials and media to create an experiential and “multilayered archive,” one that registers events (sounds and muted sounds, interviews, images) that would be lost otherwise. Assembling this archive makes it fundamental to compose intermedial spaces in and through which readers/listeners/participants experience the events. My intermedial spaces include a game, an XR tour, an installation, and a documentary. Threading together these forms of medial historicization is my theoretical analysis of what “political aurality” comes into being in situations of extreme state aggression and repression, as is the fact that I identify in the sonic a central dimension of politics. Together, my prose chapters and intermedial work seeks to create affective spheres as a fundamental historical domain. As engaged scholarship, “Sounding Freedom” generates an archive of and for my generation’s defining event.