Part 1

• Disaster Socialism and the Sonic Governance of Care and Control in Pandemic Hanoi Christina Schwenkel University of California

  What does a pandemic sound like? How might attention to acoustic atmospheres provide new insights into disaster governance and its ramifications for collective life? This paper examines the ways in which the Vietnamese state managed a public health crisis through sonic interventions in everyday life across levels of government. Drawing on sensory autoethnography conducted in Hanoi during the pandemic, it argues for attention to the acoustic technologies that played a pivotal yet overlooked role in achieving worldwide record-low caseloads, despite being a high-risk country. State actors utilized sound to instruct, shape, and regulate the conduct of the population through what I call the sonic governance of care, a term concerned with the exercise of state power not over sound (as in policing noise) but through sound to ensure wellbeing and protection from disease. The paper focuses on new and renewed media technologies—from the catchy tunes of public health videos to the authoritative messages of sound trucks and loudspeakers—that aimed to mobilize action and draw people into networks of care and control. Deploying active listening and walking-with as embodied methodologies, my approach captures the subtle shifts across time between sound and silence, stillness, movement and acoustic resurgence in an urban lakeside neighborhood settling into a “new normal.” Instead of relying on visual approaches to studying the city, or urban ocularcentrism, this approach attends to the sensory disruptions and reorientations that occurred during the pandemic and its biopolitical management, transforming the urban atmosphere and everyday sensations in the city. However, people were not merely passive recipients of sounds; as sonic agents themselves, they produced and subverted sounds through modes of in/attention, challenging state claims to sonic authority.

• Cambodian Diasporic Placemaking: The Sound and Foodscapes of Pleng Samay Music Sophea Seng California State University

  The sounds and tastes of pleng samay, Cambodian rock music from the 1960s, unveils the often-overlooked forms of community resilience in the aftermath of state-sanctioned violence. The US dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Japan in all of WWII, making it one of the most bombed countries in history. A U.S.-funded Military General Lon Nol ousted the elected regime of Norodom Sihanouk from power, leading to a 5-year civil war (1970-1975) in which approximately 900,000 people died. During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), an estimated 1.7 million perished from starvation, torture, and slave labor. In total, approximately 3 million died in a population of 7 million at the time. In the diaspora, pleng samay continues to be a nexus for connection and communal resilience, a space in which survivors can literally savor youthful memories and relative peace of the hopeful decolonization period in Cambodia (1953-1970). This paper draws on yearlong participant observation research with the Soriya Band, an amateur pleng samay band, all of whom are working-class immigrants in Long Beach, California, the center of the Cambodian diaspora. I conducted ethnographic research at the band’s Saturday sessions as they jammed on drums and guitars and shared potluck meals. I followed their gigs as they performed local Khmer restaurants and Buddhist temples. By documenting the sounds and foods that migrated with the refugees, this paper sonically traces the affective power produced through pleng samay performances. I argue that the sounds and tastes of pleng samay alter dominant narratives around racialized Cambodian refugees, sonically challenging perceptions of Asian bodies as alien and dangerous to the US body politic. Ultimately, these diasporic sonic placemaking practices unsettle transnational and transpacific silences surrounding the lingering aftermaths of colonialism and imperialism in Southeast Asia.

• Trashing the Sonic: Resonance and Resilience in Environmental Histories of Maritime Southeast Asia Hana Qugana University of Sussex

  Trash, v. To free from trash or refuse; spec. to strip the outer leaves from (growing sugar canes) so that they may ripen more quickly; to vandalize (property or goods), esp. as a means of protest.
  —Oxford English Dictionary (2024)

  From timbers to timbres, symbols to cymbals, dissidence to dissonance, this paper explores eclectic archives of music, noise, and sound in relation to experienced and existential environmental catastrophes reverberating across maritime Southeast Asia. It invokes ‘trashing’ not only as a contrapuntal metaphor, but as a literal form of subaltern activism and protest, rendering audible a seascape populated by local identities and transregional solidarities that challenge key assumptions about biopolitics and environmentalism, past and present. As the plundering of natural and human resources has driven the archipelago’s inhabitants abroad, and as rising seas and incessant storms transform the lives of those who remain at home, the oral and the aural have been instrumental in redefining community—and turning the plastic refuse of capitalist consumption into more resolute and resonant forms of ‘refuse’ characterised by radical agency and upcycled histories. Situated amid the crosscurrents of environmental history, history of emotions and eco-musicology, the paper contemplates what environmental justice sounds like, from the limbah berunyi (trash instruments) of Johanes (Mo’ong) Santoso Pribadi from Indonesia, to the call of ‘Basura’ (Trash) in the Philippines, reminding residents of Coron in song form to ready their rubbish for collection by the town’s trucks doing the rounds. Such acts have rendered trash a mnemonic, a sonic expression of human archiving, resilient and defiant. Both historical and aspirational, this paper voyages through real and imagined worlds of colonial encounters, liminal ecologies, and waves of indigenous resistance to reveal a cacophony of creative solutions for a sustainable future.

• Exclaiming the Dharma: Disonant Soundscapes in Buddhist Vietnam Sara Swenson Dartmouth College

  In Vietnam, Buddhists are adapting their religion to navigate rapid social change. However, these adaptations also cause tensions among practitioners. Some turn to secularized forms of Vietnamese Zen, while others join movements toward religious “re-enchantment” (Taylor 2007) through Pure Land Buddhism. These tensions are rooted among differences in religious epistemologies, political histories, and moral phenomenologies that manifest through ethical soundscapes. Charles Hirschkind writes that communities create “ethical soundscapes” by deploying sound to regulate “social rhythms” and produce moral environments (2006: 123–124, 75). Listeners and speakers create soundscapes to transform themselves and others into different kinds of moral subjects.

Part 2

• Benny Soebardja, the rebellious voice of the New Order Guilhem Cassagnes ENS Lyon

  This research explores Benny Soebardja’s significant role in challenging the authoritarian New Order regime in Indonesia through his music. As a pioneer in the Indonesian music scene, Soebardja’s blend of politics and music emerged as a unique form of solo resistance. His journey from The Peels to Shark Move and Giant Step showcased his innovative use of music for political dissent, with his strategic employment of English lyrics to bypass censorship and communicate his critiques more broadly, distinguishing him within the local music landscape and beyond. Employing qualitative methods, including song content analysis, press reviews, and interviews, the study highlights Soebardja’s musical expressions as a means of political and social commentary.

• Versed Voice(s) of Indonesia: Sonic Acts of Rebellion and Repression Rachel Thompson Harvard University

  This paper examines the voice in Indonesia as agent of temporal and political disruption. Engaging the tripled meaning of the word suara (voice, sound, vote) as conceptual analytic, I query the dynamics through which past oralities/auralities are recruited into present political projects, while attending to the recursive refrain that the Indonesian Revolution remains unfinished. I listen in with both ears: as much to right-wing weaponization of song, as to liberatory, left-leaning lyricism. I treat the fluctuating fate of the reviled/revered song “Genjer-Genjer” as locus of continuity and rupture within debates over national definition: from its 1942 beginnings as a pre-independence paean to women’s resourcefulness in the face of famine; to its violent 1965 conscription into propagandistic fabrications equating women’s liberation with the materio-symbolic castration of Indonesia’s founding military fathers; to its 2017 remobilization within a fear-based campaign to re-entrench collective desire for paternalistic, authoritarian rule. Against the backdrop of the political life of a single song, I analyze variant voicings of Indonesian becoming: Soewardi’s 1913 ventriloquizing of a Dutchman within the essay that caused his exile; Pramoedya’s return to oral inscription amidst penal-colony prohibitions against pen and paper; the musical re-uptake of disappeared poet Wiji Thukul’s verse by his songwriting son; and a sung-spoken dirge of endurance released on the eve of former general Prabowo’s overwhelming success in the 2024 presidential election. Through these examples and more, I suggest how canny deployments of sonorized dissent constitute vital strategies of resistance and refusal amidst ever-wily machinations to silence the Indonesian citizenry.

• Loud Speakers versus Pots: Competing Sounds and Expressions of Power in Post-coup Myanmar Htet Hlaing Win Independent Researcher

  On 1 February 2021, Myanmar’s army overthrew a democracy with a violent coup. In response, protests erupted in a cacophony of dissent. The anti-coup movement’s resulting soundscape was organic and dynamic. Inside the home, a wave of discontent surged through neighborhoods as residents banged pots, pans, and bowls – an act of defiance that resonated through the night. Outside the home, protestors adopted music from international resistance movements or created their own tunes, filling the streets with songs in the face of brute force. This spontaneous symphony of dissent was a powerful expression of collective will. In stark contrast, the sounds deployed by the junta were orchestrated and controlling, and meant to silence sonic dissent. The junta wielded the power of state media as a weapon, their messages echoing through radio and television across the country. The calculated delivery of a lone announcer, typically with a rigid posture and unwavering voice, slowly and deliberately voiced the regime’s messages, projecting an air of authority. Groups of security forces armed with loudspeakers echoed the regime’s narrative directly to the protestors’ faces in an orchestrated effort to drown out the sounds of dissent. This paper examines these competing soundscapes in the aftermath of the coup to showcase the different sonic tactics deployed by the junta and the revolutionaries respectively. Through an analysis of the cacophony of sounds both produced and heard, in addition to social media posts, newspaper articles and television news, it argues that valuable insights into the nature of power and the contrasting forces currently at play in Myanmar can be gained through an analysis of sound.

Abstract