Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific: Music, Media, and Technology

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The popularization of radio, television, and the Internet radically transformed musical practice in the Asia Pacific. These technologies bequeathed media broadcasters with a profound authority over the ways we engage with musical culture. Broadcasters use this power to promote distinct cultural traditions, popularize new music, and engage diverse audiences. They also deploy mediated musics as a vehicle for disseminating ideologies, educating the masses, shaping national borders, and promoting political alliances. With original contributions by leading scholars in anthropology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media and cultural studies, the 12 essays this book investigate the processes of broadcasting musical culture in the Asia Pacific. We shift our gaze to the mechanisms of cultural industries in eastern Asia and the Pacific islands to understand how oft-invisible producers, musicians, and technologies facilitate, frame, reproduce, and magnify the reach of local culture.

Reviews

This timely and compelling book attunes us to the far-reaching impact of media technologies on music and sound across the Asia Pacific region. Taking a comparative approach, the diverse case studies reflect on the transformative effects of 'musical media' on people's lives, exposing fundamental tensions between liberation and control, empowerment and constraint, inclusion and exclusion. * Barley Norton, Reader in Ethnomusicology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *
The anthology convincingly argues that Asia Pacific in the 21st century is more than a post-modern category of convenience, and that its coherence is evident at the nexus of music, mediatisation, and indigenous agency. The mix of authors voices, their various positionalities, and the different approaches remind us that coherence in Asia Pacific possesses its own complexities as well as its own abilities to resist facile essentialisation. Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific is a must-read for all culture workers at the onset of the presentpivot to the East. * Ricardo D. Trimillos, Professor Emeritus in Ethnomusicology and Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA *

Author Bio

Lonn Briain is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Musical Minorities: The Sounds of Hmong Ethnicity in Northern Vietnam (2018) and co-editor of Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music (2020). Min Yen Ong is an ethnomusicologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is also a research associate at Darwin College and a Bye-Fellow at Homerton College and Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, UK.