Music and sound cultures

A comprehensive encyclopaedic entry—such as Britannica—to describing Southeast Asian music may often focus on its traditional and classical histories, starting with influences from Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic kingdoms and cultures, to the kinds of instruments associated with courtly, religious, community and festival spaces, as well as the traditional arts such as Javanese shadow play, or Thai mask plays. Differences between Southeast Asian and western music are also considered in terms of technicalities, such as its tonal qualities and scale systems. 

This section aims to move beyond (but not necessarily exclude) the traditional/classical historical description and periods and technicalities, by gathering and exploring contemporaneous materials about different forms of musical production across Southeast Asia. 

Some of these works trace enmeshment and evolutions in other cultural or artistic forms such as film, theatre, dance, folk rituals, and martial arts. Others encompass writings and photos produced about pop artists and rock bands such as the Eraserheads in the Philippines; films on forgotten sounds and music histories, such as that of pre-Khmer Rouge artists like Sinn Sisamouth and Pen Ran; jazz across Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as Islam and hip hop groups such as Jogja Hiphop Foundation, across Malaysia and Indonesia. 

In addition, materials in this section can explore how the production, performance, circulation, and consumption of music have been shaped by race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality, class and inequality, and nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

In so doing, we also hope to experiment with potentialities of theorising and thinking from aural/oral sites of knowledges, alongside often-predominant textual and visual sources.