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

by Lonán Ó. Briain (Editor), Min Yen Ong (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Lonán Ó 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.