This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working on Asia to examine sound as an essential aspect of global cultural, social, political and technological change. Emotional, ephemeral and subjective, rather than concrete, empirical and scientific, the role of sound has constantly been undermined by the primacy attributed to the visual as objective, rational and, ultimately, modern. But how does attention to sound in Asia help us understand the region within a global process of modernity? What can sound tell us about the ambiguous nature of the experience of modernity within and between different cultures? Central to the conference is an examination of the ways in which ‘modern sound’ transformed individual, communal, social and national subjectivities, made clear political and social cleavages and brought new forms of social, cultural and political control. The conference therefore, will necessarily address wider interdisciplinary theoretical questions of sources, methodologies and approaches in the study of sound cultures at a time when the privileging of the visual in academia is increasingly being challenged. This conference is an invitation to rethink and re-examine the ways in which processes of modernity in Asia were and are experienced through sound. 

The conference is open to all, and no registration fee is required.

Conference language: English