Mapping Music and East Asia (Global East Asian Music Research SG)

Over recent decades, a number of intertwined seismic shifts have occurred or are impending, which have come to inform humanities scholarship. Driven by global neoliberal capitalism, developments in technology and ecology have reached a point whereby humanism and even the concept of the human are called into question. On the one hand, a small group of tech companies such as Facebook and Google are pushing the frontiers of AI development in search of profit. On the other hand, the fossil fuel industry ignored its early discovery of climate change, opting instead to discredit climate science, giving more weight to shareholders's interests than to the planet's habitability. Collectively examined in the interdisciplinary field known as "posthumanism," the various systemic factors of capitalism, technology, and ecology have led to divergences from conventional conceptions of human subjectivity and agency. The musical impact of these developments are not often at the center of public awareness, but it is precisely the arts which present questions that provoke a re-evaluation of human agency, autonomy, creativity, and musicality. This panel brings an East Asian focus to explorations in posthumanist musicology, which is already exhibiting signs of emergence. A recent spade of musicological work in animals studies, biocultural evolution, and vitalist philosophy of sound points to ecological posthumanism, while early experiments in musical AI (e.g. David Cope's computer-generated Bach music in the 90s, which was misrecognized as actual music by Bach) already point to technological posthumanism. An East Asian focus is timely because of the region's position at the frontier of technological developments, and its outsized ecological impact-both of these factors indicate that the emergence of the musical "posthuman" will be deeply affected by the region. On the one hand, Yamaha has invented musical AI--its Vocaloid program has naturalistically replicated and resurrected the voice of deceased Japanese singer Hibari Misora (1937-1989). On the other hand, ancient Taoist and Buddhist philosophies are precursors of post-Anthropocenic thought which decenters the human. A central Buddhist tenet, for instance, is the recognition of animal suffering, which translates into the practice of vegetarianism-this is broadly related to the notion of the Buddha's "passion," which is explored in music by Tan Dun and others. With increased attention on the musicality of AI and animals in a posthuman, post-Anthropocenic framework, the uniqueness of the human, one of whose special traits was thought to be his musicality, is called into question. With the deterritorialization of the human musical expression of emotions, and reterritorialization onto AI, what, we might ask, exactly is it that distinguishes human nature? How does the decline of the concept of human autonomy over the human, animate, and inanimate worlds affect our critical frameworks? What does this mean for human creativity in general?

Evolving from its far-right origin of complaining about widening class divisions in South Korea, the portmanteau Hell Joseon ("Korea is Hell") has entered public discourse, indexing a multiplicity of discontents with Korea's progress towards the future. In emphasizing the social ramifications of Korea's rampant post-1997 neoliberalization (Song 2009, Yang 2018), this paper highlights how growing intensifications of neoliberal subjectivity-individualization, competition, and self-cultivation-that engenders the actual life of Hell Joseon discourse has now pushed precarious Korean young adults to probe for optimism in virtual forms of life. Drawing from ongoing fieldwork regarding English language study, autotuning engineering labs, and noraebang (karaoke rooms), I posit the neoliberal means of auditing vocal cultivation in the realms of language and musical sensibility is perpetually oriented towards a standard of impossible unmediated reproduction. Noting the inextricable relation between voice and neoliberal ideology (Inoue 2012, Weidman 2014), I highlight how these young adults-subjectivity reduced to "carbon-based computers," and increasingly disillusioned with a perpetually altered teleology of vocal progress-subvert their self-cultivation in this narrowly-defined form of life progress. Engaging in sensorial acts of second-language complaining, unmediated singing, and intensified vintage pop music listening, I consider how their voice comes to function beside itself. Noting the existence of virtual presents and futures that exist simultaneously alongside the durational actualization of life (Bergson 1944, Deleuze 1991), I argue these analog modes of voicing allows for the unbecoming of neoliberalism's corporealization, and in turn projects a virtual optimism amid the vocal realization of Hell Joseon.

The rise of transnational media networks has transformed the exchange, preservation and digital redistribution of popular music recordings especially in the economic interfaces between local media markets in East and Southeast Asia and broader consumptions and circulations in North America and Europe. In this presentation, I will focus on the historicization of Southeast Asian popular music through emergent projects of sound collection and digitization, by documenting material histories of independent labels, institutional archives, file-sharing blogs, and online streaming platforms that link Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the United States. Examples include the physical collections of cassettes and records at the Museum Musik Indonesia in Malang, the digitization of vinyl records on the Jakarta-based streaming archive Irama Nusantara, and the restorative online projects of the US-based Cambodian Vintage Music Archive, which digitizes and recirculates rare Cambodian recordings to relate the story of Phnom Penh rock music before and after the Khmer Rouge. By taking seriously the notion that these collectors, traders, and "crate-diggers" are actively producing musical counterhistories of global popular music, music scholars can recognize different perspectives on the politics of preservation and accessibility, the ethical implications of "crate-digging" as neo-colonial extraction of regional media resourses, the critique of "world music" (directed from the Global South), and the transactional histories that construct both institutional and informal archives.