Music Research Seminar

Join us for our recent Music Research Seminar, featuring some of the world's leading researchers in music.

About the talk

Megaphones Hiding in Trees: Sounding nature and governing publics in China

Places of ‘scenic beauty’ in China—national parks, panda enclosures, holy mountains and private gardens—have become sites where encounters with nature are constructed through idealisations of particular ecologies. In these environments, the sonic design of space often depends as much on ‘organic’ elements as on deliberately engineered and broadcast ‘artificial’ sounds. Loudspeakers are hidden—camouflaged—in trees and rocks. Broadcasting ambient sounds throughout the day, they transmit signals ranging from Chinese classical music and spoken descriptions of local objects of interest to exhortations to walk in an orderly fashion and recordings of religious chants. At other times, these broadcasts take the more overt form of public-service announcements or tourist information.

Based on multi-sited fieldwork in northern, eastern and southern China, this seminar considers such mediated soundscapes along four axes of analysis. First, I contextualise these sonic ‘atmospheres’ within surveillance culture in China and traditions of civic instruction through public address. Second, I examine them in relation to a longer history of Daoist philosophy that positions humans in relation to the cosmos through an understanding of ‘artifice’ embedded in oppositional coexistence with ‘nature’. Third, I explore these articulations as multisensorial experiences embedded in ecotouristic branding. Finally, I critique the interaction between these sonic mediations and perceived ‘natural’ sounds through broader theorisation in ecomusicology developed by Guy (Ethnomusicology 53(2): 218–248, 2009) and Rees (Ethnomusicology 60(1): 53–88, 2016). I conclude by considering the relationship between national and local acoustic ecologies of the ‘natural’ Chinese world.

About the speaker

Shzr Ee Tan is a Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, working across ethnomusicology, performance studies and cultural studies. Her research examines how music, sound and performance illuminate questions of race, migration, labour, digital inequality and shifting geopolitical power, with particular expertise in Sinophone, Southeast Asian and Indigenous worlds. More recently, her work has extended into gender, ageing, care, food cultures and the social infrastructures of everyday life. She is widely published on decolonisation, EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), race and representation in music and the performing arts, combining critical scholarship with collaborative ethnography, creative practice and public engagement. A self-described “community busybody” and former journalist, she leads the Radical Aunties initiative and is developing Global Aunties, a major international research project exploring the cultural repertoires of care, labour, health and resourcefulness associated with “Auntiness.” She also writes commentary for the South China Morning Post and The Straits Times in Singapore.

Shzr Ee is also a practising musician with experience across a range of East and Southeast Asian musical traditions.

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