Sonic Worlds, Acoustic Politics and Hearing in Taiwan

Image Credit: Nga Shi Yeu

Foregrounding Taiwan as both a site and a node, this special issue assembles voices on the auditory politics and the sensory regimes of listening in Taiwan and its wider East Asian resonance. Sound is beyond merely aesthetic; it is an embodied and contested medium through which social life, political authority, and temporal identities are organised. Noise complaints and sound alarms in urban cities, the resonances of Indigenous rituality, the shifting timbres of verbal accents, and the artistic practices of the acoustics project all point to the ways sonic waves shape everyday life as well as how acoustic orders are historically produced, technologically mediated, and sensorially inhabited.

Singing for the Mountain Lands: A Pivotal Indigenous Music Concert in Taiwan Written by Eric Scheihagen

Listening for the Songs of Home: Tracing the Unheard Vietnamese Soundscape in Taiwan Written by Kuo Ta-Hsin

From Musical Garbage Trucks to Garbage Consciousness in Taiwan Written by Nancy Guy