Category: Music

Co-Listening as Defiance: The Facebook Soundscape of Taiwan’s Sino-Myanmar Gen Z and the 2021 Myanmar Spring Revolution

Written by Tasaw Hsin-Chun Lu. After Myanmar’s 2021 coup, Taiwan’s Sino-Myanmar Gen Z created a nightly revolutionary soundscape through Facebook Live. By co-listening to the clang of pots and pans, revived protest anthems, and newly sharpened hip-hop, they transformed distant violence into shared urgency. These circulating sounds stitched together a fragile yet insistent counterpublic, allowing young listeners in Taipei to grieve, rage, and imagine with those in Myanmar. Through this quiet, collective listening, they claimed a sense of belonging that crossed borders and defied the junta’s enforced silence.

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Beyond Voices of Ethnicity: Post-Global Conditions in Taiwan’s Hakka Popular Music

Written by Hsin-Wen Hsu. Since the 2000s, Taiwan’s Hakka popular music has moved beyond themes of rural nostalgia and ethnic affirmation to engage the complexities of post-global conditions. Musicians respond to ecological precarity, translocal migration, shifting borders, and digitally mediated relationships while experimenting with new linguistic and collaborative forms. Hsu traces how Hakka communities navigate socioeconomic changes and evolving identities. In doing so, Hakka popular music becomes a crucial way of hearing Taiwan’s contemporary entanglements and imagining new modes of communal life.

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Listening for the Songs of Home: Tracing the Unheard Vietnamese Soundscape in Taiwan

Written by Kuo Ta-Hsin. This piece introduces the Vietnamese presence in Taiwan, through different sonic performances, to link Vietnamese students and/or migrants closer to their home. It is just for instance, In the karaoke rooms and Vietnamese eateries of Taichung, memory meets reality. Voices turn into acts of belonging, and to sing is to remain Vietnamese, even far from home.

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Singing for the Mountain Lands: A Pivotal Indigenous Music Concert in Taiwan

Written by Eric Scheihagen. The author illustrates the 1984 Singing for the Mountain Lands concert in Taipei, organised shortly after the Haishan Coal Mine Disaster, which killed mostly Amis miners. It details how Indigenous musicians and activists, led by Hu Defu, used the concert to raise funds and publicly address discrimination, harmful stereotypes, and political issues. The event became an important milestone in Taiwan’s growing Indigenous rights movement and helped catalyse later organising efforts, including the formation of the Taiwan Association for Promoting Indigenous Rights.

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