Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SoundKnowledge (Sound Knowledge: Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-03-31
The project’s systematic analysis of music-making as a knowledge practice identifies strategies that foster resilience in the face of these urgent crises. At the same time, it also offers a first-of-its-kind theorization of the intrinsic procedural knowledge unique to music-making. The underlying hypothesis is that knowledge of music is self-referential and forms multilayered connections and ruptures with pasts, presents and futures, surrounding orders of knowledge and other sensory registers in addition to the auditory. SoundKnowledge asks what Western Pacific musical practices know and how they know it, how music-making makes this knowledge operable and how humans use this knowledge in coping with their life-world through music. The project, therefore, explores how music functions as an epistemic form that is distinct yet imbricated within its environment, often referred to as the proverbial power of music.
This research is of immediate relevance to the local island level, to the entire Micronesian region, and to global human welfare for three reasons. First, it addresses pressing local issues and their potential solutions in their entanglement with subaltern knowledge practices. Second, it analyzes these local matters within the framework of regional Micronesian epistemological, social and political configurations, fostering resilience and problem-solving strategies in the face of urgent crises across Micronesia. And third, it makes a truly innovative contribution to opening up postcolonial studies’ much-lamented, but nonetheless persistent, heavy textual bias toward a more encompassing consideration of cultural practices. This intellectual project is pivotal to current postcolonial thinking, decolonial epistemology, and musicology alike.
While it may seem surprising, the COVID-19 pandemic, with its massive disruption of academic life as we knew it, has had major productive effects on the SoundKnowledge project. Restrictions on on-site fieldwork aside, the pandemic allowed us to further the critical academic reassessment of largely unquestioned issues. It forced us to rethink issues related to fieldwork ethics and on-the-ground fieldwork versus online ethnography. It also made us reconsider methodological questions that are deeply intertwined with the epistemological questions SoundKnowledge is so programmatic in exploring. This reexamination of the project’s methodological framework, forced upon us by the pandemic, has heightened our analytical sensitivity toward the relationality of SoundKnowledge’s conceptual approach. We will pursue this line of thinking further, and while we did not originally anticipate that this dimension of our research would gain such relevance, we look forward to its assistance in further expanding the project’s expected research results.