SoundKnowledge aims to rethink music in terms of the procedural knowledge inherent in and specific to music-making by exploring the latter as knowledge practices in Micronesia. This knowledge, formed in the performance of musical practice, may prove to be key to survival in the complex postcolonial predicament of Micronesia. To make this knowledge operable, the project (a) develops a conceptual framework and an analytic capable of better understanding sonic epistemological practices and (b) addresses climate change, social alienation and postcolonial trauma in specific parts of Micronesia by fleshing out the nature and dynamics of that knowledge conceptually and ethnographically.
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.
