Name

A CURATED LISTENING SESSION – ECHOES OF DISPLACEMENT: REVOICING CHINESE DIASPORIC SPEECH AND SONG IN THE UNITED STATES AND AMERICAN ARCHIVES

This experimental presentation reactivates historical voice recordings – both spoken and sung – of Chinese diasporic communities in the United States. Drawing from archival materials housed at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, the Him Mark Lai Digital Archive, the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Folkways, and the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, this session explores how the recorded human voice serves not only as a sonic trace of migration, but also as an active site of cultural memory and resistance.

The curated listening session features carefully selected excerpts: oral histories in Cantonese and Toisanese recounting exclusion-era immigration and community survival; Cantonese opera scenes performed in mid-century San Francisco; and folk songs recorded by Chinese American elders in New York and California. These fragile, often overlooked recordings – marked by breath, dialect, Musical phrasing, and Background noise – foreground the materiality of voice and its expressive power within displacement narratives. Rather than treating these voices as fixed archival artefacts, the session invites listeners to experience them as affective encounters and temporal bridges. I will prepare English translations for materials that involve speech and lyrics to help the audience.

As a Hong Kong–born composer and ethnomusicologist with extensive Fieldwork across East and Southeast Asia, my work engages the intersection of music theory, composition, ethnography and sound studies. I approach these recordings not simply as data, but as sonic companions – utterances that resonate across generations and geographies.

The session concludes with an audience discussion, inviting reflection on the ethics and poetics of listening to displaced voices. I will bring up these questions such as ‘What does it mean to archive a breath?’ ‘How might listening itself become an act of cultural solidarity, mourning,
or revoicing?’ to facilitate the discussion.

Hippocrates Cheng is a composer, theorist, ethnomusicologist from Hong Kong. As a composer, he writes contemporary classical music, new music for Asian instruments, and Jazz. As a researcher, he researches the music of Hong Kong Composer Doming Lam, East Asian music, piano rolls and player pianos in early Jazz history, Arnold Schoenberg as well as Braille music notation. In 2024, he completed his Doctor of Music Composition, with a minor in ethnomusicology, at the IndianaUniversity Jacobs School of Music. He is currently an assistant professor of music theory and composition and an affiliated faculty of Asian and Asian American Studies at The State University of New York at Binghamton.