Soundings: Assemblies of Listenings and Voices Across the Souths is a seminal 5-day gathering of musicians, artists, performers, and sound scholars from outside of the European canon. Soundings addresses the dearth of critical engagement with artists and thinkers working on the margins of the Eurocentric discourses, to counteract a scant presence of the Global South, diasporic, and indigenous music and sound works, and scholarship in the contemporary fields of music and sound arts. The assembly aims to nurture such artistic and scholarly interventions by bringing into the foreground practices, aesthetic histories and sonic methodologies of artists and thinkers discursively grounded within the Global South.

This assembly is intended to be a global forum and an equitable platform on which the voices of artists, makers, critical theorists, and aesthetic practitioners may enter mutual dialogue and listening without the need to understand themselves through the assumptions, predilections, and set listening positions of hegemonic Western concepts and practices. Soundings is a meeting beyond borders and cultures dedicated to the dialogues between the epistemologies of what we term the “Sonic Global Souths” – and to critically analyze the aesthetic and discursive hegemonies, institutional biases and parochial canons in sonic, medial, and musical discourses and practices. This public assembly avoids the conventional Western conference formats of the fixed 20-minute lectures and Q/A leavened by panels, to instead generate care and knowledge from the ground up in a participatory programing. This bottom-up approach ushers in several open forums, such as Panchayat, Thảo Luận, Melā, Sabor, and Meśk. Over the 5 days of spirited gathering, different modes of listening and knowledge-transfer will be explored to reflect on possible models of planetary encounters by co-listening and singing together, sounding and musicking collaboratively, thinking and sensing with a communal energy. Allowing for such contingent, horizontal, inclusive, and non-hierarchical modes of knowledge generation is central to the decolonial and de-hegemonizing impulse of this gathering.