Deep Soundings on Bloomsbury

Paperback editions of the books in our series Deep Soundings: Critical Studies in Historical Ethnomusicology are now available through Bloomsbury press.

The books have received outstanding reviews and are now in many libraries.

Music and Politics Keynote

I look forward to giving a keynote speech soon for the 2025 Music Research Today (Musikforskning idag) conference of the Swedish Society for Music Research, hosted by the School of Music, Theatre and Art at Örebro University. This year’s conference theme is Music and Politics.  

 

Click HERE for a description of the keynote speeches. Below is the title and summary for my presentation.

 

Music Diplomacy Amid Populism and Protectionism

 

If one were to summarize the main political tendencies impacting the world today, far-right populism (with the rise of authoritarian leaders) combined with protectionism (featuring preoccupation with borders, migration and tariffs) would seem to be among the most prominent. There is also a noticeable shift from multilateralism toward transactionalism, which appears to be eroding the post-WWII world order through the ascent of BRICS and related alliances. How does music interact with these tendencies, and what hope might music provide in efforts to nudge humanity toward a more just and sustainable world in these uncertain times?  Music can play a highly effective role in cultural diplomacy that aims to bridge between ideological divides exacerbated by social media siloization. One relevant case comes from Samarkand, a great city on the historic Silk Road: The Sharq Taronalari Festival, which is one of the world's largest international folk music events, funded by UNESCO and the government of Uzbekistan. I participated in this spectacular festival on three different years, experiencing remarkable performances of traditional music from all inhabited continents. There are also entire institutions devoted to music diplomacy, a prominent example of which is the Barenboim-Said Academy, a conservatoire in Berlin founded with the purpose of inspiring cooperation between Arabs and Jews through classical music. In the field of Chinese music, a notable case was Copenhagen’s Music Confucius Institute, which I researched by interviewing expert pedagogues who had taught traditional Chinese musical instruments to European students. In the opposite direction, the Intensive World Music Concerts—developed across recent years among Chinese traditional instrument majors in the “Cross-Cultural Music Diplomacy” course at Beijing Language and Culture University—are another example, through which Chinese students learned to perform songs from Europe, Africa, Middle East, Polynesia, and the Americas. Finally, music diplomacy can also take the form of research and development initiatives. For example, the Sapmi Singing Map is a Norwegian Research Council-funded project that features close collaboration with Sami joikers to develop educational resources so their music, which had long been marginalized, can be sensitively taught to all students in Nordic schools. For each of these cases, anecdotes will be shared from direct personal experience, and each example will be considered in relation to state-of-the-art theories that provide a deepened understanding of music diplomacy. However, today perhaps the greatest threat to all these inspiring forms of heritage is AI’s unregulated colonization of human arts, so promising ways of responding to AI must also be briefly discussed. Taken as a whole, these examples show how the power of music diplomacy can foster forms of empathy and reconciliation that emphasize our shared humanity and thereby counteract the threat of deepening political divides.

 

Here I will note that I gave a speech covering some of the same examples in Hong Kong last month, but it looks quite unlikely even one person will be in the audience in Sweden who was also there in Hong Kong, so presumably nobody will notice or mind. I continue to refine the topic as well as how these examples are discussed. 

Image source (Orebro Castle): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%96rebro_slott_May_2014_01.jpg

GAME research group

The Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group has been achieving so much across recent years, exciting to see: many publications, grants, lectures, workshops and performance activities.

Recently we have meetings about once a month, and lately these are hybrid events with participants gathering in person in Bergen, Norway as well as online from North America, Asia, and Africa. Many GAME members plan to give presentations at the 2026 ISME World Conference in Montreal.

Pictured above is renowned composer Edvard Grieg, the most famous person from the city of Bergen, where the GAME research group (named for his legacy) is based.

Here is a photo from a GAME research group meeting (3 October 2025), which included many special guests. In person, we were joined by one of the GAME founders, Steinar Sætre, who brought guests from Uganda that are in the CABUTE project, Music subject leader Dr. Nicholas Ssempiija, PhD student Erisa Walubo, Vincent Muhindo, and Hellen Hasahya (new Master students who were traveling outside Uganda for the very first time), as well as Kjersti Elisabet Lea, a recent department head at University of Bergen. PhD student Knut Eysturstein was also here from University of the Faroe Islands. The event was hosted by HVL PhD student Kristian Iversen with support from our HVL postdoc Dr. Karan Choudhary, and included online guests from the CABUTE project in Uganda as well as Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) and other institutions.

Online we were joined by HVL Associate Professor David T. Johnson, Julia Katarzyna Leikvoll (University of Bergen), Craig Resta (Kent State University, USA), Sangmi Kang (Eastman School of Music, USA), CABUTE postdoc Milton Wabyona (Makerere University, Uganda), CABUTE postdoc James Isabirye (Kyambogo University, Uganda), ISME Routledge Book Series Assistant Editor Esther Chunxiao Zhang (EdUHK), recent PhD graduate and Cantonese opera expert Kimmie Sin-Yee Ma (EdUHK), and Yuki Morijiri (Tokyo Gakugei University). The event featured insightful presentations by two PhD students who are nearing completion: Knut Eysturstein and Erisa Walubo, a stimulating presentation by Craig Resta on approaches to historical research in music education, and some brief introductory presentations of thesis concepts by new CABUTE Master students Vincent Muhindo, and Hellen Hasahya. Michael Chi-Hin Leung (EdUHK) also gave an interesting presentation on his music education technology research.

Unexpected Audience of 500000

I recall back in 2007 while working as an Assistant Professor at Boston University, I visited beautiful Kyoto, Japan for some research, and at some point realized it could be worthwhile to develop an online portfolio to post various academic and artistic activities, including photos and videos. That is when I launched this blog Sociomusicology.

Now it is really hard to believe that on the final day of September 2025, the site has attracted a half-million page views. Compared to newspapers and magazines, 500000 is not a very large number, but it is encouraging to see what can come from persistence across years, even in what would seem to be a niche academic subject area: music education, ethnomusicology, comparative education. I will post here an analysis of the traffic to this site, which could be interesting for anyone else who might also consider making a blog of their academic work.

One interesting point worth noting here is that the Singapore numbers look unbelievable, but across time I have realized this is due to the number of mainland Chinese who use a VPN that merely causes them to appear to be based in Singapore. 

 

Malaysian Music Research

It was a pleasant surprise to be invited by two different universities this Autumn to serve as a PhD examiner for students from Malaysia who have completed quite interesting doctoral dissertations.

One dissertation is a mixed methods empirical research study at the Royal College of Music, London, that examines how musical expressiveness is learned among Malaysian college students, with particular attention to non-western understandings of expressiveness in music performance.

Another doctoral dissertation is performance-based, an artistic research study at Malaysia’s leading private university (UCSI University) that examines the characters and vocal characteristics of soprano roles in opera.

I look forward to learning from this innovative research, and to posing some useful questions, and will report in detail here when the process is completed with new music Doctors from an exciting part of the world.  

Indeed, Malaysia is a quite interesting country, with a megadiverse tropical environment, and over 34 million people in a rapidly developing economy. It is notable that Malaysia invests heavily in education and has over 20 universities. There is an array of traditional music genres Malaysia, from the Nobat court music to genres associated with dance drama traditions, as well as regional and minority folk music styles, and even lovely children’s songs. 

Also, the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, along with a new generation of singers and other world-class performers, have become known in the global field of western classical art music.

We can surely expect Malaysia to continue becoming an even more globally-impactful place for music and education in the coming years.

Chinese Translation Published

It was exciting to learn yesterday that a book I developed with Jon McCollum is now being published in Chinese translation by a team of outstanding music scholars.

Click HERE for more details (in Chinese language).

AI vs. IP in Music: An Issue for Ethnomusicology

I eagerly look forward to co-hosting the 2025 SEM Historical Ethnomusicology Section meetings with its current Chair, Otto Stuparitz, and to giving the following presentation at the 70^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. 

AI vs. IP: Who Owns the World’s Music Today?

David G. Hebert (Western Norway University of Applied Sciences) 

Abstract: 

At the 2025 Paris AI Summit, VPOTUS Vance declared to world leaders that “excessive regulation” harms the AI industry and will not be tolerated by the USA. His position contrasts with another VP, that of the world’s largest music company (Universal), who denounced AI’s “wholesale hijacking of the intellectual property of the entire creative community.” Indeed, as Suchir Balaji showed, the “fair use” doctrine cannot reasonably apply to the “training” of AI, whether in the form of text, images, or music, since the resulting synthetic products are designed to compete commercially with human-made creations. Law has arguably not kept pace with new technologies, including music AI, which flagrantly violates the spirit of copyright. How are ethnomusicologists to respond to AI in ways consistent with our values? Currently, the US, China, and Europe are the main centers of AI innovation, and of these the EU most explicitly protects privacy and AI safety (e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act). The US is also one of the only major countries that is not a signatory to major international agreements for safe AI development. Since SEM is a US-based organization, its members must consider the impact these US policies will ultimately have on music ownership and music creation worldwide. Based on a decolonial approach to IP in the context of international law, this presentation will identify established ethnomusicological values, then outline the legal arguments (and counterarguments) for regulating AI to protect musicians, promote cultural survival, and even ensure the future of human personal identity.

 

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This theme is also related to the work that our new postdoctoral researcher, Karan Choudhary, will pursue over the next few years, and who I hope may join me in future SEM conferences. His earlier work appears in the book Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy as well as various law journals. 

 

Image source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta#/media/File:Atlanta_Skyline_-_Piedmont_Park.png