Yun Emily Wang hosts “Listening for Otherwise Aliveness”

On February 27, 2026, the Duke Asian American and Diaspora Studies department hosted Yun Emily Wang, Assistant Professor of Music and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her talk, “Listening for Otherwise Aliveness,” drew upon her fieldwork at a care home for Chinese immigrants in Toronto. Through her research, Wang explores questions of cultural essentialization, quietude and the politics of listening.

In the care home, Wang observed, music is framed as a method of care for the elderly. Every Wednesday, the facility hosts karaoke with old Cantonese pop songs. This idea that the sound of cultural music hints at the sounds of life homogenizes, flattens and institutionalizes a diverse set of cultures and realities into one recognizable sound. Consequently, not all the patients understand these sounds as recognizable because there is no singular Sino-identity. 

In contrast, Wang describes another set of sounds, the humming of machines, the beeps of devices and the voices of the patients that blend into a quietude. These form an inescapable background of noise, that when not present, turns into an “audible inaudible.”

It is in this harmony of sounds that she points to another possibility of music as care, one where there is not a single, authentic cultural sound that is entirely comprehensible, but a different understanding and orientation towards sound itself. A way to understand that life is not just bottled in 1980’s Cantonese pop songs, but in the humming of a patient, the drawing of a breath or taking a moment to simply listen.