“From Chaos to Calm”

Abstract

Infrastructure enables modes of politics to come into being and gives rise to an apparatus of governmentality. Through sensing and “listening in” (LaBelle 2019) to the city, the urban “acoustic habitus” (Feld 1982) emerges out of the city’s governmentality; it comprises ways of listening that define a biopolitical “sonic citizenship” (Western 2021). Governance in Hong Kong’s new “lawscape” (LaBelle 2021) reorients one’s acoustic being in urban spaces, resounding an aural monopoly, which I call the infrastructural acoustic. In the new environment, the “semi-authoritarian” system (Tai 2020) has muted the cacophony of raging roars and unintelligible protests, infusing the city’s atmosphere with an affective entanglement of tear gas and bodies during upheavals in the passé “semi-democratic” (Tai 2020) spaces. Together with Hong Konger self-reflexive poetry, this short film juxtaposes photos, footage, interviews, and field recordings of Hong Kong’s urban spaces during and after years of pro-democracy protests in the old and new Hong Kong to reveal an invisibilized “sphere of appearance” in the “inhabitable ground” (Butler 2016). Insisting on the significance of sound and listening in making sense of the affective spheres that circulate in a transforming environment, this combined work crafts an intermedial space where the audience can sense these forces and attunements through a mode of schizophrenic listening and discern the dynamics between sounds, collective memories, and infrastructural matters to reimagine the possibilities of the counter-infrastructural acoustics where sounds of freedom attempt to retrench state violence.

Notes on Contributor

Winnie Lai is an (ethno)musicologist, multimodal artist and returning singer-songwriter working as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music (2024–2026) at Dartmouth College. She earned a Ph.D. in Music Studies (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. Her work crosses disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating ethnographic materials with historical archives and employing critical theoretical tools with cutting-edge intermedial methods. At Dartmouth, she is developing her first monograph, Unsounding Hong Kong: From Protests to Silence, to study the sonic and affective currents circulating through local and transnational protests. A Hong Kong–born and raised, classically trained mezzo-soprano (who usually sings pop), she is developing new multimodal research: Theorizing R&B Ad-libs: Intercultural Soul Aesthetics, Racialized Listening, and Singing Virtuosity in Sinophone Pop and Cantopop.