Playing the Archive

Es war einmal ein Junge, der im Königspalast aufwuchs und einen Soldaten Cello spielen hörte – und sich sofort darin verliebte. Der Prinz bemerkte das große Interesse des Kindes und schickte ihn ins Ausland, um die Geheimnisse des Instruments zu ergründen. Im fernen Land der DDR lernte der Junge fleißig und wurde weit und breit bekannt. Seine alte Heimat versank in Blut und Chaos, also blieb er in...

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany reunified, the territory of the German Democratic Republic was absorbed into the capitalist West. People felt the West had won. But what if things had gone the other way? What if reunified Germany had been communist? That is just what happened in Vietnam in 1975. As the war ended, the colonial, capitalist South joined the communist North -- and it rema...

Where do obsolete media go to die, and is there an afterlife for old tapes? In this Day of the Dead double feature, two sound artists explore lost sounds, spectral voices, trashed tapes, and anarchist sound editing, bringing research in sound studies together with experimental sound art. Join Nicolás Rey, Rita Santos, and me in the great beyond with some sonic (ghost) stories. Part I features Nico...

Dancing in a public square - it's a typical feature of Chinese urban life known as "Guang Chang Wu," square dance. Promoted by Mao, transformed through daily practice, Chinese square dance has often been mocked as an old women's activity. Yet it provides community and therapy for millions who do it in Chinese cities and in the Chinese diaspora. In this episode, Serena Agbokhan interviews Chang Che...

Which sounds do archives keep, and which do they leave out? Do we, the archivists and researchers, create archives, or do the archives create us? In this episode, Sydney Hutchinson and Natalia Neira Nieto speak with sound scholar Alejandro Madrid about his latest book The Archive and the Aural City. Alejandro reflects on how archives in Mexico and Germany are shaped—how materials are chosen, what...

When musicologist Sarah Fuchs stumbled across a mysterious set of wax cylinder recordings from a Parisian school for the deaf, she had no idea how deep the archive would go. In this episode, she chats with Sydney Hutchinson about early recording technologies, opera at a distance, and what it means to truly listen—especially when sound itself is contested. From 19th-century jukeboxes to the ethics...

Have you ever tried to listen to the past? Sound artist and ethnographer Keyania Campbell has. In her research on the soundscapes of pre-Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, she recreates everyday sounds from the days long before natural disaster destroyed the city.  In Playing the Archive, ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson and guests dive into experimental archival research with interviews, radio...

Sounds are usually momentary. They're there, and then they're forgotten. Every day, we access new sounds on Tiktok or Youtube and some of them go viral - but who remembers them a month, a year, or a decade later? Archives preserve sounds of the past, but they become hard to access, buried under data protection, privacy, and heritage laws. How will future anthropologists know what 2025 sounded like...

You thought group projects in school were tricky? Try writing a telenovela with 900 collaborators! In this episode we talk with visual anthropologist Gina Knapp about how she worked together with villagers in highland Papua New Guinea to create a show that blended fiction with reality to tell some truths about their life. Using a collaborative process both challenging and therapeutic, "A Slice of...

If you don't know the Orion, what are you waiting for? You're missing out on a hot trend (of the summer of 1963 in East Germany)! In our first episode, we explored the story of the Lipsi, a new dance East Germans created in 1958 to compete with Western trends. In this episode, we continue the story by exploring the Orion, the GDR's answer to the twist, as well as some other experiments in internat...

European colonists derided them as "headhunters." Christian missionaries forbade them from practicing traditional music and dance. The Indian army continues to target them. But the Naga people of northeast India are still there. In this episode we talk with Senti Toy, a New York-based Naga ethnomusicologist and musician, about how she created the sound exhibit "I will not weep" for the Humboldt-Fo...

How should socialist youth dance? How can social dance be more socialist? These questions may not be keeping YOU up at night, but things might look differently if you were an East German cultural functionary! In this episode, we go into the story of the Lipsi, a new dance East Germans created in 1958 to compete with Western trends. We also talk about how the Second World Music project came about,...