Benjamin Tausig

Sound, Music, Asian Studies

Stony Brook University

Recently

New book coming soon! Sign up for periodic research and publication updates.

I produced an episode of Afropop Worldwide about the life and death of Maurice Rocco. Listen to it here.

I am an elected delegate (and membership committee chair) in my labor union, working with a progressive faction of the union.

I stand in solidarity with Thailand’s ongoing pro-democracy protests (actively where possible, in these times), which advocate with breathtaking bravery for democracy as well as the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights in Thailand.

Some things:

Maurice Rocco’s blisteringly good cameo in the film Incendiary Blonde. Rocco is a key figure in my current research.

Previous Book (2019):

Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint

[Thai translation forthcoming through Soi Press]

Talks and events

(2023)

International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) workshop (January)

UC-Boulder class visit (February)

Tulane University class visit (February)

Association for Asian Studies panel presentation (March)

SUNY-Purchase class visit (March)

Stony Brook University teach-in against police violence and attacks on academic freedom (March)

Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (MACSEM) (March)

(2022)

UC-Boulder class book talk (February)

Stony Brook Undergraduate Anthropology Society address (February)

Stony Brook Printing Solidarity exhibition talk (February)

UC Santa Barbara class book talk (March)

Ohio State University department colloquium presentation (March)

Keynote remarks at Maurice Rocco’s memorial service in Oxford, Ohio (March)

SUNY-Purchase class book talk (March)

Global 1960s in the Global South conference at Stony Brook (April)

New York Southeast Asia Network public talk (April)

New York Conference on Asian Studies conference paper (NYCAS) (April)

Duke University workshop (May)

New York University department colloquium presentation (October)

Spectrum NYC pre-concert talk (November)

American Anthropological Association conference paper (AAA, November)

(2021)

lectures/colloquia/workshops at Boston University, SUNY-Purchase, Duke University, Reed College, and University of Maryland (winter-spring); MACSEM (April); Utrecht University (June).

Recent interviews and reviews

review of Bangkok Is Ringing in Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context (Coeli Barry)

review of Bangkok Is Ringing in Asian Studies (Niti Pawakapan)

review of Bangkok Is Ringing in Sound Studies (Cade Bourne)

review of Bangkok Is Ringing in Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia (Nathan Porath)

interview about Bangkok Is Ringing on the New Books Network (Patrick Jory)

review of Bangkok Is Ringing in Mekong Review (Chris Baker)

interview about Bangkok Is Ringing on The Field Recording Show (Kate Carr)

interview about Bangkok Is Ringing with CaMP Anthropology (Ilana Gershon and Mack Hagood)

interview about aural refusal with Somatic Podcast (Samuel Clevinger)

Listen to the audio edition of “Bangkok Is Ringing” at the links in the TOC below (chapters available on a rolling basis, as they finish production). The audio edition will eventually include the complete text of the book, narrated by 18 different readers, with field recordings and other audio interspersed. It is a podcast/audiobook hybrid. Please enjoy in tandem with or instead of the print version, and distribute freely.

AUDIO EDITION (brief guide to the audio edition)

INTRODUCTION: Sound, Protest Space, & Constraint (listen now)
Chapter 1 Completely Packed In (listen now)
Chapter 2 Red Sunday: Power and Connections (listen now)
Chapter 3 Atrocity Broadcasts (listen now)
Chapter 4 Wireless Road and the Ground of Modernity (listen now)
Chapter 5 Megaphone Singing
Chapter 6 Megaphonic Somsak Sangkaparicha Comes by His Goddamn Self
Chapter 7 A Quiet Mourning: The Poetry of Dynamics
Chapter 8 Whistles
Chapter 9 Vehicular Stereo Systems
Chapter 10 Developing Musical Economies I: CD Vendors
Chapter 11 Developing Musical Economies II: Stage Musicians
Chapter 12 Spontaneous Chants
Chapter 13 Developing Musical Economies III: Mr. Bear
Chapter 14 Surveillance
Chapter 15 Outer Space
Chapter 16 The Vanishing Point
Conclusion: On Mediated Spatiality

About the author

I teach sound studies and music, and research sound and dissent in Southeast Asia. I am currently researching the musical intimacies of Thailand during the Vietnam War, including the largely-forgotten (though no less astounding) American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, who lived in Bangkok for fifteen years. Here is one of Rocco’s videos, a Soundie filmed in 1943, which is a characteristically stunning performance. In this research project, I’m looking at the ways that music and nightlife were at the center of Thailand’s neocolonial development from the 1950s through the 1970s. I’m been doing fieldwork and archival work for a while in Thailand and other places — sign up for my fieldwork newsletter here. I’m enthusiastically reading Daniel Fineman on Thai-US relations, Felicity Aulino on care and aging in Thailand, Rong Wongsawan on Thailand in the aftermath of Vietnam, Ara Wilson on intimate economies, Wallace Terry on the black experience of Vietnam, Richard Wright on Afro-Asianism, and Ann Stoler on archives.

2021

“Climates of Dissent,” in Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

2019 

2018

Spring 2021

MUS 313 Hearing Politics

MUS 536 Bodies and Sex in Electronic Music

Fall 2020 

MUS 109 Rock, Pop Music, and Society

MUS 542 Theory in Sound Studies (with guests Nina Eidsheim, Jeff Dyer, David Grubbs, and Mack Hagood)

Spring 2020

MUS 451 Methods in Ethnomusicology (undergrad)

MUS 537 Ethnographic Methods (with guests K.E. Goldschmitt, Rachel Mundy, Marié Abe, Maria Sonevytsky, Shirley Lim)