Sonic infrastructures, musical circulation and listening practices in a changing People’s Republic of China

Abstract

ABSTRACT The particular media history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provokes an attention to the evolving ways in which sounds have circulated, circulations which have traced political and economic formations and the ways of imagining space they entail. Putting insights from sound studies in dialogue with approaches from the anthropology of infrastructure, this article explores how evolving modes of musical circulation and the listening practices associated with them are connected to broader transformations of state, society and space in the PRC. I focus on Xingwaixing Changpian (Starsing Records), a Guangzhou-based record company that has risen to prominence since the early 2000s in part by engaging in innovative business practices including a social networking site, the organisation of live performances and a sublabel devoted to independent bands. I analyse the ways these endeavours, as sonic infrastructures, reflect and contribute to new mobilities and translocal connections tied to China’s evolving economic and political rationalities, and explore how the listening practices they give rise to relate to privatised notions of self and subjectivity in contemporary China.