The discussion about the impact the copresence of a researcher and their technological devices have on the ethnographic field has long been a critical point in ethno(musicological) research. Since the times of Jean Rouch, the presence of a cultural and technological outsider in the field has been considered a disturbing, potentially contaminating element—although necessary for the sake of documentation. This CD/book shows impressively, taking as an example il maggio, a classical ritual feast in Southern Italy's Basilicata, that ethnomusicology's role is neither constrained to an interventionist nor to a “fly on the wall” agenda. Instead, taking part in a performance through acts of coperformance, of copresence, and active collaboration has huge potential for establishing forms of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1996) with those studied and opens up roads toward an empathetic understanding of their social/musical doings. Crucial in this process is the role the researcher attributes to the technology used—whether using sound recording and photography as potentially exploitative devices or instead as tools that enable self-reflexivity and exchange.Such desired collaborative research—a “circle of collaboration,” as the editors call it, has been utilized by Allan Sekula, Steven Feld, Anthony Seeger, and others since the 1970s. What is new about this particular multimedia publication is that collaboration does not happen only between the researchers and those who inhabit the field, but also within this research team, consisting in this case of two photographers (Stefano Vaja and Lorenzo Ferrarini), two ethnomusicologists (Nicola Scaldaferri and Steven Feld), and a local priest/historian—all having a different rootedness in the ethnographic field, different backgrounds (both academic and nonacademic), different disciplinary analytical categories (visual anthropology, classical ethnography, acoustemology), and different media competencies. The authors argue that not only the copresence of those studied is needed but also the copresence of other researchers to create conditions for a reflexive, transdisciplinary work with the potential to balance out disciplinary prejudices and biases that are too often imposed onto the ethnographic field. Such multidisciplinary “multimedia” research is not an invention specific to the twenty-first century but rather mirrors earlier fieldwork methods applied by scholars such as Ernesto de Martino, working in the same geographical area in the 1950s, in transdisciplinary “multimedia” research teams to cover the complexity of research sites.What results paradoxically from such an “evocative juxtaposition” of different sensibilities and a nondisguised coconstruction of the field—for example, through the presence of the ethnomusicologist Nicola Scaldaferri as a zampogna (bagpipe) player—is the fact that the “truth of the field” in its multidimensionality (in this case the presence of organized and spontaneous musical, verbal, and ambient sounds including the playing of three different musical bands) appears more sharply, while the presence of the researchers’ team stands back, becoming almost invisible and illegible through a hybrid audiovisual text made up of fragmented partial views of a certain ethnographic reality.This approach has been applied by Steven Feld already in a carnival setting on the Greek island of Skyros, resulting in an impressive experimental and synaesthetic publication (Blau et al. 2010). This new publication refines the approach, arguing that documenting and objectifying (CD 1: an inventory and chronology of sounds) and aestheticizing and subjectifying (CD 2: a soundscape giving account of a personal sonic experience) are not juxtaposed or subsequent activities, but parallel interconnected perspectives needed for a proper understanding of a complex sonic field site. What clearly emerges from the multimedia reflection of the festival is the idea of the feast (and the ethnographic field) as a theater setting, of which the ethnomusicologist and photographer are in part actors continuously transforming the event and its readings. When Nicola Scaldaferri, who is from the region, coperforms with his zampogna during the event, he cocreates the events and its meanings and contributes to its folkloristic revival, as well as to its transformation while he “attracts cameras and recording devices” at the same time.The epistemological core of the book is a dialogue between Nicola Scaldaferri and Steven Feld. In it, both researchers explain their approach of “critical listening.” The immersive soundscape composition by Steven Feld exemplifies this. It is basically a multispatial recording based on the idea of the sound recordist as “a participating and mobile listener.” It is all about moving into, through, around, and out of sonic spaces with one's own body with the DSM microphones as a particularly sensitive recording instrument. At the same time, this soundscape is a sonic diary that documents a first encounter with an ancient ritual that draws a certain fascination and auditive enchantment. Singing families intonating poetic courtship songs together with the bagpipe zampogna, the omnipresent delirious playing of the wind bands, the roughness of the voices of the cimaioli men who cut the May tree, religious soundscapes of veneration—all are captured with “deep listening” and a certain playfulness, for example, when Steven Feld moves around the zampogna in a dancing conspiracy. As Feld explains in conversation, the seventy-minute composition is made up of two elements: the first is the “innocent” acoustic encounter and the second a rationalized rereading and interpretation of the recorded material through editing.What is striking about this publication is the total omission of any filmic moving images of the event. Instead, it relies on the impressive photographic glimpses of the event and moving sounds that dialogue and continuously refer to each other. The result is that the listener and reader mentally reimagine the social dynamics of the event. When the Trees Resound is, above all, fascinating sonic storytelling, a “cinema for the ears,” which is both evocative and distanced, documentary and aestheticizing. It is highly recommended to all those who aim at giving justice to the “truth of the field” and its deeper cultural and emotional meanings, through using creatively, and in an imaginative way, the toolbox of the craft of ethnomusicology.