Yung Emily Wang Communication Style

On Friday, October 13th I went to the University of Minnesota’s Techniques of Listening Conference. It was very intimidating at first, with all of the people in attendance graduate level or higher music students, but as everyone introduced themselves it was a lot more friendly and enjoyable to attend. I particularly enjoyed Yung Emily Wang’s presentation titled Shopping and Chopping: Diasporic Intimacy through everyday Embodied Listening in Chinese Toronto. This was a fascinating presentation and I learned a lot about how the sounds in a typical Chinese supermarket connected the Chinese culture for generations back. It was surprising how interesting the topics were, as it was a graduate presentation, and I had thought they would all be boring. Some of the other topics were much more difficult to understand, as they were about topics I had never heard of, but they still were interesting to listen to,
It made me excited for the presenters that they had such an attentive audience, and made the vibe of the entire conference that much more comforting. I was a little disappointed at how little some of the presenters explained their topics; they were only given 20 minutes, which might have had something to do with it, but it would have been helpful to outsiders to explain their topics in depth, so that you didn’t need to be a music graduate student to understand the papers. Overall, I would like to choose different topics to attend if I were to attend this again. One topic that stood out to me was Steven Moon’s Listening Elsewhere: Enacting Affective Exodus in Gay Azerbaijan and if I had gotten their earlier I would have loved to attend that presentation. One thing attending this conference has inspired me to do is to attend more lectures on music and sound studies if they are offered in the Twin Cities