The fall of 2025 in Canada was marked by deep cultural resonance from Southeast Asia, carried by Indonesian sound artist, composer, and ecological activist Rani Jambak. Born in Medan with Minangkabau roots, Rani brought the voices of her homeland in West Sumatra to international stages.

Across her packed six-city Canadian tour, Rani not only showcased experimental electronic music, but also delivered strong philosophical and ecological statements.

At the center of this statement was her unique creation: Kincia Aia: A Living Heritage—a traditional Minangkabau waterwheel transformed into a musical instrument. This project became a bridge of dialogue, connecting ancestral wisdom of the Nusantara with global crises of the modern world. read more

Hosted in Europe or Southeast Asian countries | 3 Fellowships | 2 months each

Application deadline: 31 December 2025

Fellowship period: Autumn 2026

The Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound) project invites applications for three short-term research fellowships aimed at scholars, curators, artists, and source community members from Southeast Asia. These fellowships seek to support original research and curatorial experimentation within two main sound collections in the Netherlands: The Jaap Kunst Collection at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) and The Philips Omroep-Hollandse Indies radio broadcasts at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), or other repositories of source communities from Southeast Asia in Europe and repositories in Southeast Asia relevant to Re:Sound. read more

Dalam lanskap seni kontemporer yang terus berkembang, kolaborasi lintas budaya dan disiplin menjadi kunci dalam menciptakan karya yang relevan dan bermakna. Salah satu representasi kuat dari semangat ini hadir dalam Simposium Internasional Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music 2025 di Bangkok, Thailand, melalui penampilan BEASTs of Wonderland yang menghadirkan karya multidisiplin dan imersif bertajuk PANJAGO: Body – Sound – Improvisation. Di antara para seniman dan akademisi yang terlibat, Rani Fitriana—yang dikenal juga sebagai Rani Jambak— PhD researcher projek Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound) mewakili Universitas Gadjah Mada dalam showcase dan sesi pleno yang berlangsung pada tanggal 20-23 Agustus 2025. read more

The Internal Kick-Off Meeting for the Re:Sound project, titled “Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage,” held on 14 April 2025, marked the official launch of a multiyear, multi-institutional research initiative focused on critically engaging with colonial-era sound archives. Conducted in a hybrid format—both in person at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta and online via Zoom—the meeting gathered scholars, archivists, curators, students, and community-based practitioners from Indonesia, the Netherlands, and across Southeast Asia. Running from 2025 to 2028, Re:Sound seeks to rethink how sonic heritage is collected, curated, interpreted, and made accessible in the postcolonial present. read more

Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound)

Institutions : Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) and Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
Funding Body : The Dutch Research Council (NWO)
Application Deadline : 5 May 2025
Start Date : 1 August 2025
Duration : 3 years (full-time)

Project Overview

Re:Sound renegotiates Eurocentric understandings, conceptions and curations of “heritage”. This Eurocentrism obscures the coloniality of the history that “heritage” is supposed to narrate and obstructs the access of source community stakeholders to their own “heritage”. There is no scholarly or curatorial model to decenter European agencies and diversify understandings of heritage (curation). Re:Sound bridges this knowledge gap by focusing on sonic heritage, in particular two colonial sound collections from Indonesia, now located in the Netherlands, The Jaap Kunst Collection at the University of Amsterdam, and the Philips Holland Omroep-Hollandse Indies radio broadcasts at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV).

Re:Sound explores whether and how the inherent divergence of validations and understandings of sonic expression provides ways to reconsider established notions of heritage. It does this through Southeast Asian PhD and stakeholder research in the above Netherlands-based sound collections, and by fostering a transcontinental and inter-Asian curatorial network of academics and source community stakeholders through workshops and summer schools.

With these activities, Re:Sound aims to improve access to Netherlands-based sound collections for Southeast Asian source community researchers and stakeholders. This improvement emphatically includes options for physical and digital restitution. Through the research of the next generation of Southeast Asian scholars and stakeholders, Re:Sound moreover employs colonial sound recordings as historical sources, attending to those recorded voices that are not represented in written historical sources and hence run the risk of being “written out” of history.

Through a more inclusive historiography due to it being sound-source based and through improved access of source community stakeholders to their own heritage, Re:Sound redirects curatorial agency to Southeast Asian stakeholders – a redirection that impacts a diversification of notions of “heritage” and a decentering of European agency in heritage curation).

The Collections

The NISV holds the radio broadcasts of the Philips Holland Omroep-Hollandse Indies radio and various uncatalogued audio and video recordings related to the Dutch East Indies from the 1920s. They contain music, rituals, broadcasts of political and cultural events, speeches, debates, interviews and the coverage of insurgencies, festivities, revolts, and wars. NISV’s catalogued collections are hosted on CLARIAH and DANS, online access platforms and interfaces that are only available to researchers physically present in the Netherlands.

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) holds the Jaap Kunst Collection, consisting of 300+ sound recordings on wax cylinders from the islands of Nias, Sumatera, Java, Bali, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Kisar, the Kai Islands, the Moluccas and West Papua; hundreds of musical instruments from those locations; silent films registering dance and performance practices from those locations; 6,500 photographs of music and dance practices, and musical instruments from those locations; research reports of research expeditions to these locations; 40,000 pages of correspondence in Dutch, English, German, Indonesian/Malay and Javanese, with researchers (both within and outside Indonesia from a variety of disciplines), informants, officials, musicians, cultural entrepreneurs, and academic and archive institutions; teaching materials; publication manuscripts.

Jaap Kunst (1891–1960) and his wife Katy Kunst-Van Wely (1897–1992) “produced” this material (through recording, assembling, organizing, categorizing, annotating, writing and publishing)  between 1919 and 1934 when he was a civil servant of the Dutch colonial administration in the Dutch East Indies. Through this work and his excellent international networking skills, Jaap Kunst continues to be regarded as a “founding father” of the discipline of ethnomusicology: Kunst’s methodological approaches were adopted in virtually the entire Anglophone academic world. His Collection is, therefore, one of the richest and well-known ethnographic collections worldwide, pertaining to the history of Indonesia, the performance cultures of Indonesia, colonial history, and the history of science (anthropology and ethnomusicology.

PhD Programme

This project offers one (1) fully funded PhD position in sound heritage studies at UGM with the following

Supervisory Team:

• Supervisor: Dr. Sri Margana (UGM)
• Co-Supervisor: Dr. B. (Barbara) Titus (UvA) and Dr. M.J. (meLê) Yamomo (UvA)

Candidate Responsibilities:

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