About the Journal

Ethnosonic Journal is an interdisciplinary scholarly journal focusing on sound, music, and listening practices in social and cultural life. The journal aims to advance understanding of how communities produce, interpret, use, and transmit sound, and how these practices shape knowledge, identities, social relationships, and experiences of space.

The journal brings together ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, linguistics, education, media studies, geography, environmental studies, architecture, psychology, disability studies, philosophy, aesthetics, acoustics, organology, and art and performance studies. This interdisciplinary engagement connects the material properties of sound with human experience and cultural contexts, generating empirical findings, conceptual insights, and methodological approaches that deepen understanding of sonic life.

The journal’s scope includes:

  1. Music and sound in ritual, performance, work, and everyday life.

  2. Musical knowledge, oral traditions, and the learning and transmission of skills.

  3. Organology and musical acoustics, including instruments, making practices, material culture, and relationships between sonic characteristics, bodies, cultural knowledge, and aesthetics.

  4. Sonic environments, listening practices, spatial experiences, and ecological change.

  5. Sound in the formation of identities, social relationships, religion, and power.

  6. Histories of music and sound, recordings, archives, memory, and cultural heritage.

  7. Voice, language, vocal expression, perception, and sensory experience.

  8. Media, audio technologies, digital cultures, and changes in the production and circulation of sound.

  9. Sound art, creative practice, and practice based research addressing social and cultural questions.

Ethnosonic Journal welcomes empirical, theoretical, and methodological research articles, critical reviews, and practice based research. The journal is open to diverse geographical contexts and historical periods, including studies of rural, urban, Indigenous, diasporic, and digital communities.

Contributions are expected to move beyond description by developing explanations, concepts, or methods that clarify how sonic knowledge is formed, how meanings are negotiated, and how practices change. Findings may also inform education, archiving, instrument development, the management of sonic environments, and cultural policy. Technical research, musical analysis, and educational studies fall within the journal’s scope when they demonstrate a substantive connection to social or cultural contexts.