Hearing Is Smelling Is Tasting Is Knowing

Music Analysis and Sensing Otherwise

Bibliographic Data

ID8924937
AuthorsAnna Yu Wang (0009-0007-4181-3525, Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume70
Issue1
Pages140-166
Publication date2026-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnomusicology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1836 • E-ISSN: 2156-7417
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/21567417.70.1.08
OpenAlexW7139084323
LanguageEN
References cited36

This article probes the relationship between hearing and knowledge-making in Sinophone thought by examining linguistic, iconographic, and ethnographic representations of aurality. Hearing emerges not only as a privileged epistemic pathway but also as part of a larger sensory complex in which hearing, smelling, and tasting are coextensive sensations. I further argue that this hearing-smelling-tasting sensory complex activates a pronounced attunement to things that are changing and porous—qualities that also animate the thinking of generations of Sinophone literati in their quest to theorize the order of the cosmos. This meditation on Sinitic aurality leads, in the second part of the article, to a more general argument: that to sense the world is already to have taken a position on how best to make sense of—and to know—the world. Building on sensory scholarship, I develop the view that the way we make our way around the world is filtered through a socially constructed alignment between sensorial and epistemic orientations, or “sensibility.” The final part of the article contends with how the meaning and priorities of music analysis, as an activity contingent on multitudinous definitions of “hearing,” must open up in order to reflect a global landscape of sensibilities

Attunement · Ethnography · Frame (networking · Meaning (existential · Meditation · Order (exchange · Sensory system · Chinese history and philosophy · Sound Studies and Aurality · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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