This panel explores the implications of commodifying, commercializing, and/or secularizing sacred sounds. Presentations on Buddhist electronic music of the Awakening Music Festival in Taiwan, as well as the contemporary praise and worship music of megachurches in São Paulo, Brazil and the Christian worship music of Hong Kong, uncover the ways in which sacred musics in modernity, with its concomitant, commercialization, globalization and musicoloniality, affect religious music and practice.
In the global study of "Worship Wars," congregational conflicts typically center on musical genre and theology. This paper argues that in Hong Kong, this conflict is fought on a fiercely linguistic-aesthetic battlefield, where the demand for in-tone singing functions as an "aesthetic bullet." Reflecting the musicological principle of Hip-wan (協韻), Cantonese,a language with six contrastive lexical tones,requires a strict relational manifestation of tone to maintain the speech-melody complex. Misalignment distorts sacred meaning, allowing factions to weaponize acoustic integrity: progressives critique "out-of-tone" hymns as archaic, and disconnected from local belonging, while traditionalists attack "in-tone" CCM aesthetic as secularized . This study analyzes how acoustic integrity, “in-tone” aesthetics operate within Mandarin worship hegemonies, local music economies, and global diasporic migrations. Ultimately, in-tone practice transcends musical preference; these "bullets" exert tangible political influence by fortifying acoustic resistance against cultural assimilation, articulating a resilient, post-secular Hong Kong Christian aesthetic and identity.
This paper examines how Buddhist electronic music in Taiwan has become a site for reworking Buddhist modernism. Focusing on the Awakening Music Festival, a Buddhist electronic music festival in Taiwan, I argue that the event does more than reframe “tradition” for the present. Instead, it stages new relations between chanting, electronic sound, and collective listening. From ethnographic research, I analyze how the festival creates a shared sonic space in which religious and secular participants engage the performances through different modes of attention and embodiment. Drawing on Charles Hirschkind’s approach to moral listening and Tara Rodgers’ account of synthesis, I suggest that these contemporary music practices can be part of how devotional experience is produced. By placing Buddhist sonorities within festival infrastructure, club aesthetics, and translocal networks, the paper argues that Buddhist contemporary music in Taiwan offers a useful lens for understanding Buddhist modernism as an emergent and experimental formation.
In this paper, I argue that Contemporary Praise and Worship Music (CPWM) sounds in Brazil function as a form of sonic occupation. Leaning on ethnographic data collected in three megachurches in São Paulo, Brazil, I demonstrate how CPWM sounds participate in constructing a colonial ear in six ways: (1) the disciplining of vocal expressiveness, (2) the (dis)embodied formation of timbre, (3) sacrotechnotimbre as an aspiration to modernity, (4) masculinizing worship sounds, (5) the deterritorialization of the sonic realm, and (6) the commodification of tones in worship. Interpreting these practices through decolonial frameworks of musicoloniality, cosmophobia, and hungry listening, I argue that CPWM soundscapes produce an aesthetic of hyperculture—the detachment of culture from place, history, and land, as described (Han 2021)— that deterritorializes listening environments and detaches listeners from localized cosmologies and land.