The greater part of this book was written during travel in South-East Asia—mainly in Hanoi, in Kuala Lumpur, and in Amino, on the Kyotango peninsula in Japan.^[1] The Hanoian auditory panorama given above, from Mai Dich in the northwest end, is typical of what R. Murray Schafer (1969) calls a lo-fi soundscape. Everyone needs to raise their voices in the soundscape of this rapidly transforming metropolis. The acoustic calls of street vendors, advertised and romanticised by travel agencies, are becoming increasingly rare, as they are being replaced by pre-recorded calls, played back on horn speakers that better compete with the surrounding noise. Or, as noted by Trịnh Minh-ha, “Change is inscribed in noise, and as a reflection of power, the control of noise remains fundamentally political” (2011, 92). But these street vendors are not just losing the competition for attention in the streets. As rural–urban migrant workers struggling to manage their lives and to feed their families, who remain in poor villages in the countryside, they also embody the otherness of the migrant and the fragility that comes with it.^[2] True listening is always political. The political dimensions of a musician’s listening are intrinsically embedded in an embodied and situated understanding of musical practice. ^[3] A thin Vietnamese woman bikes through the neighbourhood projecting announcements, paradoxically with a pre-recorded male voice drawing attention to her goods or services. But these voices, transformed by technology and the struggle to make oneself heard in one of the noisiest cities in the world, also resonate with my memories of the interviews with street vendors that I made with my Vietnamese group The Six Tones in 2014 and 2015, collecting material for the music theatre project Arrival Cities: Hanoi.^[4]

[1] I stayed in Amino in the house of Hiromi Miyakita and Akio Suzuki, and I would here like to thank them for their kind hospitality and enduring friendship.

[2] In Östersjö and Nguyễn (2016), I discuss the political dimension of the technologies that produce noise in the city soundscape of Hanoi.

[3] The political implications of listening in intercultural collaboration are discussed in several previous publications, such as Östersjö and Nguyễn (2017) and Nguyễn and Östersjö (2019, 284).

[4] I discuss the making of this piece of experimental music theatre in a joint chapter with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy (Nguyễn and Östersjö 2019), which serves as a parallel narrative to the analysis in chapter five, below. Although Arrival Cities: Hanoi is a more implicitly political artistic project, the artistic processes of intercultural exchange—or of transculturation, as discussed later on in the present book—are in themselves political.

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Why do we care so much about working with this material for our current purposes, which involve anticipating alternative futures? That was absolutely at the heart of a critical Romantic project at the end of the eighteenth century, I would say. You can look at Marx as a critical Romantic philosopher and you can look also at those whole political movements that are reworking an understanding of, for example, the Roman state, the res publica—this is an active reworking to current political purpose, anticipating better futures. So this critical Romanticism that takes the past and reworks it without necessarily representing—that is, in the sense of describing, without re-enacting—¹ creative reworking, revisiting.