Pierre Prouteau [Project Partner]
Pierre Prouteau, young ethnomusicologist and anthropologist of sound, is interested in the effects of music, sound, and technologies that mediated it on individuals and societies. His PhD thesis, defended in 2021, and entitled “Buddhism, Bodies and Machines – the Sound Systems of Thailand” (Nanterre/EHESS, GIS Asia Thesis Award in 2022), analyses the potential and impacts of sound systems on humans and non-humans in Thailand in political, poetical, and aesthetical terms. Fieldwork ethnographer and Thai-Lao languages specialist, he pursues an engaged research on the relationship between sound, technologies, and intense forms of the collective. He is the author of “The Dual Fate of the Twin Horns – from United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processionnal bands’ sound system (Thailand)” (in Asian Sound Cultures – Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology, Routledge).
A postdoctoral candidate in the EU-funded project DeCoSEAS (Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives, 2021-2024), he works on putting music database online, formulating a critical approach to colonial sound archives, and podcast production. He also focuses on his own research on sound, interrogating its relationship with technologies and space, in territories and virtual spaces, both digital and utopian.