Diasporic Instrument Ecology: Reworlding Sound
Tamara Yadao
Abstract
As systems thinking increasingly engages frameworks of complexity, relationality, and co-creation, this proposal introduces Diasporic Instrument Ecology (DIE) as a framework for examining systems structured by diasporic conditions of displacement, understood not as geographic dislocation but as a mode of relation operating across temporal, material, performative, and relational dimensions.
Through a case study pairing a Nintendo Game Boy (DMG-01) with a sarunay (Filipino metallophone gong), this article examines a structurally diasporic system in which persistent difference is not an obstacle to co-creation but a condition that generates emergent sonic behaviors. By reorienting systems thinking beyond models grounded primarily in control and optimization, DIE proposes a relational architecture in which difference is not treated as a deviation to be resolved, but as a generative condition through which sonic relations emerge and the distribution of agency within the system continually shifts.
Paper Description
What is an instrument? Or how do instrument relations change what an instrument is?
An instrument system’s agency within an ecology is persistently different. By respecting this difference, multiple instruments can reach ecological coexistence through relations that produce sonic emergence. The two main instruments of my current investigations using the DIE framework are my case study.
These opening questions emerged from the physical encounter between two instrument systems:
A gray and textured plastic reflecting dramatic kelvins in orange off the surface of this handheld gaming device. Metal plates strung together with hardware heavy plastic twine. The places where the twine was cut are unraveling as they struggle to hold a knot on a hook screwed into the side of a wooden frame (a handmade stand for the metallophonic plates) a dimensional black line extends into the vanishing point point of space in this case a negatively white space. Our question now is: To where exactly does this black line extend?
I originally started working with kulintang and sarunay (traditional Filipino gong instruments) and studying with percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra because I wanted to engage with my heritage musically. I applied for an Asian Cultural Council research fellowship to study the work of Filipino experimental composer José Maceda, whose explorations of recursive ensemble structures, distributed musical organization, and non-teleological composition contributed in large part to my thinking about relational sonic systems.
When I arrived in the Philippines on a research grant from the Asian Cultural Council this past February 2026, I had a conversation with sound artist and professor Dayang Yraola about whether or not my practice was diasporic and sustainable because of it. So I started thinking about what diaspora really means in relation to my two main instruments at this point in my practice: sarunay and game boy. (Before I knew about the work of José Maceda, I developed a practice writing experimental Game Boy music in 2011, transmitting Game Boy audio through boomboxes in spatialized performance experiments. I began studying sarunay within kulintang traditions ten years later.) I developed the notion of diasporic media carriers first — thinking about the cultural and historical implications these instruments carry across history and geography, aligned with the traditional use of the word diaspora. Representation explains what instruments carry; DIE asks what those carriers do when they enter into ecological relation. As a result, I started thinking about how much of my chip music was interpreted within a retro nostalgic context, which I felt was not the right framing as my work is not chiptune or genre-oriented. Then I thought about hearing the sound of these two instruments in a room, not integrated by musical conventions of pitch, timbre, melody, texture or any other traditional musical framing. Thinking about how their individual sounds could affect the other, as if in a form of media consecration. How would this change the instrument’s meaning? Would its semiotic coding shift through a new relational context? This ontological question led me to joining the word diasporic with instrument ecology. The term diasporic within DIE describes a structural condition rather than an identity category. While this formulation is informed by Édouard Glissant’s conception of Relation, I extend this relational ontology into a systems framework in which heterogeneous entities may enter into relation while maintaining their differences. DIE develops this approach through four dimensions: temporal, material, performative, and relational. These diasporic dimensions are informed by interdisciplinary dialogues with media archaeology, new materialist theory, Philippine experimental music practices, relational ontology, and expanded approaches to systems thinking. Additionally, by the structural logic of diaspora, I began to think of my instruments as media carriers, not necessarily transmitting historical pasts, but carrying material, time and organizational conditions that become newly relational when placed side by side. Rather than becoming a single unified system, their intrinsic or persistent differences remain active forces that shape new forms of sonic interaction and emergence.
Selected References
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Butocan, Aga Mayo. Palabunibunyan: A Repertoire of Musical Pieces for the Maguindanaon Kulintangan. Edited by Felicidad A. Prudente. Manila: Philippine Women’s University, 1987.
Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Edited by Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Maceda, José. “A Concept of Time by a Music Composer in Southeast Asia.” Ethnomusicology Vol. 30, no. 1, Winter, pp. 11–53, 1986.
Maceda, José. Gongs and Bamboos: A Panorama of Philippine Music Instruments. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1998.
Paredes, Alyssa, and Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio. Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments behind Filipino Food. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, ed. 2025.
Author Bio
Tamara Yadao is a Filipino‑American composer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist whose work practice explores experimental sound, Philippine experimental music practices, and repurposed technologies. Beginning piano at the age of four, she developed a lyrical, baroque‑inflected style that later expanded into experimental pop explorations and ambient soundscapes using Game Boys, game consoles, electronics, synths, and vocals.
A Brooklynite at the turn of the 21st century, Yadao immersed herself in the borough’s conceptual art and music community, performing freely improvised sound with laptop‑processed guitars, toys, and radio transmission, while organizing DIY shows in galleries and alternative spaces. During this period, she cultivated a fascination with vintage game console sound chips, reimagining hardware and software through inventive misuse — a form of conceptual repurposing that challenges intended technological and conceptual functions.
Through her chip music project Corset Lore and the game art duo foci + loci, which she co‑founded with Chris Burke in 2010, she has been both creating multi‑layered sound worlds shaped by experimental and underground music paradigms. Among others, she has presented her work internationally at MoMA PS1 (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), including the Rethinking Affordances symposium in 2018.
She has spoken about virtual instrument design at Dartmouth College and at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City. She has also received an American Composers Forum grant and an Individual Artist grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, a foundation that informs her interdisciplinary approach and ongoing exploration of experimental sound and music. Yadao is currently supported by an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in Philippine ethnomusicology, studying José Maceda’s research at UP Diliman on kulintang music, further deepening her exploration of relational sonic systems, adaptive approaches to composition, and emergent sonic practices.