Introduction

To the celebrated humanist geographer, Yi-fu Tuan, music is valuable to both geography and humanity for expressing our experience of place, and for ‘making public our innermost feelings’. In contrast, the many studies of music and place from within ethnomusicology and elsewhere in the humanities have tended to consider the significance of the connection through investigating how music gives expression to, or is influenced by, place. Given the many and diverse links between music, sound, and place, the can find no reason to impose an overarching theory, hence we traverse wide and divergent spaces, utilizing ethnographic data and narratives. The notion of gathering and the resultant dynamism can provide helpful ways of thinking about how place interweaves with the many cultural flows of East Asia, pulling in certain directions at certain times, and emphasizing certain aspects in the particular contexts.