My work is animated by the basic media-theoretical claim, that aesthetic operations and technical procedures in their historical and cultural specificity take priority over the concepts and categories that are commonly taken to be fundamental. This justifies and necessitates a rigorous analysis of practices and techniques which make up aesthetic milieus thus avoiding a line of reasoning that starts from universal claims about music, listening or the body.

My research connects performance and sound scholarship with ideas from Theravāda Buddhist thought, German media philosophy, aesthetic theory and phenomenology. It combines three significant strands of inquiry: a new concern with the conceptual entity of “the human” as it comes up in aesthetic practices and theories, the relation between empirical procedures and concepts, and an interest in cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken) of dramatic staging and religious ritual. In my first book I have explored these concerns in a study of the development of Burmese musical drama (pyazat) from the royal patronage of the nineteenth century until the present.