The significance of Kam (in Chinese, Dong 侗) big song, the choral song genre inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, frequently features in Chinese language descriptions of this and other Kam song genres. These descriptions, apparently translations from Kam, state that “rice feeds the body, song
feeds the heart” (fan yang shen, ge yang xin 饭养身,歌养心), suggesting that Kam people view singing Kam songs as being as integral to their wellbeing as eating rice, their main staple food. From this perspective, sustaining Kam singing should be focussed mainly on ensuring suitable local employment, education and healthcare, presuming that provision of
the various conditions which allow Kam people to maintain close community contacts would naturally lead to Kam song genres being maintained. However, my recent return visit to a major Kam tourist area, following intermittent fieldwork in Kam villages over more than two
decades, revealed that its incredible advances in economic capital were not sufficient to adequately sustain all aspects of Kam musical culture. At the same time, the resurgent interest in big song singing that emerged in some other Kam villages around 20 years ago was waning, apparently because some people felt miar (“bored”) – despite singing having brought important social change and being increasingly featured in virtual spaces.

In this paper, I present an ethnographic exploration of the nature and impact of boredom in big song singing by adopting the three analytical approaches proposed by Merrill and Niedecken in their 2023 study of boredom and music. These areas – the influence of the stimulus, the “frame” (from Goffman 1974), and the person – allow new perspectives on Kam singing, and are important in developing new strategies for sustaining traditional musical cultures in contemporary society.