This panel introduces “Lanyu’s Swan Song (蘭嶼絕唱),” a research project supported by the Taiwan Music Institute, which investigates historical recordings of the Tao people on Lanyu (Orchid Island) and explores how the decolonizing of ethnographic audiovisual archives can resocialize sonic memory in community life. Drawing on recordings of traditional Tao songs housed at CREM (Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie)—collected between the 1970s and 2000s by French anthropologist Véronique Arnaud—this project engages in selection, translation, reinterpretation, musical transcription and analysis, in collaboration with community members, to unpack the traditional knowledge embedded in these materials. We further produce annotated translations and contextual notes for teaching and community advocacy. Rather than treating the archive as a static repository of loss, the project reconceives it as a living site of encounter—where listening to the past becomes an act of cultural renewal.

Lin’s paper provides an overview of the project’s aims and objectives; Chiang presents the theoretical and methodological frameworks underpinning the study; Kuo addresses the challenges of cross-cultural translation and transcultural interpretation, foregrounding the complexity and poetics of Tao song poetry and the traditional knowledge it embodies. Together, this panel examines how decolonizing the sound archive can support Indigenous communities in reasserting authorship of their histories and the re-embedding archival sound in contemporary Tao life.