In contemporary East Asian music, the fusion of traditional music with electronic sound or Western idioms has often provoked critical debates about cultural appropriation and technological dominance—what some scholars describe as the “absorption of tradition into Western technological discourse and the consumption of cultural identity as an object of empire.” Aware of these tensions, a number of composers have sought to transcend the physical and sonic limitations of traditional instruments through technological reinvention. This study examines the intercultural electroacoustic works of Jin Hi Kim (b. 1957) and Miya Masaoka (b. 1958)—Asian American diasporic composer-performers and Mills College alumni—focusing on Kim’s digital Buddha (2003) and Masaoka’s Laser Koto (2006).

Kim’s digital Buddha, dedicated to video artist Nam June Paik, reinterprets the meditative tradition of Korean Buddhism through the electronic geomungo, a computer-linked version of a fourth-century Korean zither that generates new sonic and aesthetic possibilities. Masaoka’s Laser Koto transforms the Japanese koto into a gestural interface, replacing physical strings with laser beams that trigger sampled and processed sounds. By extending the instrument’s traditional timbral and performative range, Masaoka foregrounds the embodied relationship between sound, gesture, and identity. Unlike Masaoka, Kim preserves traditional performing techniques and integrates them seamlessly into contemporary electronic spaces.

Through musical and literary analysis, as well as ethnographic inquiry, I argue that these works embody decolonial art practices that spatially and digitally expand traditional sound worlds while reconfiguring the relationships between body, race, and technology. Both composers, as diasporic Asian American women, employ technological craftsmanship to challenge gendered and racial hierarchies in instrument-making and composition. Their works reclaim East Asian artistic narratives often marginalized in Western discourse but also contribute to broader debates on cultural appropriation and hybridity, diaspora, and the aesthetics of intercultural creation in twenty-first-century global electronic music.