This paper argues that fieldwork recordings can and should be more than archival artifacts, serving also as media for relationship-building and knowledge production. Drawing on the research project “Lanyu’s Swan Song (蘭嶼絕唱),” this paper focuses on its relational, place-based collaboration with the Tao community that supports community members’ “researching back” to reclaim authority over knowledge production and representation. Following Beverley Diamond’s call to understand musical practice as theory (Diamond 2007; 2011), this paper examines how Tao singing articulates and enacts sound relations among human and more-than-human beings, grounding Tao ways of being, knowing, and doing while challenging dominant epistemologies of environment and the human-nature divide. Through co-presented, participatory workshops and facilitated discussions with community members, we collaboratively unpack sound relations and reconstruct Tao knowledge through re-examining Véronique Arnaud’s recordings. In doing so, we contend that this project moves beyond a scholarly response to cultural sustainability to actively advance community self-determination. This paper concludes by proposing ethnomusicology as a node of connectivity linking communities, academia, archives, and institutions, and by providing practical modes of inclusive, ethical partnerships that foreground the idiosyncratic researcher-community relationship shaping the work.