In Tao tradition, singing is a rich medium of remembering and recreating lived moments that enacts social relations and anchors community values. This richness, however, complicates and presents significant challenges for cross-cultural translation and transcultural interpretation. Drawing on Véronique Arnaud’s fieldwork recordings, the project develops a dialogic method that balances deeply engaged community knowledge with communicability across languages and cultures. Through co-listening and reinterpretation sessions, we move beyond literal lyric translation by providing contextual and performative layers and situating songs within historical and cultural frames that are often inaccessible to outsiders. We furthermore attempt to unpack the Tao song poetry by exploring cultural idioms and analyzing textual-sonic relationships. By foregrounding the deep cultural knowledge required to understand Tao song poetry, we argue that this project not only reclaims Tao authorship of history but also resocializes archival sound in community life, resounding the past within contemporary ethnomusicological practice.