Tyler Yamin

Tyler Yamin (he/him) is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of music and sound studies, feminist science & technology studies, multispecies ethnography, and the environmental humanities. Exploring the relationship between sound and survival during our contemporary moment of social and ecological precarity, Dr. Yamin’s research considers how musical and sonic concepts inspire both liberation and oppression in the context of cultural and environmental sustainability projects. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among severely endangered, singing apes called gibbons and the human beings caring for them in captivity, considering how the acoustic shapes the ethical and political stakes of preventing an animal species’ extinction. Dr. Yamin has also worked for over a decade with a community of musicians in Bali, Indonesia, who have fought to reconstruct and maintain their sacred gamelan tradition against a century of social, political, and environmental upheaval. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Sound Studies, and Environmental Humanities, and he received major recognitions from both the Society for Ethnomusicology (21st Century Prize, 2019) and the International Council for Music and Dance Traditions (Best Article Prize, 2020).

Dr. Yamin received his PhD from UCLA in 2022, and taught at Colby College before joining the Bucknell University Music Department. At Bucknell, he teaches classes that consider various intersections of music, sound, and society, exploring both traditional forms of music making from around the world and music’s place in contemporary developments such as environmental crisis. His courses emphasize experiential learning, and in past semesters his students have curated public museum exhibitions and soundscape installations, constructed their own musical instruments, and even worked with a local metalsmith to 3d-print and then cast their own working bells out of molten bronze. Committed to advising student research, his students regularly present at regional ethnomusicology conferences and have won a range of prizes including Best Undergraduate Student Paper (2024, 2025) and an honorable mention for Best Graduate Student Paper (2025).

Dr. Yamin also directs the Bucknell University Gamelan, a music ensemble open to the entire campus community that studies and performs traditional and contemporary Indonesian music (specifically from Bali and Java, utilizing Bucknell’s collection of Balinese and Javanese instruments). A recent semester culminated in the presentation of an original wayang kulit (shadow puppet play) that combined a traditional Balinese mythological story with puppets designed in collaboration with students and faculty in the Environmental Engineering department (watch an excerpt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqjIyI2LTc0&lis...

Recent Publications:

2025a. “‘Like Roosters on Steroids’: Sounding out ‘Sonic NIMBYism’ in Central California.” American Music Review54. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/american-...

2025b. “Tuning Species: Gibbon Conservation and the Acoustemological Politics of Vitality.” Ethnomusicology 69(2): 151–176.

2025c. “‘Sounds Like’ Redemption? On the Musicality of Species and the Species of Musicality,” co-authored with Alice Rudge. Environmental Humanities 17(1): 65–87.

2024a. “The Cålåpitå past the ‘Dull Edge’ of Extinction: A Shaggy Dog Story of Repatriation and Refusal in Bali.” In Instrumental Lives: Musical Instruments, Material Culture, and Social Networks in East and Southeast Asia, edited by Helen Rees, 52–80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

2024b. “Listening through Partitions: Ethnomusicology’s Immunological Paradigm.” Sound Studies 10(1): 138-144.

2019. “One or Several Gamelan? Perpetual (Re)construction in the Life of a Balinese Gamelan Semara Pagulingan.” Ethnomusicology 63(3): 357–392. Awarded the 2020 Best Article Prize, International Council for Traditional Music (now International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance).