Mouth Harps: Palmer Keen, Alex Iorga

This episode of The Sonic Turn podcast turns to the resonant yet over-determined world of mouth harps — small instruments burdened not only with history, but with dense layers of contemporary meaning.

In many contemporary contexts, the instrument is framed through a loose but persistent assemblage of narratives about self-discovery, vibrational awareness, and altered consciousness. Within this framework, the mouth harp is less a musical object and more a generalized technology of introspection. Cultural specificity dissolves into universalized claims about resonance; historical practice gives way to experiential authenticity. The instrument is not learned so much as activated, and its social, material, and technical conditions of existence are largely effaced.

Ethnomusicological research presents a markedly different picture. In the study “The drymba among the Hutsul in the Ukrainian Carpathians: a recent ethnomusicological survey”, the authors describe the drymba as a continuously produced and practiced instrument, embedded in everyday life, local economies, and regional identity. Rather than serving as a conduit for transcendence, the drymba appears as a “traditional local fabrication,” sustained through situated forms of knowledge, craftsmanship, and circulation. Meaning here is not abstracted inward, but distributed socially and materially.

Sound itself plays a crucial role in this distribution. One of the most striking aspects of the mouth harps is how radically its sound changes depending on where it is played. Indoors, the instrument enters into a tight acoustic relationship with walls, ceilings, and enclosed volumes. Reflections, reverberation, and standing waves thicken the sound, amplifying its metallic overtones and producing a sense of sonic intimacy — the drâmbă seems to fold back onto the body of the player. Outdoors, by contrast, the sound disperses. Without reflective surfaces, the instrument loses density but gains directionality; its vibrations travel outward, thinning as they move through open space. From a sound-studies perspective, this demonstrates that sound is not an autonomous property of the instrument but a relational phenomenon, shaped by spatial configurations, material boundaries, and modes of circulation. As scholars of acoustic space have shown, sound behaves differently in bounded environments than in open ones: it accumulates, resonates, and returns indoors, while outdoors it diffuses, attenuates, and becomes part of a wider sonic ecology. The drâmbă thus does not merely produce sound — it negotiates space, revealing how listening is always situated, and how instruments are inseparable from the environments in which they are heard.

In this episode of The Sonic Turn Podcast, I approach the mouth harp through two conversations that help relocate it within broader analytical frames.

The first is with Palmer Keen, founder of Aural Archipelago, an independent initiative documenting rare and often endangered musical instruments from Indonesia and across Asia. Our conversation focuses on documentation, circulation, and the politics of representation — and on how certain instruments become exoticized while others remain stubbornly ordinary.

The second conversation is with Alex Iorga, my professor of anthropology from the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Bucharest. Together, we reflect on how objects like the drâmbă become entangled in regimes of meaning — oscillating between heritage, subculture, academia, and contemporary sound practices — and on how to analytically resist their reduction to experience alone.

From the Carpathian Mountains to festival fields, from enclosed rooms to open landscapes, this episode is an attempt to listen critically — not only to sound, but to the spaces and discourses that shape it.