Lectures in Music Studies: YuHao Chen, The Ohio State University

YuHao Chen, Global Arts + Humanities postdoctoral fellow at the Ohio State University, presents “Tracing Sino-Phonography: A Perspective from Sound Studies and Disability History.”

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, western missionaries played a central role in recording Chinese word-sounds in phonetic writing. As traditional Chinese writing challenged western script models, early missionaries turned to the Latin alphabet to phonetically transcribe the local language and disseminate Christian literature. Starting in the 1870s, however, missionaries in China began drawing on unconventional script designs — such as visible speech, phonetic manual, braille code, and shorthand writing — for expediency and accessibility. These new transcriptions — what I call “assistive scripts” — enabled missionaries to cultivate literacy among people with disabilities. By implementing assistive scripts in disability and hospital settings, these missionaries contributed to the emerging field of special education while advancing their evangelical mission.

This talk explores these little-known script experimentations in Protestant China to surface an idiosyncratic history of sound recording. Unlike the phonograph — a paradigmatic recording/playback device invented in the 1870s — the assistive scripts from the same era did not privilege audio perception alone. They dwelled in the messiness of bodily experience, enabling readers with sensory impairments to apprehend spoken sounds on the page through multimodal designs. At the same time, this expansion of orthographic choices coincided with the proliferation of “phonography” in the West, which aspired to capture real-time speech in an automatic fashion. By conjoining “sino-“ and “phonography” in this talk, the speaker examines how missionaries transcribed Chinese sounds within a disability-focused textual economy. Drawing on sound studies, disability history, media archaeology, and histories of missionary linguistics, this research illuminates an intimacy between sound-writing and the conversion of the Word to flesh. 

YuHao Chen is a Global Arts + Humanities postdoctoral fellow at The Ohio State University. He writes about historical sound media, and his recent work has appeared in Resonance. He is working on a book, Phonographic Conversion, about the role of sound-writing and automaticity in 19th-century disability education. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Pitt Humanities Center and Asian Studies Center, Northeast Modern Language Association, Association for Asian Studies, and American Musicological Society. He holds a PhD in music from the University of Pittsburgh.