Dr. Lai's interdisciplinary research ranges from Hong Kong protest sound to Cantopop and Sinophone pop aesthetics, and performed vocalities in interspecies and interpersonal communications. Her cutting-edge intermedial methods integrate ethnographic materials with historical archives and engage critical theoretical frameworks. Broadly speaking, Dr. Lai works at the intersection of sound, auralities, and power to grapple with questions about why sound matters and how the sonic and listening are lived in everyday situations. She has published in Ethnomusicology, Openwork, and Hong Kong Studies. She is completing a multimodal monograph, provisionally entitled Unsounding Hong Kong: From Protest to Silence, which theorizes the dynamics of sound in Hong Kong's urban spaces where pro-democracy protests once took place and have since disappeared, as well as the sonic and affective currents circulating through the Hong Kong diaspora and transnational protest movements.
Dr. Lai is the recipient of the Diego Carpitella Scholarship for Audiovisual Ethnography in Intercultural Music Studies (2026), the SEM Crossroads Section's Social Justice Paper Prize (2026), the James T. Koetting Prize (2024), the SEM 21st Century Fellowship (2023), the Penn Price Lab Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2022-2023), the Penfield Research Award (2022), Tarnopol Graduate Fellowship (2020-2021), an Honorable Mention for the Charles Seeger Prize (2021), and Benjamin Franklin Fellowship (2018-2024). She has delivered presentations at leading national and international conferences and institutions, including recent talks at Harvard (2023), UBC (2023), Cambridge (2025), Helsinki (2025), Stanford (2025), Emory (2025), Dartmouth (2024, 2025, 2026), Princeton (2026), Penn (2026), UNC-Chapel Hill (2026), New York University (2026), and MIT (2026).
Being born and raised in Hong Kong, the city's 2014 Umbrella Movement was a turning point that reoriented Dr. Lai's life from becoming a fledgling singer-songwriter (winner of the Best Music Video Award from Sony Music Entertainment Hong Kong in 2013) to a junior music and sound scholar working on protest sounds. She graduated from an M.Phil. in musicology at HKU with a thesis entitled "Sound and Nonviolence: Music as Political Action in Hong Kong" (2017). That metamorphosis has evolved into Dr. Lai's academic and personal mission—to be a candid sound scholar and being. In addition to her ongoing intermedial productions and research on power dynamics in (un)sounding social spheres, Dr. Lai is rebuilding her interests as a scholar-performer, concentrating on Sinophone and East Asian R&B and pop music and Cantopop.
At Dartmouth College, Dr. Lai taught a new course titled A Critical Inquiry of Sound: Experimental Ethnographic Field Methods in Fall 2025. She was honored to receive a nomination for the Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students (2021). From 2014 to 2021, as a teaching assistant at the University of Hong Kong and subsequently an instructor in music at Penn, Dr. Lai taught courses ranging from global popular music, opera, world musics and cultures, jazz music history and appreciation, western music history, to two Common Core courses covering multiple musical topics for classes composed primarily of non-music majors.
Dr. Lai is currently serving as the Co-Chair (2024-26) of the Sound Studies Section and the Secretary (2026-27) of the Northeast Chapter at the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Secretary-Treasurer (2025-27) and Chapter Leadership Committee (2026-27) of the New England Chapter at the American Musicological Society.
Permanent email: winniemusicology@gmail.com