Paper short abstract:

TikTok's Sound feature shapes a unique musical landscape, enabling users to navigate cultural boundaries and enact complex identities. This paper explores how Ethiopian-Israeli youth employ Sounds and music to convey nuanced cultural negotiations through embodied and interrelated musicalities.

Paper long abstract:

On TikTok, the Sound feature emerges as a catalyst for user interaction, shaping an innovative musical landscape. Users can select pre-existing Sounds, or craft their own, which then become available for others in their creations. In doing so, they lean on music to create and share TikTok videos, mostly through set dance challenges, lip syncs or gestures, participating in an embodied, mimetic and interrelated form of musicality. While the dominance of global Sound trends implies a homogenised cultural expression that is largely shaped by mass media, users will in fact strategically employ them to navigate niche digital spaces and ever-changing cultural boundaries. In Esther Neurim Youth Village, a boarding school in Israel for students of low socio-economic backgrounds and immigrant families, youth make TikTok videos on a daily basis, creating multifaceted audiovisual narratives that hinge on elements of their identity, from immigration and integration to their relationship with their birth country and national identification.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as an extended digital ethnography, this paper will will reveal how these youth utilise Sound trends on Tiktok as a form of alternative musical physcality, that traverses the behavioural and performative to convey complex cosmopolitan identities and positioning. In doing so, It will show how these youths participate in a curated selection of popular trends through which they negotiate an evolving relationship with their peers, their diasporic identity, and Israel’s state structure and integration strategies.