HUB OF TALENTS :
MUSIC AS SOCIAL INNOVATION
The Journey and the Invitation
Over more than a year, the Music as Social Innovation project has brought together panel discussions, workshops, and presentations across multiple sites — at the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music, the Faculty of Education at Chulalongkorn University, and the Thailand Research Expo — drawing participants from many disciplines and many places, from Bangkok to Chiang Rai, Yala, and beyond.
Each gathering moved through three axes of inquiry. Music Makes Senses explored what happens when music works across disciplines and across the senses. Music Makes Changes brought music into the most demanding social contexts. Music Makes Humanity asked what kind of person music might help to form. These three did not operate separately. They supported one another, the way the elements of a piece of music hold each other together.
What is recorded here is one path of a journey still underway. Across society, there are teachers, musicians, researchers, and community practitioners asking their own questions and doing their own work — each with a different voice, each held by the same conviction that music can create change. The destination they are moving toward is shared, even when the paths diverge.
This exhibition is not a conclusion. It is a trace of that journey — and an invitation to continue it. Because the sound that can change society is not any one voice alone. It is all of ours, together.
MAS Team
Music Makes Senses
Asst. Prof. Dr. Veerawat Sirivesmas (Silpakorn University)
Dr. Tawanrat Mewongukote (PGVIM)
Music Makes Changes
Assoc. Prof. Dr.Kannapa Pongponrat Chieochan (Thammasat University)
Dr. Pongthep Jitduangprem (PGVIM)
Music Makes Humanity
Asst. Prof. Dr. Dneya Utaisuk (Chulalongkorn University)
Dr. Apinporn Chaiwanichsiri (PGVIM)
Dr. Suttisan Choomwijarn (Independent Scholar)
Hub Coordinator
Asst. Prof. Dr. Anothai Nitibhon (PGVIM)
Asst. Prof. Dr. Suppabhorn Suwanpakdee (PGVIM)
Sakrapee Raktaprajit
Chamamas Kaewbuadee
Supported by
National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT)
Music Makes Humanity Session
5 June 2025 | Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Does Music Make People, or Do People Make Music?
Before asking how music shapes people, this conversation asked something prior: who, exactly, do we mean by people? The answers that emerged reached well beyond the classroom or the concert stage — toward those who have no voice of their own, those with physical or cognitive differences, and toward what lies beyond the human altogether: nature, animals, ritual. Music has never worked with only one kind of person.
Inside the classroom, the problem was not a lack of skill among teachers. It was that teachers had been trained as practitioners, then placed inside a system that needed instructors. Those who wanted to design learning that genuinely meant something had to find the gaps in the system and act within them, doing what they believed was best for the children in their care. The conversation also pressed on a quieter question: whether music in schools should belong to every child, not only those who join an ensemble.
Outside the classroom, music works in ways that do not require language. A lullaby connects mother and child before either has words for what passes between them. Sound in ritual connects people to forms of belief that resist explanation by logic alone. In these contexts, music is not a designed tool. It is something humans reach for in order to touch something deeper than notes or melody can account for.
The session did not arrive at a settled answer about how music shapes people. Instead, it returned the question to those in the room: have we ever truly designed spaces in which music can work with people of every kind? Spaces where teachers do not carry the work alone? And spaces that recognise how sound already carries meaning — long before anyone thinks to call it music?
Music Makes Humanity Session
12 June 2025 | Mini Hall, 5th Floor, Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University
Music Makes Humanity: The Practice of Listening
This conversation did not set out to answer how music shapes people — at what age, or through which system. The experiences brought into the room ranged across early childhood classrooms, non-formal learning settings, and self-directed practice. What emerged, across all of these, was not a single model but a shared observation: music's deepest work is not the teaching of notation. It is the opening of a capacity — to listen, to feel, and to discover how one exists alongside others.
Listening became the conversation's centre of gravity. Ensemble practice trains children to hear their own sound and the sounds of others at the same time. One teacher described working with autistic students, replacing verbal instruction with music — and those students not only remained in school, but performed well in examinations. Another spoke of secondary students who would not listen, until the teacher began from the music the students already loved, rather than from what the teacher intended to teach.
The teachers in this room were not technicians transferring skill. They were people who created conditions — and who embodied what they hoped to cultivate. Assessment, in this light, ought to consider the quality of those conditions: the care with which opportunities are made available. It should not be reduced to outcomes, or to medals won at competitions.
What the conversation ultimately offered was a reframing: music builds people not through excellence, but through the practice of pausing — listening, and responding to what is present around you. That capacity may be the quietest foundation of social life we have.
Music as Social Innovation: Hub Session
17 June 2025 | Thailand Research Expo
From Sound to Change
When music moves beyond the stage — into communities, across art forms, among people of many different lives — new possibilities begin to appear. The Music as Social Innovation framework grew from the conviction that music works more deeply, and more widely, than is commonly assumed. And the stronger the ecosystem that surrounds it, the further its effects can travel.
Music Makes Senses explored what happens when music works alongside other senses and disciplines. When multiple fields come together to interpret a shared experience, what emerges carries more meaning than any single field could produce alone. Music Makes Changes took that energy into real contexts: music reducing isolation, opening space for people's voices to be genuinely heard, and generating cycles of giving — where those who once received return, in time, as those who offer.
Music Makes Humanity pressed the question further: what kind of person might music help to form? The answer that emerged was not simply a skilled performer, but someone who knows how to listen, how to think, and how to live alongside others with intention. Music education, understood this way, is not primarily about technique. It is about knowing oneself, knowing others, and understanding that the most resonant sound arises from the practice of listening to one another.
This session invited those present to hold music as a process still growing, still searching — asking how far sound can reach, and in what ways it might make the world around us more worth living.
Music as Social Innovation: Hub Session
1 August 2025 | SVH Hall, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
When Music Is More Than Sound
This session reflected on how music reaches beyond its role as sound or performance. Music is a process — one that brings people back to feeling, thinking, listening, and seeing one another differently. Aesthetics, understood this way, is not entertainment. It arises when sound moves through the body and the heart together, and returns us to an understanding of ourselves. An artist, then, needs more than technique. They need to know what they wish to communicate, and with whom they are in conversation.
When listening goes deep enough, it opens space for living together. This was visible across the work shared in the session: people with hearing and visual impairments creating through vibration; teachers who changed children's understanding of what disabled people are capable of; young people in communities across different regions bringing music into the life of the places they belong to.
At the same time, music is not automatically a force for good. The same sound can build friendship or fuel hatred. The question is always who uses music, how they use it, and toward what kind of person it is trying to form. Examples stretched from teachers who open music to every child — without demanding that every note be correct — to the sound of community drumming after the pandemic, calling people back to one another.
Music, then, is not a ready-made answer to society's problems. But it can be social innovation — when it creates genuine space for listening, participation, and learning together. This session offered an invitation: to hear music not simply as sound, but as relationship. To listen not only to what is played, but to the people and the meaning that lives behind it.
Music Makes Humanity Session
23, 24 & 26 September 2025 | SVH Hall, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Music Makes Humanity Workshop
This practical workshop opened space for music teachers, students, and practitioners to reflect together on how music shapes people. The sessions moved across questions of teaching, values, and ethics; of cultivating a positive disposition toward others; of what the teacher's role might mean in an age of AI; and of the place of sound in human life.
What the workshop made visible, across all of these threads, was a shared understanding: that music is a force for forming people — not through instruction alone, but through listening, through thinking, and through the experience of growing alongside others.
Music Makes Changes Session
6 June 2025 | Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Shine a Light Where You Stand
In this conversation, music was not on a stage. It was in the lives of children who had nowhere to go after school, in places where bad news travels further than good, and in ensembles where children from hill tribe communities, different faiths, and difficult circumstances stood together without having to prove they belonged. In Chiang Rai, Yala, and Khlong Toei, music did not solve problems. It opened space — for life to have another possibility.
But the satisfaction of doing good work does not, by itself, keep the work alive. The second part of the conversation moved toward harder questions: how do you translate the value of music into a language that systems can hear? This meant grappling with data and evidence that speaks to policymakers, with the need to build local management structures that are not entirely dependent on external funding, and with the honest recognition that innovation requires room to fail and to learn — not only room to demonstrate success.
Some children are born into families and environments that hold them. Others are not. The conversation asked how society might build structures of support for the lives that have no such safety beneath them — and whether music, if properly resourced and sustained, might serve as one of those structures.
The session closed with a phrase offered by Asst. Prof. Weerasak Aksornteang: "shine a light where you stand." It was not a counsel of resignation. It was a call to do one's work as fully as possible within the space one occupies — while also ensuring that the pride, the opportunity, and the hope that music can create are communicated clearly enough for society to hear.
Music Makes Changes Session
13 June 2025 | Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Music Makes Changes Workshop
This workshop grew directly out of the preceding conversation, carrying its questions from discussion into practice. It brought together activity leaders working across four regional case studies — Udon Thani, Nakhon Pathom, Chumphon, and Chiang Mai — to exchange ideas and develop music activities designed to create meaningful social change in their own contexts.
The work centred on amplifying community voices and attending to the cultural diversity of each place and its people. Rather than arriving with ready-made programmes, participants developed music as a participatory process: a way of making space for dialogue, building understanding across differences, and giving social change a more concrete form. Thinking together, playing together, singing together — the aim was to find, in shared sound, a practice that could move something in the world.
Music Makes Senses Session
27 June 2025 | Thai and Asian Music Centre, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Where the Senses Meet
This discussion did not ask what music is. It asked how music might serve as a point of entry — a way in — for people who do not ordinarily move within the world of music. The answers did not come from musicians alone, but from a chef, a writer, a designer, and a curator, each bringing their own language into contact with sound.
Netaamphai (Chef) spoke of beginning with sour, sweet, spicy, astringent, bitter — and from there, opening toward sound and silence. She spoke of suggesting rather than explaining, because an audience may catch only part of what is offered and still find it meaningful. Complete understanding is not the condition for something to matter. Tomorn (Writer) observed that sound does not carry meaning in itself — it is people who confer meaning upon it. When arranged as music, sound can reach toward memory and vulnerability in ways that words alone cannot. The perspectives drawn from spatial practice and design approached music as one sense among many, working in concert with light, architecture, and the experience of time.
The conversation also returned to a point that carries weight beyond this room: if music and the arts are to create genuine value, that value must begin with what cannot be measured immediately — building audiences, enriching children's experience, helping people come to know their own roots and sensibilities. These come before any downstream outcome worth naming.
Music, then, is not only something performed in front of us. It is a way of organising relationships — between disciplines, between maker and receiver, between what can be felt and what resists full articulation. It invites us to listen slowly, to taste, to look, and to notice that meaning often arises precisely at the threshold where the senses and people come together.
Music Makes Senses Session
17 October 2025 | SVH Hall, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Sound as Way of Seeing
Sound as a Way of Seeing
Sound, in this workshop, was not treated as something simply heard. It was approached as a way of working with what we see, inhabit, and remember.
Lamtharn showed how AI, when trained to listen to the thang — the idiomatic pathways — of the pi, the na thap krao nai, and other Thai melodic forms, need not strip music of its cultural roots. Technology, used this way, might instead place Thai sound at the centre of contemporary practice rather than at its margins.
Santi moved sound away from the stage and into the visual. The noise of a water pump, an air conditioner, a dog — Sosu — snoring, a printer: each became a line, a letter, a trace of repetition on the page. As if an image might be made from listening just as readily as from looking.
Supitcha worked with sound alongside image and community memory, transforming abandoned buildings, markets, and riverside spaces into places people wanted to return to and take part in again.
Taken together, these practices invited a different understanding of what sound can do — not as background or atmosphere, but as a tool for reorganising relationships: between culture and technology, between design and place, and between a city and the people who might yet make it mean something.
Music as Social Innovation: Hub Session
1 February 2025 | SVH Hall, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
Music as Social Innovation
Music Speaks brought together people working with music and sound across very different fields — contemporary art, community practice, and the classroom — to share what they had learned, and to think together about what music can do when it is asked to do more than perform.
The event moved through three conversations, each corresponding to one dimension of the Music as Social Innovation framework.
Music Makes Humanity opened with the question that underlies everything else: what kind of person is music education forming? Across the sessions, music appeared not only as a set of skills to be mastered, but as a way of cultivating discipline, imagination, confidence, sensitivity, and a sense of responsibility toward others. In a world that moves quickly and offers constant distraction, these qualities do not arrive automatically. They require a particular kind of teaching — one that asks not only whether a student is getting better, but whether they are coming to understand the world more deeply, and learning to use their own voice with intention.
Music Makes Changes moved the conversation into the field — into border towns, multicultural communities, and urban neighbourhoods where the conditions of life are fragile and complex. What emerged here was not a collection of success stories, but an honest account of how music actually works with people: how trust is built slowly, how dialogue is opened carefully, how young people are given room to grow, and how opportunity can be designed to last beyond a single project. Music, understood this way, is not a supplementary activity. It is a means by which people begin to see one another — and to move forward together with something resembling hope.
Music Makes Senses expanded what sound itself could mean. Here, music was not atmosphere or decoration, but material — something to be worked with alongside design, food, architecture, scent, and performance. Sound was shown to shape feeling and perception, to turn ordinary spaces into places where people want to stop, listen, and reconnect with the world around them. Aesthetics, in this framing, is not a destination. It is a force that moves people toward action of their own.
Across all three, a broader understanding of sound emerged — one that reaches beyond music to include the voices of children, young people, older adults, communities, places, and bodies that are rarely listened to. Music as Social Innovation proposes that music be a space of co-creation rather than consumption: a space where difference does not need to be resolved, but can inhabit the same moment together — experimenting with listening, with understanding, and with making new sense of what it means to live alongside one another.
MUSIC SPEAKS 2026
1 February 2025 | SVH Hall, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
10:00 Anothai Nitibhon - MAS Network
10:15 Anant Narkkong — Ethnomusicologist
10:30 Asdavuth Sagarik — Luang Pradit Phairoh Foundation
10:45 Somnuek Saeng-Arun — Contemporary Thai Orchestra
11:00 Krongtong Boonprakong — Thai Orff-Schulwerk Association
11:15 Sanchai Nongtrud — Music Teachers as Changemakers
11:30 Poramet Lertkasem — Chiang Rai Youth Orchestra (CYO)
11:45 Asst. Prof. Weerasak Aksornteang — Yala Municipality Youth Orchestra
Networking Lunch
13:00 Asst. Prof. Dr. Suppabhorn Suwanpakdee — Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music
13:15 Wachirapan Pupong — Anoh Bulan Ensemble, Pattani
13:30 Dr. Krit Niramittham — Immanuel Orchestra, Khlong Toei Community
13:45 Prachaya Nantachai — SUN DER Ensemble
Tea Break with Cha Nhapha Khaoyai Pop-up at PGVIM
14:30 Rassami Paoluengtong— Theatre, Music, and Human Development
14:45 Lamtharn "Hanoi" Hantrakul — Yaboi Hanoi
15:00 Assoc. Prof. Dr. Supitcha Tovivich — Creative Placemaking
15:15 Kanoknuch Sillapawisawakul— DEXEMBELL
15:30 Romrawin Pipatnudda — Bangkok Vernacular
15:45 Santi Lawrachawee — Music Makes Senses 2026 @ PGVIM
16:00 Theatre Performance: "Curated Imperfection" by Araya Yangkham and Yaninee Pongpakathian
16:30 Panel Discussion: Absent of Senses
