This interdisciplinary panel brings together established and rising scholars whose research agenda uses music and sound technologies, in differing yet complementary ways, as portals for historical investigation. In recent years, the field of Sound Studies, originating in Ethnomusicology, has begun to influence how historians understand the potential of sound as a rich, largely untapped primary source. Spanning geographic regions and temporalities across the twentieth century, this panel features four papers that engage this historiography and contribute to new ways of conceptualizing the historical agency of sound. Benjamin Tausig, an ethnomusicologist by training and scholar of Southeast Asia, examines the diasporic travels of different musical "gestures" emanating from Cuba beginning in the late 19th century, which then coursed through the Philippines and became imbricated into the local musical soundscape of Thailand. Nicolas Allen, a rising PhD student, analyzes the cultural response to the arrival of the phonograph in Brazil in the 1930s, suggesting how this new technology was subsequently embraced by the populist government as an "instrument of moral uplift and national development." Eric Zolov, a scholar whose research integrates cultural and diplomatic history in Latin America, looks at the commodity thread of bossa nova in the context of the early years of the Cuban revolution to show how a genre initially associated with middle-class youth was quickly embraced by both the Brazilian and U.S. governments as integral to their respective efforts to shape the discourse of Pan-Americanism. Finally, Claudia Lonkin, also a PhD student, looks at the reciprocal visits by musicians in the context of state-sponsored song festivals between socialist states in Latin America and various Soviet bloc countries at the height of the Cold War, revealing the ways in which listening and performative practices reflected the highly politicized politics of representation. Taken as a whole, this panel will appeal to cultural historians, scholars of the Global Cold War, and researchers of the Black Atlantic/Pacific. Alejandra Bronfman, a Latin American historian who has been working within the field of sound studies for many years, will serve as Chair and Commentator.