Introduction to the Special Section Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang The starting place for the papers in this special section is music. Music is not bound to material forms as is painting and sculpture or to language like literature and poetry. It travels as waves with kinetic energy through space. Music is governed by organizational principles, to be sure, but the porosity of its delivery and the purported universality of its form—no prior knowledge is required to experience it—makes music one of the most effective conveyors of human emotion. The study of Korean popular music has expanded substantially in recent years and has been informed by trends in two areas of scholarship. The first area is that of the “popular”; scholarship in this area has illuminated everyday life as a key site for critical engagement with mass media. 1 The other area can be broadly categorized as “K-pop studies”; this scholarship takes stock of popular culture in transnational forms that manifest in multimedia spectacles, global fandom, and mass perfor- mances. 2 These two groundswells have created a veritable golden age of popular culture studies, and have brought into relief the extent to which the Dafna Zur is Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture at Stanford University, United States (dafnaz@stanford.edu). Susan Hwang is Assistant Professor of Korean Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Korean Studies © 2022 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 1