Inspired by poet Gherasim Luca's Tourbillon d'etre, we invite questioning on how music and dance in the Mediterranean geography operates as a sonic whirlpool: a vortex where voices, instruments, bodies and rhythms spiral, collide, and recombine. Just as Luca manipulates language and sound into stammering resonance, music in the Mediterranean region bends and refracts scales, modes, and rhythms- maqam, nuba, polyphony, heterophony, and more--creating sonic spaces that allow circulation and blurring through moments of connection, disconnection, grounding and displacement. Sound remains a force of becoming, deterritorializing boundaries, opening lines of flight, and generating networks across difference, echoing Deleuze's affırmation of stammering, repetition, and intensity as creative forces.

The 16th ICTMD Mediterranean Music Study Group's symposium situates itself within the framework of intervention theory (Marcus & Fischer 1986; Spivak 1993; Papadopoulos et al. 2008). Moving beyond ethnography as description, we approach scholarship as intervention: a participatory, situated act that unsettles and reconfıgures the processes it engages. Mediterranean music, in this sense, functions as a critical research practice: through listening, performing, and enacting, knowledge is produced in the very act of sound, in the spiraling folds of melody, rhythm, and voice. Scholarship becomes a whirlpool or tourbillon itself, moving with the currents of cultural encounter, rupture or renewal.

Foregrounding intervention invites us to rethink how scholarship engages with the Mediterranean-not merely as an object of study, but as a lived and mediated fıeld of negotiation, tension, and relationality, particularly at a time of accelerating digitalization and perceived social disconnection. Connectivism, as a theory of learning, guides this approach: privileging connection emphasizes the networked, collective nature of knowledge; privileging disconnection risks reinforcing hierarchies, silencing voices, and flattening the rhizomatic entanglements of sound.

Music, gesture and sound are simultaneously vectors of cohesion and instruments of disconnection-through censorship, rupture, displacement, and erasure (Stokes 1994; Guilbault 1997; Sugarman 2010). in our current moment, marked by migration, border fortifıcation, digital mediation, and cultural politics, these dynamics acquire renewed urgency. The Mediterranean's sonic whirlpool, like Luca's poetic tourbillon, demonstrates how repetition, variation, and stammering produce connection without erasing difference, generating links across time, space, and affective experience.

The 16th Symposium of the ICTMD Mediterranean Music Study Group, hosted by the State Conservatory of Turkish Music at Ege University in Izmir, invites proposals that investigate how music, sound, and movement operate as vectors of connection and disconnection across the Mediterranean, historically and in contemporary contexts. We welcome ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, anthropologists, sound archaeologists, performance scholars, and practitioners to explore the multiple roles of sound, gesture, and movement in shaping both solidarity and division, and to consider music itself asa critical research practice: a method of knowledge production that is relational (Pasler, 2024), sonic and embodied.