Briët, Kayla. Return Paths: Tracing the Sound of Black, Asian, and Indigenous Technologies. Master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab, 2025.

Abstract

In Return Paths: Tracing the Sound of Black, Asian, and Indigenous Technologies, I explore the intertwined histories of sound, craft, and computation across diasporic Black, Asian, and Indigenous communities. Moving across four technological eras—acoustic instruments, radio and spectrum, amplification and electrification, and digital machines—I reframe music technologies not as neutral tools to uphold a mythology of the cutting edge, but as carriers of land, labor, and memory. Through archival storytelling, personal narrative, and craft-based research, I amplify muted stories of invention, foregrounding how improvisation, relationality, and self-sovereignty function as survival technologies against colonial erasure.

Chapter One situates improvisation and luthiery as acts of survivance, recalling instruments such as the African banjo, ekonting, and bomba barrel drum as vessels of ancestral memory and resistance. Chapter Two reframes the radio spectrum as kin, tracing Black and Indigenous broadcasting and mutual-aid radio as acts of self-determination, cultural continuity, and collective care. Chapter Three highlights Afro-Asian collaborations in Jamaican sound system culture, linking militarized knowledge and indigenous rhythms to sound and memory. Chapter Four weaves my conception of an Indigenous machine epistemology with global Black, Asian, and Indigenous contributions in computing -- from the Haudenosaunee wampum belt and Quechua khipu to Diné women’s craftsmanship in semiconductor assembly. The chapter ends with how the integrated circuit reshaped the digital soundscape and with Don Lewis’ unsung invention of a serial digital protocol that predated MIDI by a decade.

Together, these threads illuminate the politics of the archive: who is remembered as an inventor, and under what conditions? Here, my metaphor of the return path—an electrical current’s continuity to its source—serves as a method for ancestral recall. Rather than situating Black, Asian, and Indigenous histories as parallel, I argue that they are interwoven, forming a circuitous loop of innovation, collaboration, and repair. By tracing these return paths, I call for new epistemologies of technology that honor multiplicity beyond geographic and racial fixity, celebrate survival and ancestry, and create futures rooted in kinship, sovereignty, and self-determined invention. With these seeds, we may create for ourselves a beautiful, meaningful, dignified, and storied life. 

Above all, I write to those with broken and scattered archives, to those who exist in the in-between, mapping belonging across borders. We cannot study ourselves into existence. Instead, we can take the shattered pieces of the past, examine them, and arrange them to create a mosaic — something new and equally true. This path is not for the faint hearted, but this forge reveals the sanctuary within ourselves. This sanctuary is the path to becoming. Becoming is the path to freedom.