The sounds of Thailand: How one social enterprise is keeping Indigenous Thai heritage alive

In the mountains of Mae Hong Son, Thailand’s poorest province, and home to more than 20 Indigenous communities, among them generations-old villages populated by the Hmong, Karen, Lahu, Lavue, Lisu and Pa’o peoples, Sirasar ‘Mae’ Boonma has recorded everything from the twang of the tenaku (a Karen arched harp) to birds chirping at dawn.

According to Mae, co-founder of social enterprise Hear & Found alongside friend and business partner Pansita Sasirawuth, some sounds that they’ve captured, like a Tai Dam folk song passing down funeral rites, have never previously been recorded.

To Mae and Pansita, these sounds aren’t just noise; they’re reflections of life as we know it, snapshots of living cultures and vital repositories of information. But they’re also vulnerable. Without archiving them, oral traditions, dialects and belief systems could fade into the ether of lost history. And perhaps no one is more at risk of this loss than Indigenous communities.

It sounds priceless. But how do you measure the value of sounds like these? Is it in the money spent on your vinyl collection or Spotify membership? Or is their true worth in their power to transport you to another time and place, like the sounds of the Pattani palm sap harvest in Thailand’s far south, to the hills of the north, where a Lisu elder plays a timeless folk song?

If you ask Mae, the value is all the above, and more. She believes that for Indigenous communities especially, sounds are among the most priceless resources we possess. Through Hear & Found, Mae has spent the past six years recording songs, rhythms and the cacophony of everyday life in isolated communities across Thailand.

Listening to a recording, I hear the strumming of an unfamiliar stringed instrument. The lilting melody rises and returns to the same warm chord every few bars, punctuated only by the chirping of cicadas and the rustling of bamboo. The jungle creates a natural rhythm for the track.

You don’t need to see the scene streaming on your laptop to picture it: A man sits on a rock, against a backdrop of untamed grass, low-hanging clouds, and a mountain village. He wears a circular white hat and long black shirt adorned with beaded patterns at the neckline. A thin pink sash is draped over his shoulder, and in his hands is a subu—a wooden lute native to the Lisu people. He sways as he plays a song traditionally performed at celebrations.

“When you come to Thailand as a tourist, you think of all the beautiful places you can visit, but you don’t think about marginalized people. We use field recordings as a tool for people to get to know us and the local community. We want people to understand one another.”

- Sirasar ‘Mae’ Boonma, Hear & Found co-founder

“Their songs aren’t just songs. They’re like a book—they pass down rituals, traditions and knowledge acquired over generations,” says Mae. “Without preserving those sounds, we lose whole philosophies, entire ways of life. Once they disappear, you can never bring them back.”

A music student with a master’s degree in creative and cultural entrepreneurship from Goldsmiths University in London, Mae met Pansita about 10 years ago while working for a community-based travel startup called Local Alike. Together, they organized and marketed small-scale tours to overlooked communities across Thailand. Believing field recordings offered a new approach to solving social problems and erasing discrimination, they started Hear & Found in 2018.

Ever since, they have formed partnerships with Indigenous communities in Thailand’s northern hills, dense southern jungles and vast central plains. They regularly visit to record songs and sounds, which they sell on stock music sites, sharing half the profits with the creators.

So far, the 50-plus people they work with have together earned more than USD$18,000, a significant sum considering many Indigenous people in Thailand live on as little as USD$1 a day and face gaps in healthcare, education and disease prevention. But their impact has resonated in other ways too.

Hear & Found also creates videos and organizes tours. It has also partnered with the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and curated exhibitions for public events like Bangkok Design Week to bring the sounds of the village to the big city. These efforts aim to bridge the gap between urban consumers and Indigenous creators, fostering deeper connections across cultural divides.

In some of their cultural exchange programs, Hear & Found has organized workshops that introduce their customers—mostly students, but also inquisitive travelers—to the process of making field recordings. They then visit villages, not only to produce their own recordings, but also to meet and engage with Indigenous groups in a more personal setting.

“When you come to Thailand as a tourist, you think of all the beautiful places you can visit, but you don’t think about marginalized people,” says Mae. “We use field recordings as a tool for people to get to know us and the local community. We want people to understand one another.”

These efforts have helped them gain the trust of artists like Akom ‘Gai’ Tongkonghan, a 48-year-old Tai Dam khaen (reed flute) musician from Nakhon Pathom, about an hour northwest of Bangkok.

Gai meets outsiders with both welcoming arms and a healthy skepticism. He has been burned by would-be record producers before and is protective of his Tai Dam heritage, and Mae had to earn his trust slowly. Even when she proposed that he perform with his band at this year’s edition of Wonderfruit—Thailand’s more intimate and accessible equivalent to Burning Man—where Hear & Found has led workshops teaching festival-goers how to play instruments like the tenaku, he agreed, albeit with a stoicism that suggested he wouldn’t lose sleep if the opportunity didn’t materialize.

However, Gai has also embraced Mae’s grassroots approach. He doesn’t say it outright, but the pair seem to have met at a time when Tai Dam customs are as vulnerable as they have ever been.

There are up to seven million Indigenous people in Thailand—anywhere from seven to 10 percent of the population—but their distinct identities began to blur more than 80 years ago when, in 1938, Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram led a forceful cultural revolution.

“Among kids in the community today, maybe 30 percent are interested in carrying on the old traditions,” Gai explains as we talk in the shade under his stilt house and listen to folk songs on his phone. He points out his two sons. They’re wearing traditional black shirts in honor of our visit, but they’re also streaming Thai pop videos on YouTube as they lounge in a hammock. The fading or fusion of traditions with pop culture is no surprise to Gai.

Although he estimates there could be as many as four million Tai Dam spread across the country, he stresses that no school teaches the Tai Dam language. Aspiring musicians like him must still make ends meet, and for most, that means hard factory or farm work during the day.

Even the way Tai Dam artists make music has evolved. To more easily participate in modern-day Thailand, many have incorporated their traditional music—more like stilted chanting than singing—into more popular country music forms, like luk thung and molam. Gai thinks there are only about 20 people in the country who still sing these songs the old way.

The Tai Dam, who migrated from Yunnan, Vietnam and Laos more than 100 years ago and fanned out across the country, are not the only group confronting these pressures.

There are up to seven million Indigenous people in Thailand—anywhere from seven to 10 percent of the population—but their distinct identities began to blur more than 80 years ago when, in 1938, Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram (also known as Marshal P) led a forceful cultural revolution.

Then known as Siam, the country was renamed Thailand: “The land of the free people.” Cultural mandates encouraged Western-style clothing, required the use of the standardized Thai language, and embraced the concept of siwilai, a term for progress stemming from the English word “civilized.”

Rather than allowing ethnic minority groups, including Muslim and Chinese communities, to run their own schools, the government centralized education in 1921. Schoolchildren were ordered to wear neutral uniforms, eschewing traditional attire. Public schools weren’t even allowed to teach courses in any language other than Thai until 2010.

As the concept of ‘Thai-ness’ centralized, stigmas grew. Until the late 1950s, Indigenous people were known as chao pa—forest, or wild, people.

Thailand’s diversity became a footnote in the story it tells the world today. And in many ways, Indigenous people became outsiders in their own land, a feeling that persists even today. “Thailand’s Indigenous people sometimes don’t want to be themselves because it’s not easy to be themselves,” says Mae.

In a phone call during a break from work at his roastery,  I speak to Lee Ayu Cheupa, a leader in the Akha community, an Indigenous group that migrated from southern China to Southeast Asia around 100 years ago. The founder of Akha Ama, a social enterprise supporting Indigenous coffee growers in northern Thailand, he tells me that self-doubt starts at an early age for many people like him.

Even though Thailand is a signatory of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), none of its constitutions have recognized or even mentioned Indigenous peoples—chon phao pheun muang in Thai. “Thailand has never used the word ‘Indigenous’ to recognize that we come from here,” Lee says. Even now, he notes, tourist are still hauled off to ‘long neck’ villages that present Indigenous people as if they were animals in a zoo.

That has left people like Lee feeling as if they aren’t even members of Thai society. “A lot of Indigenous people, when they go off to school in a city [like Chiang Mai or Bangkok], they don’t want to practice their traditions or speak their language because they feel insecure.”

“People in big cities are seeing that what makes us different makes us beautiful. When they support Indigenous enterprises [like Akha Ama] … it means they recognize the privileges we can contribute to the country.”

- Lee Ayu Cheupa, founder of Akha Ama

Since so much Indigenous wisdom is passed down from elders to children through folk songs and oral teaching, Lee explains, these insecurities put their cultures and legacies at risk. “The elderly can’t remember everything for us,” he tells me. “We need to document [our traditions] and collect data. We need to have our own guidebook to share our treasures with future generations.”

But as Gai points out, the communities need a sense of ownership over them too. “Thailand is very good at ‘preserving’ but not at caring for [our traditions],” Gai says, using the Thai word ‘raksa’, which roughly translates to ‘taking care of’ something. “‘Preserving’ is like buying an object and keeping it on a shelf behind glass. It’s not the same as helping us to develop.”

For example, he says the Tai Dam community requires official approval to organize large events. But local bureaucrats often seize the opportunity to turn their events into promotional tourism activities. Sometimes, he adds, Indigenous people are encouraged to perform songs, dances or rituals that are reserved for specific festivals year-round, stripping them of their meaning.

“It isn’t organic,” Gai says. “It’s window-dressing.”

Hear & Found may offer a solution for both the lack of data Lee cites and the frustrations Gai feels. The social enterprise has created a publicly accessible archive of Indigenous traditions that may never have existed if not for their efforts.

“We’re trying to collaborate with the Thai government’s [Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn] Anthropology Center. They’ve published Indigenous stories in academic and photo books, but sound is not a main medium for them yet,” Mae says.

While the archive documents traditions, the startup’s social programs and financial model have empowered Indigenous creators, giving them control over their creative output and identities. One Karen artist used the money he has earned to build a music school in his village, and another invested in tools to protect against forest fires, Mae tells me.

These outcomes are no surprise to Lee. The more empowered Indigenous people feel, the more that Thailand stands to benefit, he says.

“Thailand’s Indigenous people are more than happy to integrate and share wisdom to support national development. Once we have the [formal] education and basic infrastructure we need, we can offer so much,” Lee says, whether it’s community innovations that support rural development or knowledge that can decolonize food systems, revive native seeds and protect biodiversity.

And he says Thailand is beginning to see the value in its cultural diversity.

The local school that Gai’s children attend allows them to wear traditional attire every Friday. So does the school that Lee’s sister and nephews go to in Chiang Rai. Meanwhile, Hear & Found’s exhibitions, workshops and World Music Series concerts have attracted thousands of visitors.

“People in big cities are seeing that what makes us different makes us beautiful. When they support Indigenous enterprises [like Akha Ama] … it means they recognize the privileges we can contribute to the country,” Lee says.

As these contributions have grown, they have opened new windows for travelers.

At Wonderfruit this year, Gai and his band are tentatively scheduled to play in front of thousands of attendees who will travel from Bangkok, Singapore and further afield for the festival. It will give them a creative platform to share their culture with people from all over the world. It’s a big opportunity, and not just for the band or even the Tai Dam community alone. If Gai’s music pushes the needle for all Indigenous people in Thailand, then all the better.

And, as he tells me, “It’s important to remember that we are not just one people in Thailand.”

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Hear some of the sounds recorded by Hear & Found here

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