Friedlind Riedel studied German philology, visual arts and music at the University of Bielefeld and Cultural Musicology, Social & Cultural Anthropology and Sinology at Georg-August University of Göttingen. In her M.A. thesis Saa Manna – A Close Listening to Music in Bulangshan, Yunnan, based on research stays in China (09/2008-03/2010 and 07-08/2011), she explored music and musicking in a Xishuangbanna village in Southern Yunnan. In this context, she engaged with the question of how musics and ethnic communities are related. Moving beyond the common structuralist approach that presupposes an (ethnic) music as belonging to an (ethnic) community, she described musicking in Xishuangbanna along its immanent lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). In acknowledging music’s rhizomatic movement, she searched for music’s impact on processes of communitisation and (de-)territorialisation.

Since May 2013 Friedlind Riedel is research assistant in the DFG project “Moving Music – Space, Meaning, and Musical Transformation” and in the competence network “Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia” (DORISEA) . Her PhD project “Drifting Atmospheres: Musical Becomings in Southern Myanmar” engages with music as atmosphere in the Mergui Archipelago, Myanmar