Professor Cannon's current research project SoundDecisions examines the relationship between music, environmental change, and economic decision making in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam. From 2025 to 2029 and with the SoundDecisions team, he will undertake archival, fieldwork, and quantiative research on the ways that farmer-musicians make everyday economic decisions and build trust through improvised music performance.
Professor Cannon’s previous research has investigated the changing nature of traditional music practice in southern Vietnam. He has studied the genre đờn ca tài tử, a ‘music for diversion’ also called the ‘music of talented amateurs’. His 2022 monograph examines notions of creativity used by Vietnamese musicians to sustain interest in traditional music and to rejuvenate debates concerning the Vietnamese identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan and globalised Vietnam. Titled Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam, he argues that southern Vietnamese musicians draw from long-standing theories of Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused on the individual genius. These musicians play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to maintain their tradition and keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam.