In the era of digital and intelligent media, the transmission of local ethnic music faces multiple challenges, including communication transformation and cultural ecological reconstruction. This study conducts a systematic investigation of the living communication of Chongqing ethnic music within an integrated framework of “geography-media-space”. The findings reveal that within a diversified communication network composed of national-level media, local-level media, their new media matrices, and short-video social platforms, the communication of local ethnic music has undergone a three-tiered modern translation-namely, the fusion and re-creation of elements, the cross-border dimensional upgrading of genres, and the localized writing of themes-thereby achieving a dual transformation from “space of presence” to “space of representation,” and from “single geographical anchor” to “multi-space adaptation”. Multiple communication agents have respectively constructed a “national symbolic space”, a “regional public space” and an “everyday inhabitation space”. Through a two-way interpenetrating “spatial circulation”, they have facilitated a spatial transition from “geographically anchored local soundscapes” to “multi-layered fluid digital soundscapes”. In this process, however, multiple contradictions have emerged, harboring risks of cultural alienation: the digital divide leads to intergenerational transmission ruptures; the detachment from geographical context results in “soundscape fragmentation”; the algorithmic traffic logic induces “auditory narrowing”; and local folk practices are transformed into cultural commodity production. Spatial reconstruction can consciously re-establish the organic connection between sound and place within media spaces. To this end, efforts may be directed along three dimensions: transforming the transmission model from “closed transmission space” to “open co-creative space”; shifting the industrial form from “symbolic consumption space” to “value-led space”; and reorienting spatial meaning from “fragmented sound markers” to “immersible digital homeland”. This study provides a referable theoretical framework and practical pathways for the creative transformation and innovative development of China's outstanding traditional culture within the context of digital and intelligent media.