Author: Writing from Below

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“So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94).

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Sweeney’s story of encountering the hum for the first time is remarkable. It begins in Taft, California, which Sweeney recounts as “a podunk little desert bowl town in the middle of nowhere. You can literally drive from one end to the other in under 10min, under 5 if you was speeding.” On this particular night, while walking down the main road of Taft, they report the scene being charged with electricity, and following this charge, hearing a moving sound, a traveling yet invisible sound. “This invisible thing was creating a noise like I had never heard before and sending a wave of static electricity throughout the air in every direction around it,” Sweeney explains. They try to track it down, but to no avail. After following the hum a few blocks and around a couple of corners, it just simply vanishes. As Kristin Gallerneaux aptly claims in her book High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, “the Hum’s oppression seems to come from everywhere and nowhere” (196), and this is especially true in Sweeney’s encounter.

While their account of the hum as electrically-charged is exceptional, Sweeney’s story adequately represents both the anomalistic qualities of the hum and its ability to elude a locatable and identifiable source. They attempt to describe the hum during this encounter as “like an invisible traveling vehicle of some sort,” but that, altogether, they are “not really sure” what it is. And they even admit that this explanation “makes no sense… whatsoever.” This difficulty in describing the phenomenon is reaffirmed not only by the stories told by other listeners but, too, the numerous scientific experiments that have been conducted after the hum’s frequent emergence beginning around the 1970s (Deming “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” 583).

In the US, two major studies have been conducted on the hum: The first in Taos, New Mexico, and the second in Kokomo, Indiana (Cowan “The Results of Hum Studies in the United States”; Mullins and Kelly “The Mystery of the Taos Hum”). Collectively, nearly three hundred residents in these communities have reported hearing a mysterious hum that exists without a known source. While it may sound like an idling diesel truck engine (Frosch “Manifestations of a Low-Frequency Sound of Unknown Origin Perceived Worldwide, Also known as ‘The Hum’ or the ‘Taos Hum’” 60), a dentist’s drill (Deming 575), “someone’s high-powered audio bass running amok” (Mullins and Kelly “The Elusive Hum in Taos, New Mexico”), or simply just an “invisible force”—as Sweeney claims—it may be none of the above. Musicologist Jorg Muhlhans asserts that “there is no clear evidence for either an acoustic or electromagnetic origin, nor is there an attribution to some form of tinnitus” (“Low Frequency and Infrasound: A Critical Review of the Myths, Misbeliefs and Their Relevance to Music Perception Research” 272). Thus, according to Muhlhans, these studies reveal that while hum’s sensorial impact is that of sound, the phenomenon itself is likely neither acoustic nor electromagnetic.

Beyond the limits of current scientific logics which attempt to make sense of sonic events and their impacts, the hum exists as an exceptional and unknown anomaly. It transcends the valuative limits of current knowledge in acoustics and ways of understanding how sound moves through, across, and within spaces to address potential listeners. “I’m not saying I saw waves of electricity or anything of the sort,” Sweeney adds to their above description of the hum as a sound “charged with electricity.” “It was more of a feeling than something you saw. I could just feel electricity everywhere, and see little tendrils of it from my fingertips as I ran them across each other… I just KNEW it was coming from whatever was making that sound, this invisible force that was traveling down the road.” In such an account, the hum defies scientific explanation, and this fact is supported by the multiple failed investigations into the phenomenon. As Franz Frosch details in their article “Hum and Otoacoustic Emissions May Arise Out of the Same Mechanisms,” some scientists have built multiple “custom shielded chamber[s]” out of copper and magnetic material to test for a potential acoustic or electromagnetic source of the hum (604). These investigations, time after time, can’t provide an answer—leaving it up to listeners of the hum to form their own.

Sweeney’s story—and the endless other stories of the hum that have been told across the world—depict the lived, affective, and rhetorical experience of anomalistic listening. To hear, to listen with the hum, is to experience the affective dimensions of a “sound” that has no apparent acoustic or electromagnetic source. This is because “sonic knowledge is framed through acoustics and experience” (84), as Mark Peter Wright notes in his book Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, and Critical Practice. So, to listen with the hum is to occupy a state of affection that is altogether unknown to not only science but the listener themself. Sweeney bluntly continues, writing about their experience of the hum, saying, “I only know exactly what I’ve told you today.” To know this sound, for this sound to exist as truth, this unfolds through stories found in the still-to-be-explained.

I consider “after sound” to characterize this felt condition for rhetorical action that is a result of listening beyond or after acoustic valuations. Instead of this being a moment void of sound, “after sound” defines a state of experience that is complicated by an attempt to control the valuative limits of what is and isn’t sonic. In this way, “after sound” only gestures toward the temporal to develop the different emergence of the sensorial. Because the hum affects in a manner similar to sound but without acoustic or electromagnetic origin, people who hear the hum make sense of this relentless experience through a condition that is after sound. Such a claim is represented in Sweeney’s admission that “[they] just have this weird feeling that this story needs to be told. That there’s more to The Hum than anyone has realized, and that maybe it needs to be further studied and looked into” (added emphasis). This felt, “weird feeling” is initiated after sound, and this is what I am considering as the call for rhetorical action. Such an affective, felt, and lived experience may only exist after the “logical” answers, failed scientific studies, and experiments lacking helpful results become determinative of sonic limits.

Further, “after sound” moves from Marie Thompson’s discussion of “source-oriented” noise (30) that she posits in her book Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism. Speaking to the phenomenon of the hum, Thompson explains that an “unidentifiable noise is often amplified in perception, grasping the attention of the listener” (29). “After sound” is an hyper-attuned condition wherein the rhetorical actions of listeners are always attentive to what-may-(not)-be acoustics. It is their presence within utter sonic mystery that fuels the potential for persuasive response. And David Deming, a researcher in Geosciences, articulates in his article “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” that “in the absence of an answer provided by science, Hum hearers tend to find an explanation and hang on to it” (579), which illustrates the potential for listeners to respond via story within the conditions foregrounded by anomalistic encounters. “After sound” describes a moment of malleability that opens up in soundtime for different negotiations of sense and affect.

Responding to the conditions of listening with story, like Sweeney does, reflects an intention to share and persuade through an expression of sonic experience. As Katherine McKittrick states in her book Dear Science and Other Stories, “story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with creative precision” (7). And V. Jo Hsu, speaking to the rhetorical potential of story, elucidates in their book Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics that “story can slow down, hold still, redefine, and/or reimagine our physical movements to renegotiate their shared meanings” (18). How I’m conceiving of storytelling after sound develops from the insights developed by these authors and other scholars exploring the rhetorical potential of story in cultural rhetorics.

Story, in the domain of sound, enables listeners to reconsider how, when, why, and where the sonic is defined and valued. While it must not be the sole rhetorical technology after sound, Sweeney clearly relies on storytelling to make sense of their encounter with the hum. This story and other stories told about the hum illustrate how listeners practice the negotiation of sound’s meaning by collectively exploring ways of investigating and experimenting with(in) phenomena. Telling stories after sound is to reach across and through a community of listeners to find shared truths that come to be through encounters with hearing. Altogether, rhetoric after sound queries the intersection of perception and intelligibility to jostle forward the meaning of listening. At a moment when the world is at a loss for answers, this is a practice of seizing opportunities for hopeful and imaginative intervention into the valuative limits of the sonic.

“I’ll end it here,” Sweeney begins in their last paragraph, “and I can assure you that everything I have told you is the absolute truth. It happened to me and not a friend of a friend. I was awake, I’m not making any of it up, and all I want are REAL answers.” Sweeney’s call for a resolution was posted 10 months ago, in May 2023. And still today, the hum continues to lack answers, and the unsolved mystery continues to impact listeners. More recently, Popular Mechanics reported in a November 2023 article, titled “A Ghostly Nighttime Hum Is Invading Random Towns. Scientists Don’t Know What It Means,” that the hum has reached Omagh in Northern Ireland and that citizens are “trapped inside [of a mystery].” So far, no matter the amount of media coverage nor number of affected people across the world, encounters are ultimately defined by sounds unknown. After sound—when communities of listeners are left behind by these valuative limits—rhetorical action persists in search of an explanation.

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Featured Image: Spiral by Flickr User Richard CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED

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Trent Wintermeier is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s a Graduate Research Assistant for the AVAnnotate project, where he helps make audiovisual material more discoverable and accessible. Next year, he will be an Assistant Director for the Digital Writing & Research Lab. His research interests broadly include sound, digital rhetorics, and community. Currently, he’s interested in how researchers can responsibly engage with communities impacted by sound and the local rhetorical ecologies which materialize under sonic conditions.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Becoming a Bad Listener: Labyrinthitis, Vertigo, and “Passing”–Aaron Trammell

Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness, and the Trembling Body–Airek Beauchamp

Listening to Tinnitus: Roles of Media When Hearing Breaks Down—Mack Hagood

My Time in the Bush of Drones: or, 24 Hours at Basilica Hudson–Robert Cashin Ryan

Echoes of the Latent Present: Listening to Lags, Delays, and Other Temporal Disjunctions–Matthew Tompkinson

Re-orienting Sound Studies’ Aural Fixation: Christine Sun Kim’s “Subjective Loudness”–Sarah Mayberry Scott

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

–Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

On an almost visceral level, we may likewise remark that states of “latency” involve downward movement, as in the case of something falling by the wayside and lying unnoticed until its presence is felt.

— Hans Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present

Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).

Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”

This work speaks to a recurrent theme in my life: namely, my pervasive sense of feeling out-of-sync with the world, or as Vonnegut puts it, “unstuck in time.” In this essay, I want to think about latency—essentially, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points—as a poignant extended metaphor for the temporal disjunctures of the present moment. Indeed, the frantic mantra of “being present,” as popularized among Western spiritualists by Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (1997), is a kind of antiphrasis, a phrase which evokes precisely the opposite thought. In this case, the power of now simultaneously diagnoses the perils of asynchronicity. And yet, perhaps there are some counterintuitive reasons why latency might be politically productive at times, as I will discuss in the sections that follow.

Fittingly, the concept of “echoic memory” suggests that the brain acts as a kind of temporary holding tank for sounds, not unlike an old wooden chest full of memorabilia. The difference, in this case, is that echoic memory is a short-term storage system. One example of this memory structure at work is when someone asks “What did you say?” only to answer their own question after a half-second, since they are somehow able to retrieve this latent information, one might say unconsciously, from the holding tank.

As a sound artist, I am interested in multiple facets of latency, from its aesthetics to its politics, and especially its psychoacoustics, the way that sound acts tangibly upon bodies and minds. This post will examine how audio latency encapsulates the paradoxical tension between the desire for sonic immanence—in the sense of longing for an immediate experience—and the frustrations of technology, its delays and disruptions. A prime example of this tension is that you and I could be seated right beside each other and still experience a laggy phone call. The paradoxical element starts to emerge when one tries to achieve zero latency, since any signal must travel through space and time, just like Achilles and the tortoise, and thus subject itself to delay.

(Latency Commercial)

Latency, as such, is a shifty concept. By one definition, it refers to any length of interval between impulse and response, including the time it takes to respond to a handwritten letter, or, in my case, the rediscovery of an old book after twenty-something years. By another definition, latency refers to all manner of system delays, including the quality of a network connection, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points. The term might also be familiar from biology or psychology, where it refers to anything hidden or dormant that has not yet manifested, like a disease or an unconscious desire. Another context in which the term frequently shows up is laboratory studies, measuring the delay between some kind of sensory stimulus and reaction, such as a honeybee’s conditioned response to a scent. Lastly, and most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, “audio latency” refers to a very short period of delay that causes sound to lag behind imagery, or, ultimately, behind itself.

(Latency Test)

The latency test video above provides a helpful listening exercise. Though such small intervals of time, measured in milliseconds, are hard to conceptualize in the abstract, they are jarringly comprehensible as sound. With just five milliseconds of latency, a chorus effect is applied to the experimenter’s finger snap, which now sounds as though it has been placed inside a drainpipe. At ten milliseconds of latency, one can already hear two distinct transients, otherwise known as amplitude spikes, where the sound of the snap abruptly begins. By fifty milliseconds, a more dramatic delay effect emerges, and it sounds as though the finger snap is being pulled apart. This bifurcation process culminates at three hundred milliseconds, when the concept of “latency” begins to overlap with that of “delay,” such that there are now two distinct snaps.

(Network Audio Latency)

Latency, then, can be both a problem and an intentional effect. If you have ever tried to record an acoustic guitar, or a vocal track, on an outdated computer, you may have encountered this phenomenon in the form of a technological issue. Everything is plugged in and ready to go, the active track in your audio workstation is armed, headphone monitoring is turned on, and you begin to strum or sing. To your dismay, the sound you hear from the computer starts to fall behind the sounds you are making in the real world. Not only does the recording sound off, and out of time, but it becomes physically impossible to play an instrument when your fingers and ears are thrown out of alignment, like attempting to ride the backwards brain bicycle.

(Guitar Latency)

Diagnosing and solving latency issues is another game entirely: lowering the buffer size, enabling delay compensation, or simply going rogue and recording without monitoring playback, with the hope of nudging the recording back into alignment after the fact. In a home studio, sometimes a full half of the day’s recording session will get swallowed up by these technological battles, trying to shrink latency down to smaller and smaller increments. Given the sheer number of YouTube tutorials dedicated to reducing latency, it is clear how pervasive this issue is for musicians and audio engineers.

(Singing)

As Mitch Gallagher suggests in the video above, some singers can detect latency as short as three milliseconds, which can significantly throw off their performance. If you have ever been in a Zoom call where you can hear yourself through the other person’s speaker, this feeling will be all too familiar. This is not unlike a less aggressive form of speech jamming, which refers to a kind of crowd-control tactic employed by the military in order to break someone’s concentration using delayed audio. Known as “acoustic hailing and disruption” (AHAD), this process makes it very difficult to speak consistently, because a live recording of one’s voice is beamed instantaneously back at the speaker with a certain length of delay, in milliseconds, as demonstrated in a 1974 piece by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, called Boomerang. As with the backwards brain bicycle, but perhaps far less benign, latency can take the form of weaponized confusion. The same principle, however, is used for positive ends in the case of Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) devices which people who stutter use as an assistive technology.

Being out of sync with the present moment, in other words, can be both disorienting and orienting. Latency can mean one thing for a musician trying to lay down a vocal track, but something else entirely for a political protestor attempting to address a crowd, or someone consciously manipulating their own speech patterns.

As a form of sonic violence, weaponized latency has an ancient Greek precedent in the myth of Echo, a nymph who is cursed with repeating the last words spoken to her, such that she can no longer express herself. This archetypal figure, both gendered and pathologized, embodies a form of perpetual exclusion from discourse. Speaking to this subject, Katie Kadue underlines a pertinent quote in literary critic Barbara Johnson’s essay, “Muteness Envy”: Feminist criticism has been pointing this out for at least thirty years. But why is female muteness a repository of aesthetic value? And what does that muteness signify?” At the same time as Echo’s curse represents a metaphorical silencing, it also signifies something else in its insistence on rhetorical conformity, denying and dislocating her from the present of her own thoughts—a “living death,” in the words of Rebecca Solnit.

If patriarchy loves the sound of its own voice, then capitalism loves the beat of its own drum, which speeds up or slows down depending on competing urgencies. Ultimately, this manufactured present moves much faster than the embodied present, moving at such a rate that one cannot even decipher the words that one is meant to repeat.

To operate outside of this temporal structure then, is to move and make sound at a tempo that does not match the dominant rhythms of hypercapitalism. To this end, Fred Moten quotes the following passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind.” Moten calls this “improvisational immanence,” characterized by “disruptive surprise.” Bringing these concepts together, Fiamma Montezemolo’s Echo (2014) is a work of video art that “disrupts and dissents from the ways that race and gender are produced and experienced through sound and listening,” to quote Lois Klassen and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. It does so by assembling an archive of earlier artworks in which women share their personal testimonies of discrimination and inequality, along with hopes for the future. Through this archive, Montezemolo helps these voices to reverberate, latently, in the present. With this in mind, one begins to hear how latency can function both as a barrier, as well as a boon, to expressivity. Especially in those cases where the original sound might have gone unheard, or was actively obstructed, there is always the possibility of a disruptive re-sounding.

In practice, audio latency can often feel like a curse, and it is difficult to see the upsides. In the recording studio, it can turn even the most fluid riff into a halting mess, interrupting creative flow with high-tech tedium. As Rebekah Wilson points out in her study of networked music performances, these technological failures have “aesthetic implications” beyond a mere computer glitch, insofar as rhythmic music is much harder to coordinate over long distances; more than anything, latency “affects time keeping and human-level rhythms” (Wilson 2020).

Must audio latency always be met with resistance, however? No doubt, such glitches could be treated as opportunities for creative misuse. What might happen, for example, were someone to treat these rhythmic glitches as an intentional musical element or a compositional technique reminiscent of a musical canon? As discussed in a previous post, Eleni Ikoniadou presents such thought experiments in The Rhythmic Event (2014), where the author asks what alternative modes of expression might arise when we are able to “twist chronology and rethink the latent tendencies of the event, outside the tyranny of the ticking clock” (68). Latency takes us off the grid and into the abstract, unquantized space of the timeline, where notes are free-floating, and other temporalities become possible, as in Ellison’s description of the jazz musician who plays behind or ahead of the beat, while still remaining “in time,” moving within a loose present that is spacious enough for jazz artists to name it “the pocket.”

(Latency Sucks)

Pondering the relationship of “latency” to the present moment, I am reminded of Boris Groys’ definition of the contemporary: “To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time.’” For the percussionist whose dexterity has been scrambled by latency issues, to be a “comrade of time,” in the words of Groys, would mean “collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties.” This is a counterintuitive approach, however, which does not call for latency to be fixed, necessarily, but rather to be adopted as a political and aesthetic strategy.

The laggy outbursts of latency belong to the anti-capitalist “ritual of wasting time,” in resistance to “contemporary product-oriented civilization,” which would have us chase ultra-low latency for the sake of faster sports betting and stock trading. This ritualistic rejection of capitalist time resonates with Kemi Adeyemi’s description of “strategic pattern interruptions,” in a previous article, where the author shows how “lean” (a narcotic drink consumed by some rappers) is absorbed into the slowed-down aesthetics of their music, in objection to “the demands the neoliberal state places on the black body.” In this way, Adeyemi underscores the racial politics of latencies, particularly in the way that the “dissociative pleasures controlled substances offer to black people have been historically criminalized, and radically different sentencing guidelines continue to be handed down,” depending on the drug.

Where the cocaine-fuelled algorithmic traders of Wall Street chase a asymptotic present in their attempt to reach zero latency (transfers are now measured in picoseconds), contemporary sound artists might explore more audaciously the latent present, wherein one moment, one sound, is always imbricated in the next. To quote Groys once more: “we are familiar with the critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence.”

Such absent presences are reflected in one of the secondary definitions of latency (as concealment). For instance, Alan Licht references Alvin Lucier’s famous sound art piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, as an example of a room’s latent resonant frequencies, which are amplified via a feedback loop. Aptly, room tone is also referred to as “presence” in the film industry. Lucier’s piece resonates with Groys’ model for the prototypical time-based artist: Sisyphus. Like the happy boulder-roller, Lucier commits to a process of absurd repetition, and reveals the present to be, in Groys’ words, “a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future.” In the case of Serres and Holt’s experiment in Boomerang, this rewriting is also an overwriting of thought, with latency preventing the speaker from formulating her next sentence. As if to evoke the dislocation of a time traveler, at one point Holt says, “I am not where I am.” With the undercurrent of cruelty running throughout this performance piece, the artists demonstrate the disembodying effects of latency and its potency as a metaphor for systemic threats to women’s self-expression.

Groys also mentions Francis Alÿs’ animated film, Song For Lupita (1998) in which a woman pours water back and forth between two glasses, in a gesture of anti-capitalist counterproductivity. Here, it is worth noting the discrepancy in attitudes between the tragic male heroism of Sisyphus and the cursed mimicry of Echo, whereby one is celebrated for his resistance in the face of futility, whereas the other is not often mythologized in the same way, though women working in contemporary sound art have begun to redress this representational imbalance by mobilizing the concept of subversive difference. The Alÿs animation linked above takes a similar but slightly different approach, of subversive indifference, where pointless repetition pushes back against capitalism’s intolerance of delay (unless it serves the status quo, e.g., climate inaction). Underscored by lyrics which repeat the phrase “mañana, mañana,” the score reflects this theme of deferral while also indicating that actions taken (or not taken) today might have a delayed effect tomorrow.

(Phone Latency)

As I work through the second draft of this essay, I can hear the boomerang of latency returning to me, offering another chance to rethink, reformulate, reword, and re-listen. Much like how latency has the potential to alienate performers from the flow of a recording session, it can often feel to me as though I am permanently trailing behind the sonic present, caught in its slipstream, an exasperated Achilles chasing after the tortoise of time. As I type these words, I can just barely sense the time it takes the letters to leave my fingers through the keyboard and appear on screen. I think about the illusion of instantaneity, and how the typewriter was a constant reminder of this delay between the exciter of the key and the resonator of the page. Suddenly I can hear the letters smacking the screen. I feel anxiously attuned to the basic math of my estrangement, knowing that sound travels at just over a thousand feet per second.

As a matter of fact, this means that my sonic present and yours are subject to a proximity effect, depending on who is closer to the megaphone. Sometimes it can feel like one is always trying to make sense of a belated reality. And yet, old books are often showing up just when they are needed most, and it is in this way that “intense collective potentials hover as forms in the present,” in the words of Lisa Robertson. The poet reminds us that not only is every historical moment charged with the latent potential to act, but that such political actions are latent in language, surviving as poems and essays “across long durations,” ready to reach someone in a new instant.

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Featured Image: “Minema Maxima” by Laurence Chan (2015) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

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Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, composer, and postdoctoral research fellow based in Vancouver. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His current book project, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. As a composer and sound designer, he has presented his work widely throughout the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the UK, collaborating with companies such as Ballet BC, Company 605, Magazinist, and the All Bodies Dance Project. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.

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TiK ToK: Post-Crash Party Pop, Compulsory Presentism and the 2008 Financial Collapse–Dan DiPiero

Straight Leanin’: Sounding Black Life at the Intersection of Hip-hop and Big Pharma–Kemi Adeyemi

My Time in the Bush of Drones: or, 24 Hours at Basilica Hudson–Robert Ryan

“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality— Aaron Carter-Ényì

The Noises of Finance–Adriana Knouf

I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic shift in the board game industry. The game received an unparalleled number of awards, including the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur Game of the Year), and an unheard of seven categories of the Golden Geek Awards, including Best Board Game of the Year and Best Family Board Game of the Year. In addition to causing shifts in typical board game topic, artistry, and demographic, Wingspan has led many board game fans to engage with the natural world in new ways, even inspiring many to become avid birders.

Following the game’s rise to popularity, developer Marcus Nerger released an app, Wingsong which allows players to scan each of the beautifully illustrated cards and play a recording of the associated bird’s song. On the evening in question, the unexpected occurred when I scanned the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) card and received a message that read:

Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.

Of course, I had to know more. Although the board game was originally designed using information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird.org website, Wingsong derives its recordings from another free database, xeno-canto.org. A quick search of the website revealed the following statement:

Some species are under extreme pressure due to trapping or harassment. The open availability of high-quality recordings of these species can make the problems even worse. For this reason, streaming and downloading of these recordings is disabled. Recordists are still free to share them on xeno-canto, but they will have to approve access to these recordings.

Though Xeno-Canto does not give specific details about each recording, the Wingspan card offers a clue in italics at the bottom: “Habitat for these birds was a topic in logging fights in the Pacific Northwest region of the US.”

The unexpected incursion of such politics into a board game is startling, especially given the limited information in the initial message. As such, the restriction of Spotted Owl recordings on Xeno Canto, and by extension Wingsong, suggests complicated issues relating to the ownership and distribution of sound, censorship, and conservation.

Spotted Owl Recordings

The status of the Spotted Owl was a major issue of public debate in Oregon of the 1980s and 90s, where I grew up. As Dr. Rocky Gutiérrez, the “godfather” of Spotted Owl research, wrote in an article for The Journal of Raptor Research, “Conservation conflicts are always between people – not between people and animals” (2020, 338). In this case, concerns about the impacts of logging in old-growth forests, thought to be the primary habitat of the Spotted Owl, pitted loggers and the timber industry against conservationists. On both sides, national entities like the Sierra Club and the Western Timber Association helped turn a regional management issue into one with implications for forest protection, wildlife conservation, and economic development across the nation. Forty years later, it is still a hot button issue for scientists, industry, and the government, now with added complications of fire control, climate change, and competing species like the Barred Owl (Strix varia).

Xeno-Canto uses a Creative Commons license, meaning that users can access and apply to a wide variety of projects without explicit permission of the recordist, but it also offers tools for contacting other users. I wrote to two recordists who uploaded Spotted Owl calls to Xeno Canto: Lance Benner and Richard Webster, both recording in southern areas where the Spotted Owl’s conservation status is slightly less dire than in Oregon. Benner is a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, whose recordings have been used in scientific research projects, at nature centers, in phone apps, and notably, in a Canadian TV show. Benner told me via email that he agrees with Xeno-Canto’s restriction on the Spotted Owl recordings to the public, writing

I used to play spotted owl recordings when leading owl trips but I don’t any more now that the birds have been classified as “sensitive.” There have also been multiple attempts to add the California Spotted Owls to the endangered species list, so if I find them, I’m not sharing the information the way I used to….

Webster, on the other hand, offered a slightly different perspective:

There are enough recordings in the public domain that restricting XC’s recordings probably will not make a difference. However, some populations of Spotted Owl are threatened, and abuse is quite possible…  

As Webster points out, numerous recordings of Spotted Owls are readily available, including via The Cornell Lab of Ornitology’s Voices of North American Owls and other audio field guides. The concern with such recordings, Gutiérrez told me over Zoom, is that anti-Spotted Owl activists might use the recordings to “call in” Spotted Owls – essentially a form of audio catfishing historically used in activities like duck hunting. In the case of Spotted Owls, the concern is that activists might deliberately harm the birds. However, it can also be a dangerous practice when used by birders who simply want to get a closer look: birds may abandon their nests, leaving chicks vulnerable and unprotected.

From a sound studies perspective, “calling in” underscores questions of avian personhood. Rachel Mundy contends that audio field guides are structured by people in ways that highlight animal musicianship. Yet when we consider the practice of “calling in,” it becomes clear that birdsong recordings are not only designed for human ears, but also avian ones.

Nonetheless, while birds are considered intelligent enough to recognize a call from their own species, they are not believed to be able to identify the difference between a recording and a live performance. The bird’s sensorium is short-circuited by the audio recording, tricking it into thinking a mate is nearby. Not only does this recall the interspecies history of the RCA Victor label His Master’s Voice, it highlights distinctly human anxieties about the role of recording and its ability to dissimulate. Restricting access to such recordings, then, revives deep-seated ethical questions that require a nuanced application.

Whether or not Spotted Owls are able to differentiate between a recorded call or the call of a live mate it is likely to be of decreasing concern, however: Gutiérrez suggests that Northern Spotted Owl populations are so small that anyone attempting to call one in would be unlikely to actually find one.

Immersion, Conservation, Reflection

App developer Marcus Nerger conceptualizes Wingsong as part of an immersive augmented reality experience, one that situates the game player in a more realistic soundworld. In the world of board games, parallels might be drawn to  audio playlists used in tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, or to the immersive soundscape design used in video games.

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Via Zoom, Nerger and I discussed the importance of sound in bird identification, which is arguably more significant than vision given birds’ general fearfulness of humans, branch cover, and the physical distance bird and observer – a separation underscored by the pervasive use of technologies like binoculars. Wingsong is not simply immersive because it connects the player to the real bird species, but because the experience of birding relies as much on hearing as it does on sight.

However, the Spotted Owl restriction message provides a provocative interruption to the immersive bird song experience provided by Wingsong. It is a jarring contrast to the benign experience of listening to recorded bird song, reminding the player of both the artifice of game play and the consequences of environmental actions. It suggests that the birds in the game are not hyper realistic Pokémon to be simply collected, but rather living animals embedded in environmental and political histories. The lack of information provided in the “restricted” message leaves the player wanting more – and subsequently, with a bit of searching, unearthing the mechanics behind the app, the politics of bird song recording, and finally, the specific histories of the species contained there, the ghost in the machine irrevocably unveiled.

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Featured Image: by author

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Julianne Graper (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work focuses on human-animal relationality through sound in Austin, TX and elsewhere. Graper’s writing can be found in Sound Studies; MUSICultures; forthcoming in The European Journal of American Studies and in the edited collections Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (2023); Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID (2023); and Songs of Social Protest (2018). Her translation of Alejandro Vera’s The Sweet Penance of Music (2020) received the Robert M. Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Animal Renderings: The Library of Natural Sounds — Jonathan Skinner

Sounding Out! Podcast #34: Sonia Li’s “Whale” — Sonia Li

Catastrophic Listening—China Blue

Learning to Listen Beyond Our Ears: Reflecting Upon World Listening Day–Owen Marshall

Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music–Carlo Petrão

The Better to Hear You With, My Dear: Size and the Acoustic World--Seth Horovitz

The Screech Within Speech–-Dominic Pettman

When the COVID-19 global pandemic began, news reports and studies throughout the world began citing a lot of sound-based statistics: drastic reductions in noise pollution in urban centres, AI recordings of cellphone coughs, shifting soundscapes at home with new routines and work settings, and sonic sensitivities cultivated in quarantine and isolation. At the same time, in conjunction with these new research studies and areas of interest, there was an outpouring of calls for sound recordings and contributions to digital archival sound projects, such as Sounds of Pandemia, the Pandemic Diaries project, Sound of the Earth: The Pandemic Chapter, Sounds like a Pandemic? (SLAP?), and Stories from a Pandemic, just to name a few. A perceptive post by Sarah Mayberry Scott (2021)outlines the stakes for these types of initiatives grounded in a particular yet ever-changing historical moment, and the stakes of listening (in its attentiveness) and sound (in its persuasive power) more broadly, though undoubtably mediated and defined by power relations in their various social and the cultural contexts.

Part of this surge in scholarly attention and artistic projects is premised on the idea that sound and sound recordings are important additions to cultural heritage in documenting histories and personal evidence, and yet, they are often viewed as supplementary adjuncts to more physical or visual archival artefacts. This subjugation to the primacy of the visual extends to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but this is beginning to change as scholars across these fields increasingly argue that sound (with its attendant listening) is an especially critical medium for cultivating different modes of attention, forging affective relations, producing alternative knowledges, revealing hidden narratives, and attuning to neglected pasts.

Two digital sound archival projects created in response to the pandemic, The Pandemic SensoryArchive and#StayHomeSounds, are especially instructive in thinking about sound as a key medium for engaging with the monumental a/effects of the present and as important contributions to cultural history. Like other pandemic digital sound archival projects, these two projects sought to document the present for the future – creating a “past” in real time, based on the underlying assumption that sound – as a material-discursive apparatus – can offer particularly generative possibilities in this context. The methods, scope, and presentation design employed by these two web-based archival platforms generates a sense of intimacy, proximity, andcollectivity in otherwise surreal, secluded, uncertain, detached, and disconnected situations, much like in radio and podcasting though in this case with different infrastructure and interactivity.

In these online, mediated spaces where worlds intensely collide and conflate, and users become flattened out and disembodied, new configurations of intimacy, subjectivities, and world-building emerge through alternative forms of affective archival engagement. This was (and still is) particularly important and complex during COVID-19, which is marked not only by a series of indefinite lockdowns and uneven distribution of intervention measures, but an affective logic whereby life is completely reconfigured and capacities within the world are diminished and redistributed. Part of making mass sound archives usable relies on the medium for circulation, the presentation for users, and what user participation empowers for these living histories, as Fabiola Hanna makes clear. These two projects generate what Hanna identifies as a particular orientation in digital humanities projects through a politics of listening that necessitates an active mode of participation that is not simply one-directional but a two-way engagement.

The Archive of Intimacy, later renamed The Pandemic Sensory Archive (PSA), wascreated by professors William Tullett (Associate Professor in Sensory History, Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.) and Hannah McCann (Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia) with the goal of exploring the senses through a digital platform and to act as an open data bank of contributions from the public. Their open call for contributions asks for a response that considers two questions: What smells, sights, sounds, touch, and/or tastes do you associate with the pandemic? Has your experiences of the senses (smell/sight/hearing/touching/taste) changed at all as a result of the pandemic? Contributors are then asked to drop a pin on the map (though this is not a typical Google Maps rendition of a specific locale, but a sort of simplified graphic representation of sensory input/output waves) and follow the prompts to anonymously submit. The digital map is divided among the five senses and features the entries that contain a title and brief response, such as:       

Quiet where there should not be quiet: “Being in my flat in the centre of town on my own with nobody else around on a Saturday. Everything weirdly, eerily, quiet.”

Birdsong: “Hearing birdsong in the garden having not noticed it before, no longer drowned out.”

You’re on mute! “Did the conversation in meetings become less robust as we all sit there on mute, politely waiting for our turn to speak?”

Less sound, more sound: “Blissfully quiet at night as curfew curtails the normal constant traffic roars, far more voices in the early morning and through the day as people‘exercise together’ to socialize in the park”

Complimenting this map, which may seem limited in scope but allows users to engage without having to sift through an overwhelming amount of content, is the Sound category page, where four interviews are embedded with “sensory experts on sound during the Covid-19 pandemic,” including Shoshana Rosenberg, Andrew Mitchell, Martin Stewart, and Stephen Sullivan. One interview considers how the pandemic clarified the immensely relational dimension of artistic sound practice and that the lack of access to intimacy during lockdown instigated a radical reformatting and questioning of what it means, more broadly and now, to be intimate and close in creating sound art. For them, what the pandemic spelled out is that intimacy is fragile and valuable, and that this delicate balance and fluctuating ratio has come to the fore during this time.

The initial designation for the platform, “the archive of intimacy,” is worth meditating on to consider the particular forms of intimacy in this context, perhaps through Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics” – a concept that captures the affective and collective dimensions of intimacy among strangers. The notion lends itself to understanding the mediated social intimacy in these spaces and the different affective experiences they invite in varying capacities through sound.The connection between imagined publics and community through sound has, of course, been conceptualized by scholars who do historical work on radio and podcast studies, but it can also be extended to these digital, affective, pandemic sound archives. Evidenced in the submission prompts and interview data, the emphasis on the distinct shifts and palpable changes resulting from this new situation, and its accompanying affective logic, can be read as a strategy for cultivating intimacy and connection because attending to these changes may render their intensities as less alarming.

Through the descriptions and dialogues of these new affective environments grounded in sound, some users might feel a sense of camaraderie, connection, and affinity to these novel experiences and how it relates or compares to one’s own (or the sense of not being so alone), especially in the personalized, diaristic, idiosyncratic tone in the short text extracts and longer interview forms. According to Tizian Zumthurm and Stefan Krebs (2022), digital spaces enable this type of “self-affirmation: by contributing and following the contributions of others, users are assured that they are not alone in whatever they experienced” (492). They also point out that as a result crowdsourced archives, particularly related to traumatic events, have a curative function.

Although the PSA may not be what likely comes to mind when thinking about a digital sound archive, presumably composed exclusively of musical or field recordings, it provides an entry point into a confluence of concerns to grapple with some of the key questions and issues related to sound, intimacy, and affect during the pandemic. In particular, diversity in form – between short excerpts and lengthier conversations, creates different engagement options for users based on preference and capacity (quick snapshots of the sonic changes in daily life or deeper explorations concerning sonic worlds), and across sensory inputs. Moreover, interviews add an oral history aspect to the project, which some scholars argue is more empowering and intimate than other modes of telling or sharing history. As a historically feminist practice, oral history has the potential to expose ignored topics and present diversified perspectives on traumatic pasts (like the 1918 pandemic) which is also especially important considering the research areas and professional backgrounds among the interview experts.

#StayHomeSounds is part of a larger project led by UK-based sound artist Stuart Fowkes, who created Cities and Memories in 2014, which Milena Droumeva describes as a “one-of-a-kind sonic portal dedicated to the exploration of place, sound and memory” (147). The website boasts being the largest sound project in the world with over 5000 sound recordings from over 1000 different contributors across 100 territories worldwide. It encompasses field recordings, sound art, and sound mapping, and each location features two sounds: the original field recording of that place and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere, something else. The listener can explore sites through their actual sounds or the reimagined versions, flipping between the two different sound worlds. #StayHomeSounds is one of the latest ongoing sub-projects on the site and it is a collection of recordings during the pandemic from all over the world mostly done using cell phone recordings.

Although there is a wide range of quality and content, #StayHomeSounds offers a glimpse into the everyday sonic realities of quarantine life that cut across geography, life, and circumstances. The immensely mundane soundscapes and sheer multitude of recordings across cities and regions allows us to listen comparatively and try to notice the striking sonic cultures of different places even in lockdown. Those submitting sounds are required to provide a reflective text, and an elective representative image, to accompany their recording which details the changes in the soundscape as well as any a/effects that change has produced on other aspects of life.

An entry from Vancouver reads “Their chorus runs day and night and is a most pleasant soundtrack to both fall asleep with and wake up to. In this clip the background birds have joined in to add their avian melody to the amphibian bass line.”

Another from the Greek island of Crete, “after a heavy rain last night, the chirping of the birds woke me up this morning. It was such a powerful sound, like waking up from a sweet dream or a bad nightmare. I think that due to quarantine measures the nature’s sounds are more clear than even before.”

In New Orleans, “I’m thankful for my quiet spot out here on the edges of town, but I worry about how the city can recover and for all those sick, out of work, or unable to stay home.”

The objectives of the project, as described by Fowkes in the online text, are largely affective or affectively oriented, that is, to establish a sense of connection in the present, “how it feels at this unique moment,” by being able to discover new relations to place, to others, and to our sentient selves, through these sonic recordings and texts. In an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Fowkes said, “(You can) see what other people are hearing around the world and also read their stories and see that actually people are feeling similarly… hopefully that helps to make us feel a little bit more connected.” The breadth of contributions in terms of different locations and number of entries helps build this sense of connection, increasing the possibility of similar experiences to be seen and heard.

By attending to personal struggles, observations, and speculations in relation to sound, these two digital sound archival projects gesture towards the intersections of intimacy, memory, and world-building, and alleviate and mediate some of the dominant and pervading affects that marked lockdown and remote life. In undertaking this project, I found pleasure in the informality of the responses and both the fresh insights and shared resonances, creating an experience that was jointly intimate (feeling seen and validated) and expansive (an opening to alternative experiences). In cultivating openness and a space for difference, and making the reflections and recordings publicly available, so that we can listen together but apart, the projects cultivate new forms of intimacy, empathy, collectivity, and nostalgia.

But, of course, the potential affective experience with the entries and recordings is not a given, much like with any critical scholarly intervention or artwork that attempts to raise awareness (in this case, to both the grave and minute effects of the pandemic) and resist dominant narratives (that the pandemic is under-control, over, or effects only one’s respiratory system), there is no guarantee that the intended experience will transpire in every engagement, but the possibility to do so – to cultivate intimacy and world-building at a time of profound uncertainty and physical distance – is nonetheless still valuable. Much like the diversity in responses, undoubtedly there are varying degrees and types of resonances, perceptions, and impacts within each visit.

Using an open access, crowdsourced approach, the PSA and #soundsathome construct participatory, community archives, creating and remediating documents and recordings for collective access and engagement on behalf of a global community that underwent monumental change, disruption, and loss. Calling explicit attention to palpable sensory shifts and disruptions is a central way to track, record, and make sense of the immense changes in this historical moment, and to illuminate the inequalities in environments and experiences that have been exacerbated by the (lack of) responses by governments and policy. The very existence of these projects and their participation through listening marks a resistance to the discourses of a “return to normalcy” or that we are on the other end of the pandemic. Because affects live in the body and are not often considered as objects of knowledge, the ongoing presence, use, and discussion of these two projects amplifies the a/effects, and a resistance to the affective logic of the pandemic, that they seek to produce. By considering COVID as an unprecedented, deeply affective, traumatic event, these online spaces operate to archive this moment in time and its myriad sonic dimensions, bringing these affective worlds into dialogue through an intimate exchange and assemblage between different bodies, experiences, and locations.

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Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Tkaronto (Toronto) whose work draws on sound studies, feminist theory, critical disability studies, and cultural theory to examine sonic social relations and materiality through entanglements of resistance and care within contemporary artworks and creative practices. As a cultural worker and active member in the arts community, Emily has worked at diverse film, visual arts, and digital media organizations, institutions, and research networks within Canada and abroad, including Archive/Counter-Archive, PUBLIC Journal, VUCAVU, Festival Scope (Paris), the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Sonic Lessons of the Covid-19 Soundscape—Sarah Mayberry Scott

“Share your story” – but who will listen?–Fabiola Hanna

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening--Airek Beauchamp

SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes

A Day on the Dial in Cap Haïtien, Haiti—Ian Coss

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions–Laura Wagner

Usually when we celebrate our year in review, we get a little bit loud. . .okay, well, maybe we get REAL loud! We’re not usually ones to shy away from joyous bombast, especially when celebrating the hard work of our writers and editors, and the deep relationship we have with our readers. We wouldn’t be here without your clicks, your sharing, and your inspiration, and we love the excitement of readers becoming writers. It’s our favorite! But we don’t want our joy and celebration to be drowned out by 2023’s many loudnesses. We’re starting off 2024 with neither a bang nor a wimper, but instead, with the quiet but powerful resonance of ripples in water, which is exactly the energy our top ten posts bring. Please enjoy them, and keep these ideas spreading far and wide, near and far. Thank you. We’ll be dropping more gems in the pond in 2024. –JS

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(10). From Spanish to English to Spanish: How Shakira’s VMA Performance Showcases the New Moment in Latin Music “Crossover”

by Petra Rivera-Rideau  and Vanessa Díaz

“On the night of September 12, Colombian pop star Shakira made history as the first predominantly Spanish-language artist to be honored as MTV’s Video Vanguard at the Video Music Awards (VMAs). The award recognizes artists who have had a major and innovative impact on music videos and popular music. Shakira played a 10-minute medley of Spanish and English hits from her three-decades long career. Her performance demonstrated her breadth as an artist as she shifted from pop to rock to reggaetón.

Not only did she demonstrate her impressive musical range, but of her 69 singles, Shakira selected those that represent two significant crossover moments for Latin music. She sang hits like “Wherever, Whenever,” “Hips Don’t Lie,” and “She Wolf” from her English-language crossover in the early 2000s as part of the so-called “Latin Boom.” She sang 2001’s “Objection (Tango)” with the same samba/rock music arrangement she used at her very first VMA performance in 2002.”

[Click here to read more]

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(9). The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling

by Dorothy R. Santos

“[. . .] The past few years may have been a remarkable advancement in voice tech with companies such as Amazon and Sanas AI, a voice recognition platform that allows a user to apply a vocal filter onto any human voice, with a discernible accent, that transforms the speech into Standard American English. Yet their hopes for accent elimination and voice mimicry foreshadow a future of design without justice and software development sans cultural and societal considerations, something I work through in my artwork in progress, The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022-present).

The Cyborg’s Prosody is an interactive web-based artwork (optimized for mobile) that requires participants to read five vignettes that increasingly incorporate Tagalog words and phrases that must be repeated by the player. The work serves as a type of parody, as an “accent induction school” — providing a decolonial method of exploring how language and accents are learned and preserved. The work is a response to the creation of accent reduction schools and coaches in the Philippines. Originally, the work was meant to be a satire and parody of these types of services, but shifted into a docu-poetic work of my mother’s immigration story and learning and becoming fluent in American English.”

[Click here to read more]

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(8). Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region

by José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Geographically, the Paso del Norte (PdN) region includes the city of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as well as neighboring cities in the state of New Mexico (see map). U.S. citizens live and play in Juárez, and those in Juárez (Juarenses), live and work in El Paso with families extended on both sides; continually moving back and forth. Yet, this broader region has long been plagued with sensationalizing headlines, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, that cast violent and limiting portrayals of these borderland communities. Recognized as sister cities, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are seen less as close-knit siblings and more like distant cousins with Juárez routinely referred to undesirably as the little sister or ugly sister in comparison to El Paso. Indeed these hierarchical north/south (first world/not-quite-first-world) distinctions are products of histories of colonialism, unequal trade policies, and racial capitalist systems galvanized by immigrant detention camps (a tenant of the Immigration Industrial Complex). Within larger conversations about border cities, both Tijuana (San Diego) and Reynosa (McAllen) are recognized as the “primary” border cities due to their larger population size, transnational capital, and industrious reputations.

Two decades ago, Josh Kun’s concept of the “aural border” invited scholars to consider the US/Mexico border as a “field of sound, a terrain of musicality and music-making, of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing” (2000). Kun’s writings over the years have roused generations of sound scholars to listen to borders, border crossings, border communities and how they reverberate their economic, social, and migrant conditions. This essay intentionally moves away from Kun’s (beloved) border city of Tijuana and towards a less-referenced US/Mexico border city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Here, 1,201 kilometers east of Tijuana, we offer an opportunity to listen to Juárez’s everyday bustling of migratory life through the digital sound repository, the Border Soundscapes Project.

[Click here to read more]

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(7). Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication 

by Amina Abbas-Nazari 

“[. . .] I have a particular interest in extended and experimental vocality, especially gained through my time singing with Musarc Choir and working with artist Fani Parali. In these instances, I have experienced the pleasurable challenge of being asked to vocalise the mythical, animal, imagined, alien and otherworldly edges of the sonic sphere, to explore complex relations between bodies, ecologies, space and time, illuminated through vocal expression.

Following from [Nina] Eidsheim, and through my own vocal practice, I believe AI’s prerequisite of voices as “fixed, extractable, and measurable ‘sound object[s]’ located within the body” is over-simplistic and reductive. Voices, within systems of AI, are made to seem only as computable delineations of person, personality and identity, constrained to standardised stereotypes. By highlighting vocal potential, I offer a unique critique of the way voices are currently comprehended in AI recognition systems. When we appreciate the voice beyond the homogenous, we give it authority and autonomy, ultimately leading to a fuller understanding of the voice and its sounding capabilities.”

[Click here to read more]

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(6). Tuning In to the Desi Valley: Getting to Know a Community via Radio

by Noopur Raval

“Sound has a peculiar relationship to mindfulness; zoning in and out, active and passive forms of listening while we situate our listening practices alongside other daily activities. Especially when it comes to driving, listening to something or someone or just singing aloud by myself, I have realized, helps me drown out other noises of alertness. Over the years I have come to value background music or chatter and especially radio programming that takes the burden of curation and scheduling off my back, in all sorts of tasks that require deep concentration. Enough and more has been said about the visual-bias in various forms of ethnographic inquiry (see Andrew C. Sparkes’s “Ethnography and the senses” for a good example). Without belaboring these arguments, I also find that knowing through listening and listening as a mode of non-haptic yet immersive and intimate engagement can also prove to be a fruitful method of inquiry, especially in our post-pandemic worlds, where it feels a lot harder to establish intimacy. The United Nations noted that radio, in particular, “provided solace” during that period of physical distancing  and social isolation.

For me, radio sparked my accidental realization and foregrounding of sonic methods as an itinerant means of getting to know new things, people and surroundings in life and research when I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-2022 to start a new position as a postdoctoral researcher. Knowing that I would continue living in California for the near future, after eight long years of having deferred driving in America, I decided to learn driving and buy a car.”

[Click here to read more]

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(5). Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body

by Cloe Gentile Reyes

“[. . .] My mother grew up listening to her father sing boleros, and she would later sing with the Florida Grand Opera Chorus when I was a child. My early knowledge of opera came from her. Growing up in Miami Beach, I would also listen to reggaetón and hip-hop in afterschool programs. The Parks & Recreation department would host dances for us, and that was where I first learned to dance perreo. My early musical surroundings represent what it means to be a colonial subject, to hear the Italianate vocal legacies of opera mixed with the Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous rhythms of reggaetón. This post contextualizes my experience within bolero’s colonial history and legacy particularly its operatic disciplining of brown and Black bodies and voices. Reggaetóneras provide models for sonic subversion by being ronca, raspy, or breathy, and thus overriding internalized Eurocentric dichotomies of feminine and masculine vocal timbres.

When I began my own operatic training in college, I was constantly told to “purify” my voice, to resist vocal “fry,” and to handle my acid reflux by avoiding spicy foods. I was steered away from singing the pop songs I had grown up with, and kept many musical activities secret, like when I soloed for the tango ensemble and my a cappella group. In graduate school, thanks to my Latina roommates, I began listening to reggaetón again. I reunited with the voices that raised me and was reassured that their teachings of resistance would always present themselves when I needed them”

[Click here to read more] 

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(4). “Caught a Vibe”: TikTok and The Sonic Germ of Viral Success

by Jay Jolles

“[. . .]The app currently known as TikTok began as Musical.ly, which was shuttered in 2017 and then rebranded in 2018. By March of 2021, the app boasted one billion worldwide monthly users, indicative of a growth rate of about 180%. This explosion was in many ways catalyzed by successive lockdowns during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the relaxation and subsequent abandonment of COVID mitigation measures, the app has retained a large volume of its users, remaining one of the highest grossing apps in the iOS environment. TikTok’s viral success (both as noun and adjective) has worked to create a kind of vibe economy in which artists are now subject to producing a particular type of sound in order to be rendered legible to the pop charts. [. . .] The app, which is the perfect–if chaotic–fusion of both radio and video is enmeshed in a wider media ecosystem where social networking and platform capitalism converge, and as a result, it seems that TikTok is changing the music industry. . .”

[Click here to read more]

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(3). “In My Life”: Loving Queerly and Singing Across Generations

by Casey Mecija

The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.

[Click here to read more]

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(2). “Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor

by Golden Owens

“In October 2019, Google released an ad for their Google Assistant (GA), an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that initially debuted in 2016. As revealed by onscreen text and the video’s caption, the ad’s announced that the GA would soon have a new celebrity voice. The ten-second promotion includes a soundbite from this unseen celebrity—who states: “You can still call me your Google Assistant. Now I just sound extra fly”— followed by audio of the speaker’s laughter, a white screen, the GA logo, and a written question: “Can you guess who it is?”

Consumers quickly speculated about the person behind the voice, with many posting their guesses on Reddit. The earliest comments named Tiffany Haddish, Lizzo, and Issa Rae as prospects, with other users affirming these guesses. These women were considered the most popular contenders: two articles written about the new GA voice cited the Reddit post, with one calling these women Redditors’ most popular guesses and the other naming only them as users’ desired choices. Those who guessed Rae were proven correct. One day after the ad, Google released a longer promo revealing her as the GA’s new voice, including footage of Rae recording responses for the assistant. The ad ends with Rae repeating the “extra fly” line from the initial promo, smiling into the camera.

Google’s addition of Rae as an IVA voice option is one of several recent examples of Black people’s voices employed in this manner. Importantly, this trend toward Black-voiced IVAs deviates from the pre-established standard of these digital aides. While there are many voice options available, the default voices for IVAs are white female voices with flat dialects. This shift toward Black American voices is notable not only because of conversations about inclusion—with some Black users saying they feel more represented by these new voices—but because this influx of Black voices marks a spiritual return to the historical employment of Black people as service-providing, labor-performing entities in the United States, thus subliminally reinforcing historical biases about Black people as uniquely suited for performing this type of work.”

[Click here to read more]

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(1). “Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport”

by Michelle Pfeifer 

“In the 1992 Hollywood film Sneakers, depicting a group of hackers led by Robert Redford performing a heist, one of the central security architectures the group needs to get around is a voice verification system. A computer screen asks for verification by voice and Robert Redford uses a “faked” tape recording that says “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” The hack is successful and Redford can pass through the securely locked door to continue the heist. Looking back at the scene today it is a striking early representation of the phenomenon we now call a “deep fake” but also, to get directly at the topic of this post, the utter ubiquity of voice ID for security purposes in this 30-year-old imagined future.

In 2018, The Intercept reported that Amazon filed a patent to analyze and recognize user’s accents to determine their ethnic origin, raising suspicion that this data could be accessed and used by police and immigration enforcement. While Amazon seemed most interested in using voice data for targeting users for discriminatory advertising, the jump to increasing surveillance seemed frighteningly close, especially because people’s affective and emotional states are already being used for the development of voice profiling and voice prints that expand surveillance and discrimination. For example, voice prints of incarcerated people are collected and extracted to build databases of calls that include the voices of people on the other end of the line.“

[Click here to read more]

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Featured Image “ripples in monochrome” by Flickr User SalmonSalmon CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

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December 1975.

The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.

In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.

“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).

What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016), as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.

There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.

“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).

January 2018.

I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.

And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.

“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)

Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.

December 2022.

I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.).  At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.

To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.

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Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Blank Space and “Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence”  –Casey Mecija

The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020) –Casey Mecija

The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling–Dorothy Santos

Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien

Enacting Queer Listening, or When Anzaldúa Laughs–Maria Chaves Daza

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

The Queerness of Wham’s “Last Christmas”–Justin Burton

Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón

or, Last Summer a DJ Saved My Life

“Hip Hop does work that a lot of other things don’t do” Young Guru (viii).

The way that we imagine English Studies, specifically Composition and Rhetoric (Comp/Rhet), today needs a radical shift. Specifically, we need new techniques for Writing Studies pedagogy to reach students in a more meaningful and contemporary fashion.  Todd Craig’s “K for the Way:” DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies (Utah State University Press, 2023) both documents the need for this shift and enacts it. Craig’s work enables us to recognize the pedagogical impact on writing that Hip Hop has had over the last 50 years—specifically how the DJ/deejay as twenty-first century new media reader and writer teaches students not just to think about sound, but to compose with it, too.

An Associate Professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center, Craig has little desire to shake the foundations of English Studies, but instead do what Hip Hop has always done—make a way where there is none. The point is to (re)imagine new ways of doing old things; in this case, of teaching and reaching students who arrive in First-Year Writing courses. “K for the Way” does more than demonstrate the ways in which the DJ is a twenty-first century pedagogical savant; it also teaches readers, using DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy, about the culture that makes them possible.

This summer, a DJ really did save my life: as someone who feels consistently overwhelmed by the vast nature of scholarly discourse, “K for the Way” gave me a chance to breathe, to identify with something that has been a part of me for the better part of my life, and to see myself in a conversation about a topic I am more than passionate about. For Craig, community, history, and culture are the core of his mission as a scholar, educator, and DJ.

Craig defines several new terms that bridge the worlds of Hip Hop and Composition and Rhetoric.  First, we have DJ Rhetoric, which can be understood as the modes, methodologies, and discursive elements of the DJ. For Craig, it “encompasses the quality of oral, written, and sonic language that displays and expresses sociocultural, historical, and musical meanings, attitudes, and sentiments” (23). Next, there is DJ Literacy, which is the “sonic and auditory practices of reading, writing, critically thinking, speaking, and communicating through and with the rhetoric of Hip Hop DJ culture” (23). These two definitions, operating in conjunction, situate the DJ as a kind of griot, a figure that Adam Banks invokes as a carrier of tradition, stories, and histories in Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) (2011). The mission of the griot is to carry stories and translate them to various audiences while adhering to the rhetorical conventions and modes of whichever audience they find themselves before; similarly, the DJ is responsible for “communicating the pulse and the evolution of a culture that once sat as ‘underground’ but now has dramatically evolved to ‘mainstream’” (25). These definitions serve as guides for the reader as they are tethered to all of the concepts and (re)imagining happening throughout the book.

Craig is intimately close to the work he is doing. He lives and breathes Hip Hop; and what should a book about the Hip Hop DJ be if not written by someone who embodies the role, culture, and practice of DJing?   Craig  uses a  a research methodology known as hiphopography in which Hip Hop ways of being are central to studying it. Coined by James G. Spady, this term is defined as “a shared discourse with equanimity, not the usual hierarchical distancing techniques usually found in published and non-published (visual-TV) interviewers with rappers” (27). Craig states that hiphopography “allowed me to engage a variety of Hip Hop DJs while also maintaining my own shared values and sentiments around my love of Hip Hop culture and DJ practices” (28).  Hiphopography constructs a conversational, intimate space—touched by history, culture, and music—wherein the interviewer and interviewee can engage and produce meaningful data. This methodology—and Craig’s many interviews with DJs about their craft—becomes part of the text’s core as we begin to see how Craig’s two-pronged argument connects DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy to bring both life throughout the book.

If one understands the DJ as a twenty-first century rhetorician and compositionist and considers the ways in which the DJ is a cultural meaning-maker, sponsor, and master sampler, then one can clearly see the connections between the DJ, DJ culture, and Writing Studies in the contemporary moment. In the first part of his argument supporting the significance of DJ Rhetoric and Literacy in writing pedagogy Craig asserts that, “it is essential that the academy at large works to strengthen students’ undergraduate experiences by reinforcing their racial, ethnic, and cultural ties” (14). This perspective provides the foundation for the second part of his argument that “the DJ (and thus, Hip Hop DJ culture) is the epicenter of Hip Hop culture’s creation” (23). Taken together, these dynamic arguments make the claim that the DJ offers a powerful model of a new media reader, writer, and critic. Today, our students come to writing classrooms with a “vast array of cultural capital. . .in their philosophical and cultural backpacks” (107). If we, as writing teachers, want to honor that cultural capital and build with it, we should follow Craig’s lead and look toward the DJ for some pointers on how to expand students’ access to a language that represents them.

Readers will also see a developing research agenda in “K for the Way” that thinks toward changing the culture beyond the present, while acknowledging the groundwork laid for the current moment and building genealogically upon that foundation, just as DJs do with sampling. Craig best exemplifies this when he writes, “in order to fully engage in a conversation—whether intellectual, pedestrian or otherwise—that discusses what DJ Rhetoric might look like, one has to think about the cultural and textual lineage of sponsors and mentors” (51). This notion of textual lineage is borrowed from Alfred W. Tatum who explains the term as “Similar to lineages in genealogical studies” and continues to note that textual lineage is “made up of texts (both literary and nonliterary) that are instrumental in one’s human development because of the meaning and significance one has garnered from them” (Tatum, qtd. in Craig, 51). Craig builds upon Tatum’s idea by introducing sonic lineage, which follows the same logic as Tatum’s term, but through sound (51). What becomes apparent, is that the DJ, as a cultural sponsor, can deploy sonic lineage as a way of communicating history and culture to members within and outside of the Hip Hop community and, more specifically, DJ culture.

Chapter three, especially, works at the interdisciplinary junction of Sound Studies, Writing Studies, and Hip Hop studies to convey a clear critique of the dominant discourse surrounding plagiarism.  Craig is unsatisfied with the black-and-white conception of plagiarism as it presents itself in the academy. As a result, he moves to inquire “how we as practitioners [of teaching composition] approach citation methods and strategies within a twenty-first century landscape” (75). Craig promptly turns us toward the DJ’s conceptualization of sampling as a citation practice. Sampling in Hip Hop, as defined by Andrew Bartlett, “is not collaboration in any familiar sense of the term. It is a high-tech and highly selective archiving, bringing into dialogue by virtue of even the most slight representation” (77). The highly selective archiving, a.k.a crate diggin’, builds upon the idea of sonic lineage.

For the DJ, the process of diggin’ through crates to find that right sound, that one joint that going to get the party jumpin’, is a key element in the practice of “text constructing” (79). The Hip Hop sample functions alongside an understanding, offered by Alasdair Pennycook, of “transgressive-versus-nontransgressive intertextuality,” which, for an academic audience, complicates the idea of plagiarism.. The DJ becomes a figure through which we can understand intertextuality, sampling becomes the practice through which we can see parallels to citation through text construction, and the mix is where we begin, with the help of Pennycook, to complicate notions of plagiarism.  In this chapter, readers are able to understand through sound.

Subsequently, Craig explores the concept of revision as it relates to the DJ’s ability to engage with an emcee on the point of “remix as revision” (107). Building from on Nancy Sommers’ article, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Craig lifts and examines four strategies of revision through the lens of the Hip Hop DJ: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering (Sommers, qtd. in Craig, 107). These practices not only identify the Hip Hop DJ as a master of revision but also center the DJ, in the context of the writing classroom, as a key figure for understanding editorial practice. As teachers of writing—and especially for those of us who are deeply connected to Hip Hop culture—we have traditional scholars, such as Sommers, but we also have the DJ as cultural scholar, which offer new models with communicating and practicing the craft of writing in the twenty-first century.

Chapter Five, which is co-written by Craig and Carmen Kynard, centers on six women DJs: DJs Spinderella, Pam the Funkstress, Kuttin Kandi, Shorty Wop, Reborn, and Natasha Diggs to work toward developing a “Hip Hop Feminist Deejay Methodology” that positions women in Hip Hop culture as a key source of key knowledge production–as meaning-makers, theoreticians, storytellers–and as tastemakers in twenty-first century discourse about education, technologies, race, and gender.  This chapter is also apt representation of hiphopography at work, as both Craig and Kynard ground their position in the interviews of these six women deejays, “deliberately situating their stories first… as opposed to the usual academic expectation that a tedious delineation of methods and an extant literature review come before a discussion of the actual subjects” (123).

In part, this chapter focuses on the affordances and limitations—political, social, and economic—present in DJ culture, and the effects it has on these women DJs to make it do what it does. For example, the introduction of the digital software Serato has simultaneously made access to music easier, and complicated access to the cultural archive that made the music possible in the first place. Natasha Diggs, states, “While she values the ability to access mp3 files so readily, she argues a deejay’s research and craft suffer, because many times the mp3 files do not include information about an artist’s name, history, or band” (129).   Pam the Funkstress ties this sentiment up nicely when she argues, “There’s nothing like vinyl” (129).

The final chapter is fashioned like a Hip-Hop outro, with Craig leaving with a few parting ideas. Most important among them is his vision of “Comp 3.0,” a version of Comp/Rhet wherein “we have to push the scope of writing and rhetoric—with or without the field’s permission or acknowledgement” (171). For scholars of composition and rhetoric and writing teachers who ground part of their understanding of the field in Black Studies, Hip Hop, and the DJ, we gotta make it do what it do, regardless of who says what! Comp 3.0 does not seek approval or recognition from the powers that be; instead, it focuses on the new ways of thinking and writing, and of teaching, that we are able to conjure—with history, culture, and practice propelling us—when we invoke that which got us to the academy in the first place.

What is at stake, for those of us who engage Black Studies, Sonic Studies, Comp/Rhet, and Hip Hop Studies as critical points of departure for the teaching of writing, is that our presence—our being, methods, and our teaching—is crucial for developing a genealogy of scholars and world citizens who are aware of the myriad possibilities present in the twenty-first century.

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Featured Image: Cover Art for “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies by Cathey White

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DeVaughn (Dev) Harris is a PhD student studying composition and rhetoric in NYC. His academic interests are mainly in writing studies and pedagogy, but those are often supported by other sub-interests in music, creative writing, African American studies, and philosophy. When not reading or writing, Dev enjoys making music wherever and however possible. He has published music before under the collective AbstraktFlowz. 

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening--Airek Beauchamp

The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes

Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne–Lucreccia Quintanilla

Ill Communication: Hip Hop and Sound Studies–Jennifer Stoever

SO! Amplifies: Regina Bradley’s Outkasted Conversations

A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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This post is co-authored by Sara Veronica Hinojos and Eliana Buenrostro

Cardi B eloquently reminds us that our español, as US Latinxs, might seem “muy ratata;” an apt phrase, heard lyrically within her music, used here to characterize inventive, communicative Spanglish word play. Yet, the proliferation of hashtags used to shame and silence second and later generations of Latinx kids runs counter to Cardi B’s ratata blessings. 

The hashtags #nosabokid #nosabokids #nosabokidsbelike #nosabokidsorry #iamanosabokid represents a collective acknowledgment of Gloria Anzaldúa’s “linguistic terrorism.” Featured on NBC News, Locatora Radio, the Los Angeles Times and, surely, referenced within familial discussions, #nosabo has brought, once again, to the fore the coupling and, we fiercely argue, the need to decouple language (“proficiency”) from that of Latinx identities. The phrase “no sabo” – a non-standard Spanish conjugation of the phrase “no sé” for “I don’t know” – has become a stand-in as both a linguistic (bad) sign of Americanization and/or a (good) marker of ethnic, bicultural pride. 

Anzaldúa has long warned us that, “[e]ven our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca [want to put locks on our mouths]” (1999, 76). In many ways, the “no sabo” label silences or “locks” one’s mouth. The institutional attempts to Americanize Spanish-speaking individuals constitute a form of violence that has led to the erosion of Spanish spoken among Mexican and Latino families in the United States. Today, children of immigrants are ridiculed for speaking “broken” Spanish, yet, for decades Mexicans raised in the United States experienced harsh consequences and blatant discrimination for speaking Spanish in public; this racism continues today. 

As scholars of Latinx listening, these social media posts can be incredibly frustrating. They remind us of the sad reality that many Latinx people do not know their own history or better yet futures. Anzaldúa would describe the intraethnic linguistic policing as, “peleando con nuestra propia sombra” (fighting with our own shadow) (1999, 76); it’s both unproductive and self-inflicting. Poet Michele Serros describes her experiences being policed in her 1993 poem “Mi Problema”:

Eyebrows raise

My sincerity isn’t good enough

when I request:

“Hable mas despacio por favor.”

My skin is brown

just like theirs,

but now I’m unworthy of the color

‘cause I don’t speak Spanish

the way I should.

Then they laugh and talk about

mi problema

in the language I stumble over [. . .]

–Opening stanza of “Mi Problema” from Chicana Falsa

Applied to speakers (mostly kids) whose Spanish is identified as grammatically wrong or heard with an Anglicized accent, “no sabo” hashtags can encourage people to police each other’s tongues.  Social media videos even show parents testing their children’s Spanish. When a child cannot remember or (mis)pronounces a Spanish word, or worse, uses a Spanglish iteration, they are disparagingly called “no sabo kids” (Stransky et al. 2023). Other posts reveal Latinx users’ fear of having and raising a “no sabo kid” or not wanting to date a “no sabo kid.”

Speaking to my kids in Spanish and telling them buenas noches they giggle and say buenos nachossss

I’m not tryna have some no sabo kids

— 🩷 𝖁𝖊𝖊 🩷 (@megumis_mama) October 13, 2023

https://twitter.com/SimplySelena101/status/1591649430117273604?s=20

Lastly, other posts proudly admit to being a “no sabo kid.”  The latest series of “no sabo kids” hashtags are also unapologetic declarations that their language does not define the totality of their being or experiences.

I’m a Yo No Sabo kid and proud of it!!

— RAMONISLOVE (@ramonislove_) March 22, 2022

Indeed, speaking Anglicized Spanish as Latinx can surface feelings of embarrassment, disappointment, and mockery from presumed “perfect” Spanish speakers or self-appointed “real” Spanish-English bilinguals. Televised instances of Latin Americans chastising the Spanish spoke of Latinx speakers or the public praise thrown at Ben Affleck  for his spoken Spanish in comparison to the public side eyes given to wife, Bronx-raised, Jennifer Lopez are both hyper-mediated instances of #nosabokids.

Here’s Ben Affleck speaking better Spanish than JLo pic.twitter.com/D1eRFrNHn3

— Laura Martínez (@miblogestublog) April 9, 2022

White people might be praised for learning Spanish – no matter how Anglicized their accent – yet Latinx people whose Spanish is detected as Anglicized, are (racially whitewashed) “no sabo kids” (Urciuoli 2013). And yes, the use of the word “kids” alone infantilizes the speaker as some social media posts point to both children and adults as “no sabo.”

Irrespective of the proficiency in English or Spanish, Latinx individuals share experiences of being corrected in educational settings, at home, or online. The misuse of verb conjugation, such as using “sabo” instead of “sé,” is a developmental challenge encountered even by Spanish-speaking children who are learning solely Spanish. In other words, it is not an exclusive practice among Spanish-English bilingual speakers, despite what  social media posts insist. The public discourse that some Latinx social media users are battling is what Jonathan Rosa calls “looking like a language” and, in this case, not “sounding like a race” (Rosa 2019).

imagine i was a no sabo kid & didn’t know what bad bunny was saying

— M (@pra_dough) October 3, 2022

Speaking, listening, and living “muy ratata” with inventive modes of Spanish and English in the U.S. is clearly heard as threatening. For instance, knowledge of another language has always  challenged monolingual conservative speakers. Bilingual speakers and listeners routinely teach us how to resignify language practices and ultimately, the meaning of being a “no sabo kid.” (Or how Nancy Morales argues about Los Jornaleros del Norte and Radio Ambulante in the ways they offer new forms of belonging by understanding themselves and respecting each other.)

Entrepreneurs with Chicana and Latina feminist identities are modeling refashioned ways of belonging. For example, Los Angeles-based brand Hija de tu Madre created t-shirts and crewneck sweatshirts with the words “no sabo” to counter the ridicule heard and circulated within social media and to loudly claim a racial, linguistic identity that has nothing to do with shame. Similarly, the card game “Yo Sabo,” founded by a first generation college student of Mexican descent, Carlos Torres, looks for ways to improve his Spanish and simultaneously creates another way to connect with immigrant family members. Labels like “no sabo ” that are intended to categorize people in harmful ways are being repurposed to build community.

The podcast Locatora Radio: A Radiophonic Novela released an episode on April 12, 2023, Capítulo 160: No Sabo Kids, detailing historical reasons why Latinx ethnicities have structurally been banned from learning and speaking Spanish. Perhaps most importantly, Locatora Radio shares with listeners lengthy listener-recorded testimonios.

They provide diverse personal reasons for identifying as a “no sabo kid.” One listener, Paula, is a transracial adoptee whose first language was Spanish. However, because of forced family separation and the foster care system in Virginia, she “lost” her Spanish. Paula was enrolled in Spanish language classes throughout her formal schooling and accepts that her reclaiming of culture and language is a lifelong process. The use of verbal testimonios, a format that makes it possible for podcast listeners to listen to fellow listeners, moves away from posts above that wag their digital finger at “no sabo kids” and instead gives them a space to speak for themselves.

The intense personal and communal fear of losing aspects of culture or language makes it difficult to understand how shifts in language practices and accents are important new forms of belonging as Latinx in the U.S. If we cannot accept our own linguistic diversity, how do we expect others to listen to us?

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Featured Image: A selection of TikTok #nosabo memes from @marlene.ramir, @yospanishofficial, and @saianana

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Sara Veronica Hinojos is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research focuses on representation of Chicanx and Latinx within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial function of linguistic “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US.

Eliana Buenrostro is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She received her master’s in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research examines the criminalization, immigration, and deportation of Chicanes and Latines through the lens of music and other forms of cultural production. She is a recipient of the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

From Spanish to English to Spanish: How Shakira’s VMA Performance Showcases the New Moment in Latin Music “Crossover”—Petra Rivera-Rideau  and Vanessa Díaz

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

“Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*–Sara Hinijos and Inés Casillas

***This post is co-written by Petra Rivera-Rideau  and Vanessa Díaz

On the night of September 12, Colombian pop star Shakira made history as the first predominantly Spanish-language artist to be honored as MTV’s Video Vanguard at the Video Music Awards (VMAs). The award recognizes artists who have had a major and innovative impact on music videos and popular music. Shakira played a 10-minute medley of Spanish and English hits from her three-decades long career. Her performance demonstrated her breadth as an artist as she shifted from pop to rock to reggaetón.

Not only did she demonstrate her impressive musical range, but of her 69 singles, Shakira selected those that represent two significant crossover moments for Latin music. She sang hits like “Wherever, Whenever,” “Hips Don’t Lie,” and “She Wolf” from her English-language crossover in the early 2000s as part of the so-called “Latin Boom.” She sang 2001’s “Objection (Tango)” with the same samba/rock music arrangement she used at her very first VMA performance in 2002.

During this “Latin Boom” of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Shakira and other established Latin stars who had previously performed in Spanish, such as Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, and the late Selena Quintanilla, dominated the charts with English-language albums. Despite their successful global careers in the Latin market—and the long history and influence of Latinx musicians in U.S. pop music–U.S. media consistently portrayed these artists as exotic newcomers to the scene, praised more for being “Latin lovers” than established musicians. The Latin boom stars were valued as spicy foreigners there to expose Americans to new, exotic Latin sounds – conga beats, flamenco-style guitar riffs, and festive horns – even as many of these songs draw from familiar rock/pop references. Draco Rosa, one Ricky Martin’s co-writers, remembers “channeling [Jim] Morrison” and “elements of big band … a little bit of surf guitar” in the 1999 smash “Livin’ La Vida Loca.”

Despite the Latin Boom’s English-language crossovers, the images and sounds associated with the moment underscored the artists’ foreignness, something that continues today. This year’s Grammys’ botched treatment of superstar Bad Bunny’s performance and acceptance speech, in which, in lieu of translations, the subtitles merely declared that his words were “non-English.” Spanish has long been used to signify Latinxs’ alleged foreignness and inability to assimilate into US life and culture despite the fact that Latinx communities have been part of the fabric of the US for centuries. In the context of increased anti-immigrant sentiment, the popularity of Spanish-speaking artists like Bad Bunny and Shakira takes on even greater significance.

Following the Grammy’s disastrous handling of Bad Bunny’s performance and speech, backlash ensued. A plethora of popular memes and even t-shirts proudly claiming non-English popped up almost overnight. New York Times’ critic and Princeton professor Yarimar Bonilla proclaimed that “Bad Bunny is [Winning in Non-English].” Celebrities from comedian Cristela Alonzo to rapper 50 Cent admonished CBS. Even California Congressman Robert Garcia sent a letter directly to the CBS president and CEO George Cheeks, writing that the incident “display[ed] a lack of sensitivity and foresight. For too many Spanish-speaking Americans, it felt disrespectful of our place in our shared society, and of our contributions to our shared culture.” CBS eventually released a tepid statement saying that their vendor was not adequately equipped to manage Benito’s Spanish-language speech and performance, and Cheeks took “full responsibility” for the incident. Overall, the Grammys snafu reflects the ways in which the American mainstream still is incapable of embracing the status of Latin artists as equal players in the US and global music markets, in any language. 

Compared to this year’s Grammys, however, MTV’s VMAs offered a much more inclusive approach, with a historic perspective that demonstrated exactly how we were able to arrive at this new moment in Latin music. When Puerto Rican and Cuban American rapper Fat Joe and Mexican pop star Thalia presented the award for Best Latin video, Thalia reminded the audience that “in the 2000s’ first Latin explosion, we had a song together, and now we’re here celebrating again this new Latin explosion.” This new Latin explosion refers to the numerous Spanish-language artists like Shakira, Bad Bunny,  Karol G, and Peso Pluma  who have recently broken out in the US mainstream.

But, unlike the previous Latin Boom, these artists have maintained their Spanish and their musical style. Bad Bunny’s Grammy performance included plena, reggaeton, and merengue rather than the kitschy styles of his Latin Boom predecessors. In addition to selling out stadiums around the country, Karol G drew 15,000 fans, the largest crowd in the Today Show’s history, for her reggaetón performance as part of the program’s Summer Concert Series in Rockefeller Center. Just this past September, Eslabon Armado became the first Mexican regional music group to ever perform on Good Morning America with their chart-topping hit “Ella Baila Sola” (the first Mexican regional song to ever hit number one on Billboard’s Global 200 chart). Whether it is the percussive dembow beat of reggaetón or the syncopated horns of corridos tumbados, all of these musicians have maintained the sounds of their respective genres, foregoing the stereotypical “Latin” sonic signifiers historically associated with Latin music. 

Shakira herself reflected this moment in her Video Vanguard performance. She performed her new Spanish-language songs as 2022’s “Te Felicito,” and 2023’s “TQG” and “Bzrp Music Sessions: Volume 53” (the latter having broken four Guinness world records, including the most streamed Latin track in 24 hours). All of these songs have been part of this new Latin music movement. In fact, her “TQG” collaborator Karol G also performed her Spanish hits at the show. Mexican regional phenom Peso Pluma sang “Lady Gaga” on a small stage, surrounded only by his band, and called out “¡arriba México!” at the end. Brazilian artist Anitta performed a multilingual medley from her Funk Generation: A Favela Love Story. In addition, Shakira and Karol G won the award for best collaboration for “TQG.” Not only did the women give their acceptance speech in Spanish, shouting out their home country of Colombia, but they also won in a category otherwise populated by mainstream English-language artists like Doja Cat with Post Malone, and Metro Boomin with The Weeknd, 21 Savage, and Diddy. The interchangeable, tropical Latinidad of the earlier Latin boom was replaced with shout outs to specific countries and regions, and the crowd proudly waved Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Colombian flags. At the VMAs, Latin musicians were not isolated in Latin awards categories or depicted as exotic novelties. They were central to the show – nominated for major awards, and celebrated for some of the night’s most memorable performances.

Much like this year’s Coachella, which featured Bad Bunny and K-Pop sensation Black Pink as headliners, this year’s VMAs reflects a more global approach to pop music. Tuesday night’s award show also featured two performances by K-Pop groups, and MTV offered its first ever award in Best Afrobeats. In this context, it makes sense that Latin music would have a significant presence in the program. But the dominance of Latin music right now makes it so that no part of the music industry can leave Latin music out anymore. Not the VMAs, not the Grammys, not Coachella. As Thalia proudly declared on stage, “this last year for the first time in the US Latin music made a billion dollars in streaming.” Bad Bunny has been the most streamed artist on Spotify for three years in a row, has the longest-running Spanish-language album at the top of the Billboard chart, and in 2022 became the only artist in history to stage two separate $100 million-grossing tours in less than 12 months. Karol G became the first woman to have a Spanish-language debut at number one, and came to the VMAs after a string of historic performances at her Mañana Será Bonito stadium tour. Latin music’s global appeal is undeniable and the industry has to respond accordingly.

This is among the most important times in history for Latin music, and honoring artists like Shakira center stage at the VMAs helps underscore the musical evolution we are lucky enough to witness. Twenty years ago, Shakira had to crossover into the US market in English; now she performs in her native Spanish and is more relevant than ever. The global success of stars like Peso Pluma, Karol G, and Bad Bunny means we need to completely reevaluate the concept of the crossover. Latin artists today did not crossover, the market crossed over into them. They are not compromising their language, their identity, or their culture. They do not have to kowtow to industry expectations that they perform the exotic, sexy Latin other. So while the VMA Vanguard Award winner Shakira may have had to crossover into English to make it during the ‘90s Latin boom, she can proudly return to her roots and, this time, the market will follow her.

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Featured Image: Screen shot by SO! from Shakira’s MTV 2023 Video Vanguard acceptance speech

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Petra Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College, and the author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico and the forthcoming book Fun, Fitness, Fiesta: Selling Latinx Culture in Zumba Fitness. Vanessa Díaz is Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, and the author of Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood. Díaz and Rivera-Rideau are the co-creators of the Bad Bunny Syllabus.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne—Lucreccia Quintanilla

Unapologetic Paisa Chingona-ness: Listening to Fans’ Sonic Identities–Yessica Garcia Hernandez

SO! Podcast #74: Bonus Track for Spanish Rap & Sound Studies Forum

Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-Language Radio– D. Inés Casillas

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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This post is co-authored by José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.  

Gloria Anzaldúa (1999)

Ciudad Juárez es número uno/

y la frontera más fabulosa y bella del mundo

Juan Gabriel  (lyric to “Juárez es el #1” – 1984)

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Geographically, the Paso del Norte (PdN) region includes the city of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as well as neighboring cities in the state of New Mexico (see map). U.S. citizens live and play in Juárez, and those in Juárez (Juarenses), live and work in El Paso with families extended on both sides; continually moving back and forth. Yet, this broader region has long been plagued with sensationalizing headlines, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, that cast violent and limiting portrayals of these borderland communities. Recognized as sister cities, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are seen less as close-knit siblings and more like distant cousins with Juárez routinely referred to undesirably as the little sister or ugly sister in comparison to El Paso. Indeed these hierarchical north/south (first world/not-quite-first-world) distinctions are products of histories of colonialism, unequal trade policies, and racial capitalist systems galvanized by immigrant detention camps (a tenant of the Immigration Industrial Complex). Within larger conversations about border cities, both Tijuana (San Diego) and Reynosa (McAllen) are recognized as the “primary” border cities due to their larger population size, transnational capital, and industrious reputations.

Two decades ago, Josh Kun’s concept of the “aural border” invited scholars to consider the US/Mexico border as a “field of sound, a terrain of musicality and music-making, of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing” (2000). Kun’s writings over the years have roused generations of sound scholars to listen to borders, border crossings, border communities and how they reverberate their economic, social, and migrant conditions. This essay intentionally moves away from Kun’s (beloved) border city of Tijuana and towards a less-referenced US/Mexico border city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Here, 1,201 kilometers east of Tijuana, we offer an opportunity to listen to Juárez’s everyday bustling of migratory life through the digital sound repository, the Border Soundscapes Project.

Sound structures our social, cultural, and political relations, and as Tom Western reminds us succinctly: “sounds have politics” (2020). Indeed, Juárez’s soundscapes are microcosms of economic, immigration and border enforcement policies as the city’s migratory composition changes depending on the latest economic crisis in the global south. “Whether intentional or unintentional,” Sarah Barns insists “urban soundscapes are by-products of both active design strategies as well as infrastructure and socio-economic organization” (2014). In essence, listening to migrants within Juárez, along with those planning to traverse Ciudad Juárez (to el norte), shapes our multiethnic and multiracial understandings of Latinidad.

Field audio recordings of public life including nuanced linguistic expressions, comprise a rich sonic site that best demonstrates Juárez’s daily sounds of transit. This Project benefits tremendously from José Manuel Flores’s attentive ear, raised as a borderlander himself, and a seasoned crosser of the bridges linking Juárez and El Paso. Flores created this Project in 2018, the same year, Ciudad Juárez became a prominent make-shift, temporary “home” for groups of migrants – currently a majority of Venezuelan-nationals with previous waves of Cubanos and Salvadoreños. Within Juárez, these migrant caravans initially settled on the primary Paso del Norte bridge and later to nearby main border bridges. Migrants have felt comfortable settling in this arid city of approximately 1.5 million people, while others consider Juárez more of a “waiting room” before setting their sights on securing political asylum in the United States. Either way, Juárez becomes part of both their journey and resettlement.

Below are five instances where we listen to migrants in Juárez.

Track 1: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “Te traigo un manguito”

Near the Paso del Nte. International Bridge, in Juárez, on Avenida Juárez, a downtown street where people begin to line up to cross the border. Cars are heard passing. A Venezuelan man wants to rest on this hot day yet his friend cajoles him to get ready to work. He promises his resting friend un mangito o agua (a mango or water) as soon as he’s up and ready to tackle some work.

Track #2: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “Cualquier bendición que le sale a tu corazón es buena”

Near Juárez’s Migration’s national institute and  Presidencia Municipal de Ciudad Juárez, an older woman cleans car windshields during traffic stops. As she cleans, she is heard laughing while conversing and doling out bendiciones (blessings) to those who gave her work. She’s assumed to be Venezuelan yet her use of the word “carnal” –a Mexican phrase to say brother – indicates that she’s been in Juárez for sometime.

Track #3: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “El Escandalo”

Local news highlights the influx of migrant caravans in promising tones. In an interview for local and national media in Mexico, Mr. José Luis Cruzalta, Cuban migrant, comments that: “no hay que ir para el lado de allá (EE.UU.), aquí se vive igual o mejor que del lado de allá, menos sacrificio, sin meterte en problemas, aquí no hay problemas de ningún tipo.” 

“you don’t have to go there (USA), here you live the same or better than on that side, less sacrifice, without getting into trouble, there are no problems of any kind here, they can stay here.” 

He later sends assurances that there is enough work for everyone and that only a willingness and desire to work is required, that nothing else.

Track #4: Migrants in Ciudad Juarez: “Rincon Cubano”

A group of Cuban migrants started a small Creole street food business offering “frituras de maíz” and Cuban “tamales.” The sound space of the downtown of Ciudad Juárez is nourished by the voices of a group of Cubans proclaiming Cuban Corn, “Maíz Cubano”. These contemporary Cuban criers conjure the city’s sonic memories of previous food vendors. Flores remembers fondly as a child the shouting of “Caldo de Oso” (Bear Broth) for sale and the fear that he’d find a grizzly bear in his soup. 

Track #5: Migrants In Ciudad Juarez: Haitians Talking in La Taquería

The small restaurant,”La Taqueria,” in downtown Juárez has undergone ethnic transformations. A few years ago it used to be a place known for traditional Cuban food –el rincón cubano–, nowadays it is a place recognized for its tasty, Venezuelan food. Caribbean music attracts some Haitian migrants to this place, inside the restaurant there are some families eating and having a restful moment. Outside the place, there are some Haitian families moving through the city carrying their luggage.

Bonus Track and Outro

The Border Soundscapes Project offers an acoustic ecology of this region through a site that acts as part-archive, part-map, and perhaps even, part-love-song, à la the late singer Juan Gabriel, a globally famous Juaranese who dedicated six songs to his beloved home city.

The Border Soundscapes Project invites listeners to hear for yourself why Juan Gabriel characterized Juárez as the most beautiful borderland in the world. His lyrics fiercely defended Juárez, and decades later, the Border Soundscapes Projects demonstrates how Juarez, the “little sister,” dignifies their migrant communities, in the critical context of Gloría Anzaldúa’s conceptions of borders as vague, “unnatural boundaries” crafted by the “emotional residue” of two other siblings: colonialism and capitalism.

Inspired by the written musings of Valeria Luiselli (2019), the Border Soundscapes Project also functions as an “inventory of echoes,” where sounds are not simply recovered or used within a larger catalog project. Instead, sounds are considered “present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost” (p. 141), and we would add, in transit. Most importantly, echoes cannot be placed on static, visual representations of standard “maps.” In offering audio snippets of Juárez’s public life, sound becomes a different migrant-led “scale of analysis” (DeLeon 2016); a type of audio counter-mapping of the U.S./Mexico border that lends itself uniquely to sound.

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Featured Image by Flickr User Simon Foot, “Ciudad Juárez, from El Paso, Texas” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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José Manuel Flores is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Composition Program at The University of Texas at El Paso. He holds an MA in Studies and Creative Processes in Art and Design. He considers that the sounds that arise between the Juarez and El Paso border are relevant because they contribute to the historical heritage of the region. That is why his interest as a researcher focuses on Sound Studies, specifically in the intersection between Soundscapes and philosophy from a disciplinary posture of rhetoric.

Dolores Inés Casillas is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (2014), which received two book prizes, and co-editor of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (2016) and Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (2018).

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes

SO! READS: Melissa Mora Hidalgo’s Mozlandia: Morrissey Fans in the Borderlands–Nabeel Zuberi

Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport–Michelle Pfeiffer

Óyeme Voz: U.S. Latin@ & Immigrant Communities Re-Sound Citizenship and Belonging-Nancy Morales

“Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*–Sara Hinijos and Inés Casillas

“Listening to the Border: ‘”2487″: Giving Voice in Diaspora’ and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez”-D. Ines Casillas

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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In the past year, we, Esther, a first-generation profesora in Latinx culture and feminist studies in Chicago and Kristian, an L.A-raised Xicano de letras pursuing a doctoral degree in Santa Barbara, engaged in a multi-synchronous dialogue on the life-giving sonics of our critical consciousness. This Xicanacimiento, as theorized in Kristian’s current writing and in conversation with Irene Vasquez and an emerging generation of Chicana/o scholar-educators, refers to the incomplete process and life-giving knowledge forged in the socio-political and pedagogical activities of Chicanx worldmaking. 

SO! writers note music listening as a powerful site for critical thinking. Erika Giselda Abad, for instance, teaches the Hamilton Mixtape so her Latinx students may “hear [their stories] from people who look and sound like them.” We reflected on the pedagogical implications of our music listening that informed our coming-into-critical consciousness. In this diálogo, we developed a playlist through experimenting with our sonic memories through the poetics of our rasquache sensibilities. Gloria Anzaldúa suggests something similar with notes from Los Tigres, Silvio Rodriguez, and others in La Frontera. Our auditory imaginary echoes our evolving conocimiento toward spiritual activism.

Here, we offer our musical resonances as shaped by our gendered, place-based, and generational Xicanx experiences as a pathway to hear the auditory dimensions of Xicanacimiento. Our listening is thus counter-hegemonic or a “brown form of listening” as suggested by D. Inés Casillas, “a form of radical self-love, a sonic eff-you, and a means of taking up uninvited (white) space,” when this listening evolves critical anti-imperialist and feminist consciousness that hears 500 years of opresión y resistencia.

Diverging from the mixtape genre, our Xicanacimiento playlist seeks to convey something beyond connection and emotion towards a sustained affective state. Instead of a sonic moment, we hear a sonic stream; a subaltern auditory repertoire that is multi-directional and open to expansion by any and all interpellated Xicanx ears.  

Kristian: Tuning-in to Xicanacimiento is a symbiosis of feeling and listening to La Chicanada from Califas to all corners of Aztlán unearthed. I was raised to the sounds of my father’s rancheras played in his truck and the hip-thumping rhythms of bachata and reggaetón played in my mother’s kitchen after a workday.

Yet, my love for UK anarcho-punk and US hardcore punk developed in defiance of public schooling and of a disaffected civil society. As a youth during the Great Recession, a future without higher education meant prison, the military, death by overdose, or the eternal damnation of working the Los Angeles service industry. I thrashed in sound; numbing my ears with noise, bruising in the mosh pit; bearing witness to minors as mota and alcohol addicts; pierced by the cries of police sirens breaking up our communion. 

I found refuge in Xicanacimiento as a community college student and as a transfer at UC Los Angeles. I came into Xicanx consciousness by studying Mexican anarchists and Chicanx organizing. As a MEChistA, I came to listen to the ways local elders, youth, organizers, and agents of social transformation in Los Angeles identified their struggle with land, life, and spirit. My primer to social movements gave me language, and it was MEChistAs who offered me a new soundtrack against the escapism of the Los Angeles punk scene. The resonances of marchas, fiestas, and the songs of danza azteca oriented me into a new modality of listening. Xicanacimiento was the sonic web of these social and cultural practices, rooted in my auditory encounters with the verses of Quetzal, the biting guitars of Subsistencia, the rhythms of Quinto Sol, and the lyrical narratives of Aztlán Underground. The life-giving sonics of Xicanacimiento grazed against my wounded sonics of broken glass, nos tanks, drunk noise, and the cacophonous affair of a raided gig as intoxicated Latinx youth disperse into the discordant symphonies of the urban soundscape.

Esther: I listen as a campesina migrante translocada from Jalisco to California, Texas, and Illinois. Some twenty years ago, while attending Cal State en el Valle Central, I heard Xicanacimiento as concientización; an evolving awareness about la lucha obrera, the open veins of Latinoamerica and my place within the interlocked hierarchies of race, class, and gender in US society. With Chicanx and brigadista musics I felt connected to la lucha and acquired the language to name capitalist imperialism rooted in white supremacy as the enemy of humanity and Pachamama. 

My early sonic memories include the sequence of my Alien number, the urging tones of radio hablada discussing Prop 187 (insisting we were aliens), Prop 227 (banning our language), and reports of Minuteman harassing la raza. I was immersed in listening; my mother’s sobremesa, my sister’s Temerarios at 5 am, Selena on the school bus, and 90s hits-from Chalino to Morrissey-on Columbia House CDs I traded with my older brother. Among other norteñas, La Jaula de Oro, the theme song of the diaspora of papás mexicanos, played at random-at the marketa, en los files, in passing cars, and so on…- to remind us of my father’s sacrificio en el norte caring for 500 dairy cows, six days a week, in two 5-hour shifts, to provide us el sueño americano.

I studied music in college, playing jazz and orchestral bass until the racist and sexual harassment targeting my young Latina body turned me away. I left the scene but continued my communion with music through library loans, traveling vendors, and trips to Amoeba. In reggae and canción nueva I found otros mundos posibles in the upbeat, cariño in 2 over 3, and the poetics of black and brown history; manos abiertas, muchas manos.

In 2002, “El Rasquache Rudo” a poet from the Rudo Revolutionary Front brought me sounds from Azltán; the UFW unity clap rallying in Modesto, a recitation by José Montoya in Sacramento, and brigadista music synergizing the 1492 quincentennial resistance with the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). As Omar Marquez argues, the Zapatista uprising shifted Chicano ideology to speak from the position of a living indigenous present; still loud in the work of Xicanx activists like Flor Martinez. Into the 21st century, Aztlán Underground, Manu Chao, and Todos Tus Muertos, among others, soundtracked our protests against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Julieta Venegas’s distinctly vulnerable voice over the controlled chaos of ska and Martha Gonzalez’s tension over the wall of sound that is Quetzal, was transformative as I heard In Lak’ech; hearing in their voices possibilities for my Chicana existence. 

Some of these selections anchor my first-year lectures at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where most of my students are working-class Latinx and Black. I do this with the intention of “opening affective pathways toward Xicanacimiento” as Kristian offered, and to insist on the point that Latina/o/x Studies is to be a critical, anti-hegemonic, subaltern field of study that hears a history from el mundo zurdo.

Outro:

In a gesture to deconstruct the term Xicanacimiento, one might think of the words “renacimiento”and “conocimiento.” What might emerge is a “regenerative force” and “collective knowledges” in consideration to how we listen, what resonances are made, and what sounds we inhabit when Xicanacimiento is invoked or felt as sound. Tuning into this auditory imagination guides the listener to a myriad and select decisions of what constitutes the Xicanx resonance for the local sonic geographies and the soundscapes which emerge from music. This curated sonic experience is one where voice, instrument, memory, and affect intersect.

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Featured Image by Jennifer Lynn Stoever

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Esther Díaz Martín is a researcher and educator in the Latin American and Latino Studies and the Gender and Women’s Studies program at the University of Illinois in Chicago. At present, she is working towards finishing her manuscript Latina Radiophonic Feminism(s) which seeks to amplify the acoustic work of popular feminism in contemporary Spanish-language radio and Latina podcasting. 

Kristian E. Vasquez is a Xicano writer, poet, and zinester born and raised in Los Angeles, California currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research on the affects, sounds, and semiotics of La Xicanada expands the concept of Xicanacimiento, centering the affective force of expressive culture.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes

SO! Podcast #74: Bonus Track for Spanish Rap & Sound Studies Forum—Lucreccia Quintanilla

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

Mixtapes v. Playlists: Medium, Message, Materiality–Mike Glennon

SO! Amplifies: Memoir Mixtapes

Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón

Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Christopher Chien

Sounding Out! Podcast #28: Off the 60: A Mix-Tape Dedication to Los Angeles–J.L. Stoever

“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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My Puerto Rican grandmother used to sing Pedro Infante’s “Las mañanitas” to all the women in the family on their birthdays, so naturally I grew up thinking this was a Puerto Rican song. Not quite – it’s Mexican. When my family came to New York City from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, they were starved of warm waters, mountains, and family members, but they were not starved of Spanish-language music and media thanks in large part to Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. In the Bronx, Puerto Ricans would go the theaters to watch movies like Nosotros los Pobres (1948),which popularized boleros like “Las Mañanitas.” This movie-going ritual in the wake of relocation and diaspora has provided the birthday soundtrack to my life. 

My mother grew up listening to her father sing boleros, and she would later sing with the Florida Grand Opera Chorus when I was a child. My early knowledge of opera came from her. Growing up in Miami Beach, I would also listen to reggaetón and hip-hop in afterschool programs. The Parks & Recreation department would host dances for us, and that was where I first learned to dance perreo. My early musical surroundings represent what it means to be a colonial subject, to hear the Italianate vocal legacies of opera mixed with the Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous rhythms of reggaetón. This post contextualizes my experience within bolero’s colonial history and legacy particularly its operatic disciplining of brown and Black bodies and voices. Reggaetóneras provide models for sonic subversion by being ronca, raspy, or breathy, and thus overriding internalized Eurocentric dichotomies of feminine and masculine vocal timbres.

When I began my own operatic training in college, I was constantly told to “purify” my voice, to resist vocal “fry,” and to handle my acid reflux by avoiding spicy foods. I was steered away from singing the pop songs I had grown up with, and kept many musical activities secret, like when I soloed for the tango ensemble and my a cappella group. In graduate school, thanks to my Latina roommates, I began listening to reggaetón again. I reunited with the voices that raised me and was reassured that their teachings of resistance would always present themselves when I needed them.

After 20 years of listening to Ivy, I have located the descriptor that most closely encapsulates the way her voice sounds to me: ronca. This is Spanish for hoarse, and in my experience, it’s been used colloquially, mostly by women, to describe moments when their throats might feel sore, and their voices sound raspy, or masculine, even. Ronca has been articulated as an epistemology of vocal sounding in the artistry of lower-class Black reggaetón creators like Don Omar and more recently, Ozuna. Sounding ronca is a signifier of realness, of truly knowing the struggle of race and class oppression. It is a vocalization of full-body rage fueled by poverty and colonization.

Ivy’s voice is so special to me because she sounds like my aunt when she’s had a long day, my mom when she’s yelling, and my grandma after years of having long days and yelling at people. She sounds like the raw, unfiltered power that comes from exhaustion. She sounds like inner will and justified fury. She sounds like yelling at landlords and ex-husbands for hot water and child support. She sounds like age. And she always has, even when she was “young.” And this sound is even more beautiful and life-giving to me after 4+ years in a classical voice program that told me it was bad to sound hoarse or raspy, surveilled my eating, and perpetuated the colonization of Native and Black peoples through musical subjugation.

Operatic training utilizes mechanisms that are opposite of what is “natural” for me as a poor Latina from the barrio. It asks me to lift my voice, clarify it, and feminize it. This, to me, is antithetical to the girl who laughs really loudly, gets raspy often from yelling and eating too many Takis, and loves to sing from her chest. Ivy’s voice empowers my place as the antithesis. Even as I sang classically in college, my voice was still often described as “soulful,” “hoarse,” “raspy,” “throaty.” My voice, although in a moment of attempted cleanup in college, was read as having previously engaged in genres that disrupt colonial dichotomies of “art” and “noise.” The sonic Blackness– in particular the exoticized and tropicalized Blackness of Latinidad in the U.S.- of my timbre was legible, and perhaps even hyper-audible, in moments when I was trying to adapt to European art forms. Raquel Z. Rivera asserts in New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003) that Latinidad doesn’t take away from Blackness but adds an element of exoticism to the Blackness. Thus, I have come to understand ronca voices as representative of a Latina/e liberatory sonic and embodied praxis that resists the derogatory discourse around racialized voices predicated on European ideals of cleanliness.

The ronca voice is negotiating suciedad, Deborah Vargas’ analytic for how queers of color may reclaim their abject bodies and social spaces. Readings of my voice in predominantly white spaces were contextualized by my queer ambiguously-brown body, which in direct opposition to whitening regimes, was sounding suciedad. This is what ronca voices do, and what I conceptualize as “ronca realness”: the tendency of Latinas/es to not hide behind the voice but rather keep it real with the audience via their vocal timbre. Ronca voices sound another option to Barthes’ hegemonic article “The Grain of the Voice,” which has been applied to Ivy Queen and Don Omar in Jennifer Domino Rudolph’s “‘Roncamos Porque Podemos,’” and Dara Goldman’s “Walk like a Woman, Talk like a Man: Ivy Queen’s Troubling of Gender.” I intend ronca realness to be understood as a queer of color vocal analytic born from community and lived experience.

Ronca voices reflect emotional states, flip colonial gendered vocal scripts, reveal if the singer had coffee that morning and Hot Cheetos the night before, and navigate tough musical contours with strain and stress; most importantly, they refuse to be white(ned). In college, my ronca realness was not always a choice. Keeping it real, in general, is sometimes undecided upon prior to the act of realness; it is an additional and deeply engrained responsibility that queer people of color have in white spaces to sound their dissent, or else face the continued exploitation of their communities. Further, these acts of realness may not even be legible as such but are often coded as bad behavior or an attitude problem.

Within communities of color and (im)migrant communities, it’s important to recognize that Ivy Queen’s ronca timbre was permissible because she was light-skinned, thin, and usually took on the masculine role of the rapper, rather than the feminine role of the dancer, in several of her videos. These privileges have left Afro-Latina ronca reggaetóneras like La Sista in the shadows.

La Sista has veered away from sounding ronca in recent years, but in her debut album, Majestad Negroide (2006), she praised Yoruba goddess Yemaya and Taino cacique Anacaona with a hoarse, raspy, bold sound. She is the Afro-Indigenous Latina many of us needed growing up, and her absence speaks to the ways in which Black ronca voices are policed and erased within Latinx culture and elsewhere. Let us praise her now.

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Featured Image: Still image by SO! from RaiNao’s “Tentretiene”

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Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and performer from Miami Beach. She is a soon-to-be Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and earned her PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing explores how Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Cloe’s poems have been featured in the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit, and she has presented and performed at PopCon, Society for American Music, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch, among several others. 

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne—Lucreccia Quintanilla

“How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?”: DJ Irene, Sonic Interpellations of Dissent and Queer Latinidad in ’90s Los Angeles—Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.

Unapologetic Paisa Chingona-ness: Listening to Fans’ Sonic Identities–Yessica Garcia Hernandez

SO! Podcast #74: Bonus Track for Spanish Rap & Sound Studies Forum

Cardi B: Bringing the Cold and Sexy to Hip Hop—Ashley Luthers

In summer 2021, sound artist, engineer, musician, and educator Johann Diedrick convened a panel at the intersection of racial bias, listening, and AI technology at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn, NY. Diedrick, 2021 Mozilla Creative Media award recipient and creator of such works as Dark Matters, is currently working on identifying the origins of racial bias in voice interface systems. Dark Matters, according to Squeaky Wheel, “exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.” And now, he’s working with SO! as guest editor for this series (along with ed-in-chief JS!). It kicked off with Amina Abbas-Nazari’s post, helping us to understand how Speech AI systems operate from a very limiting set of assumptions about the human voice. Then, Golden Owens took a deep historical dive into the racialized sound of servitude in America and how this impacts Intelligent Virtual Assistants. Last week, Michelle Pfeifer explored how some nations are attempting to draw sonic borders, despite the fact that voices are not passports. Today, Dorothy R. Santos wraps up the series with a meditation on what we lose due to the intensified surveilling, tracking, and modulation of our voices. [To read the full series, click here] –JS

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In 2010, science fiction writer Charles Yu wrote a story titled “Standard Loneliness Package,” where emotions are outsourced to another human being. While Yu’s story is a literal depiction, albeit fictitious, of what might be entailed and the considerations that need to be made of emotional labor, it was published a year prior to Apple introducing Siri as its official voice assistant for the iPhone. Humans are not meant to be viewed as a type of technology, yet capitalist and neoliberal logics continue to turn to technology as a solution to erase or filter what is least desirable even if that means the literal modification of voice, accent, and language. What do these actions do to the body at risk of severe fragmentation and compartmentalization?

I weep.

I wail.

I gnash my teeth.

Underneath it all, I am smiling. I am giggling.

I am at a funeral. My client’s heart aches, and inside of it is my heart, not aching, the opposite of aching—doing that, whatever it is.

 Charles Yu, “Standard Loneliness Package,” Lightspeed: Science Fiction & Fantasy, November 2010

Yu sets the scene by providing specific examples of feelings of pain and loss that might be handed off to an agent who absorbs the feelings. He shows us, in one way, what a world might look and feel like if we were to go to the extreme of eradicating and off loading our most vulnerable moments to an agent or technician meant to take on this labor. Although written well over a decade ago, its prescient take on the future of feelings wasn’t too far off from where we find ourselves in 2023. How does the voice play into these connections between Yu’s story and what we’re facing in the technological age of voice recognition, speech synthesis, and assistive technologies? How might we re-imagine having the choice to displace our burdens onto another being or entity? Taking a cue from Yu’s story, technologies are being created that pull at the heartstrings of our memories and nostalgia. Yet what happens when we are thrust into a perpetual state of grieving and loss?

Humans are made to forget. Unlike a computer, we are fed information required for our survival. When it comes to language and expression, it is often a stochastic process of figuring out for whom we speak and who is on the receiving end of our communication and speech.  Artist and scholar Fabiola Hanna believes polyvocality necessitates an active and engaged listener, which then produces our memories. Machines have become the listeners to our sonic landscapes as well as capturers, surveyors, and documents of our utterances.

The past few years may have been a remarkable advancement in voice tech with companies such as Amazon and Sanas AI, a voice recognition platform that allows a user to apply a vocal filter onto any human voice, with a discernible accent, that transforms the speech into Standard American English. Yet their hopes for accent elimination and voice mimicry foreshadow a future of design without justice and software development sans cultural and societal considerations, something I work through in my artwork in progress, The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022-present).

The Cyborg’s Prosody is an interactive web-based artwork (optimized for mobile) that requires participants to read five vignettes that increasingly incorporate Tagalog words and phrases that must be repeated by the player. The work serves as a type of parody, as an “accent induction school” — providing a decolonial method of exploring how language and accents are learned and preserved. The work is a response to the creation of accent reduction schools and coaches in the Philippines. Originally, the work was meant to be a satire and parody of these types of services, but shifted into a docu-poetic work of my mother’s immigration story and learning and becoming fluent in American English.

Even though English is a compulsory language in the Philippines, it is a language learned within the parameters of an educational institution and not common speech outside of schools and businesses. From the call center agents hired at Vox Elite, a BPO company based in the Philippines, to a Filipino immigrant navigating her way through a new environment, the embodiment of language became apparent throughout the stages of research and the creative interventions of the past few years.

In Fall 2022, I gave an artist talk about The Cyborg’s Prosody to a room of predominantly older, white, cisgender male engineers and computer scientists. Apparently, my work caused a stir in one of the conversations between a small group of attendees. A couple of the engineers chose to not address me directly, but I overheard a debate between guests with one of the engineers asking, “What is her project supposed to teach me about prosody? What does mimicking her mom teach me?” He became offended by the prospect of a work that de-centered his language, accent, and what was most familiar to him.The Cyborg’s Prosody is a reversal of what is perceived as a foreign accented voice in the United States into a performance for both the cyborg and the player. I introduce the term western vocal drag to convey the caricature of gender through drag performance, which is apropos and akin to the vocal affect many non-western speakers effectuate in their speech.

The concept of western vocal drag became a way for me to understand and contemplate the ways that language becomes performative through its embodiment. Whether it is learning American vernacular to the complex tenses that give meaning to speech acts, there is always a failure or queering of language when a particular affect and accent is emphasized in one’s speech. The delivery of speech acts is contingent upon setting, cultural context, and whether or not there is a type of transaction occurring between the speaker and listener. In terms of enhancement of speech and accent to conform to a dominant language in the workplace and in relation to global linguistic capitalism, scholar Vijay A. Ramjattan states in that there is no such thing as accent elimination or even reduction. Rather, an accent is modified. The stakes are high when taking into consideration the marketing and branding of software such as Sanas AI that proposes an erasure of non-dominant foreign accented voices.

The biggest fear related to the use of artificial intelligence within voice recognition and speech technologies is the return to a Standard American English (and accent) preferred by a general public that ceases to address, acknowledge, and care about linguistic diversity and inclusion. The technology itself has been marketed as a way for corporations and the BPO companies they hire to mind the mental health of the call center agents subjected to racism and xenophobia just by the mere sound of their voice and accent. The challenge, moving forward, is reversing the need to serve the western world.

A transorality or vocality presents itself when thinking about scholar April Baker-Bell’s work Black Linguistic Consciousness. When Black youth are taught and required to speak with what is considered Standard American English, this presents a type of disciplining that perpetuates raciolinguistic ideologies of what is acceptable speech. Baker-Bell focuses on an antiracist linguistic pedagogy where Black youth are encouraged to express themselves as a shift towards understanding linguistic bias. Deeply inspired by her scholarship, I started to wonder about the process for working on how to begin framing language learning in terms of a multi-consciousness that includes cultural context and affect as a way to bridge gaps in understanding. 

Or, let’s re-think this concept or idea that a bad version of English exists. As Cathy Park Hong brilliantly states, “Bad English is my heritage…To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.” It is necessary for us all to reconfigure our perceptions of how we listen and communicate that perpetuates seeking familiarity and agreement, but encourages respecting and honoring our differences.

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Featured Image: Still from artist’s mock-up of The Cyborg’s Prosody(2022-present), copyright Dorothy R. Santos

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Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She has her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz and was a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.

Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation. In 2022, she received the Mozilla Creative Media Award for her interactive, docu-poetics work The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022). She serves as an advisory board member for POWRPLNT, slash arts, and House of Alegria.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer 

“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens

Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari 

Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso

The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020)—Casey Mecija

Look Who’s Talking, Y’all: Dr. Phil, Vocal Accent and the Politics of Sounding White–Christie Zwahlen

Listening to Modern Family’s Accent–Inés Casillas and Sebastian Ferrada

In summer 2021, sound artist, engineer, musician, and educator Johann Diedrick convened a panel at the intersection of racial bias, listening, and AI technology at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn, NY. Diedrick, 2021 Mozilla Creative Media award recipient and creator of such works as Dark Matters, is currently working on identifying the origins of racial bias in voice interface systems. Dark Matters, according to Squeaky Wheel, “exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.” And now, he’s working with SO! as guest editor for this series (along with ed-in-chief JS!). It kicked off with Amina Abbas-Nazari’s post, helping us to understand how Speech AI systems operate from a very limiting set of assumptions about the human voice. Last week, Golden Owens took a deep historical dive into the racialized sound of servitude in America and how this impacts Intelligent Virtual Assistants. Today, Michelle Pfeifer explores how some nations are attempting to draw sonic borders, despite the fact that voices are not passports.–JS

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In the 1992 Hollywood film Sneakers, depicting a group of hackers led by Robert Redford performing a heist, one of the central security architectures the group needs to get around is a voice verification system. A computer screen asks for verification by voice and Robert Redford uses a “faked” tape recording that says “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” The hack is successful and Redford can pass through the securely locked door to continue the heist. Looking back at the scene today it is a striking early representation of the phenomenon we now call a “deep fake” but also, to get directly at the topic of this post, the utter ubiquity of voice ID for security purposes in this 30-year-old imagined future.

In 2018, The Intercept reported that Amazon filed a patent to analyze and recognize user’s accents to determine their ethnic origin, raising suspicion that this data could be accessed and used by police and immigration enforcement. While Amazon seemed most interested in using voice data for targeting users for discriminatory advertising, the jump to increasing surveillance seemed frighteningly close, especially because people’s affective and emotional states are already being used for the development of voice profiling and voice prints that expand surveillance and discrimination. For example, voice prints of incarcerated people are collected and extracted to build databases of calls that include the voices of people on the other end of the line.

What strikes me most about these vocal identification and recognition technologies is how their appeal seems to lie, for advertisers, surveillers, and policers alike that voice is an attractive method to access someone’s identity. Supposedly there are less possibilities to evade or obfuscate identification when it is performed via the voice. It “is seen as a solution that makes it nearly impossible for people to hide their feelings or evade their identities.” The voice here works as an identification document, as a passport. While passports can be lost or forged, accent supposedly gives access to the identity of a person that is innate, unchanging, and tied to the body. But passports are not only identification documents. They are also media of mobility, globally unequally distributed, that allow or inhibit movement across borders. States want to know who crosses their borders, who enters and leaves their territory, increasingly so in the name of security.

What, then, when the voice becomes a passport? Voice recognition systems used in asylum administration in the Global North show what is at stake when the voice, and more specifically language and dialect, come to stand in for a person’s official national identity. Several states including Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden, as well as Australia and Canada have been experimenting with establishing the voice, or more precisely language and dialect, to take on the passport’s role of identifying and excluding people.

In the 1990s—not too far from the time of Sneakers release—they started to use a crude form of linguistic analysis, later termed Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO), as part of the administration of claims to asylum. In cases where people could not provide a form of identity documentation or when those documents would be considered fraudulent or inauthentic, caseworkers would look for this national identity in the languages and dialects of people. LADO analyzes acoustic and phonetic features of recorded speech samples in relation to phonetics, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, as well as intonation and pronunciation.

The problems and assumptions of this linguistic analysis are multiple as pointed out and critiqued by linguists. 1) it falsely ties language to territorial and geopolitical boundaries and assumes that language is intimately tied to a place of origin according to a language ideology that maps linguistic boundaries onto geographical boundaries. Nation-state borders on the African continent and in the Middle East were drawn by colonial powers without considerations of linguistic communities. 2) LADO thinks of language and dialect as static, monoglossic and a stable index of identity. These assumptions produce the idea of a linguistic passport in which language is supposed to function as a form of official state identification that distributes possibilities and impossibilities of movement and mobility. As a result, the voice becomes a passport and it simultaneously functions as a border, by inscribing language into territoriality. As Lawrence Abu Hamdan has written and shown through his sound art work The Freedom of Speech itself, LADO functions to control territory, produce national space, and attempts to establish a correlation between voice and citizenship.

I’ll add that the very idea of a passport has a history rooted in forms of colonial governance and population control and the modern nation-state and territorial borders. The body is intimately tied to the history of passports and biometrics. For example, German colonial administrators in South-West Africa, present day Namibia, and German overseas colony from 1884 to 1919 instituted a pass batch system to control the mobility of Indigenous people, create an exploitable labor force, and institute and reinforce white supremacy and colonial exploitation. Media and Black Studies scholar Simone Browne describes biometrics as “digital epidermalization,” to describe how surveillance becomes inscribed and encoded on the skin. Now, it’s coming for the voice too.

In 2016 the German government took LADO a step further and started to use what they call a voice biometric software that supposedly identifies the place of origin of people who are seeking asylum. Someone’s spoken dialect is supposedly recognized and verified on the basis of speech recordings with an average lengths of 25,7 seconds by a software employed by the German Ministry for Migration and Refugees (in German abbreviated as BAMF). The now used dialect recognition software used by German asylum administrators distinguishes between 4 large Arabic dialect groups: Levantine, Maghreb, Iraqi, Egyptian, and Gulf dialect. Just recently this was expanded with language models for Farsi, Dari and Pashto. There are plans to expand this software usage to other European countries, evidenced by BAMF traveling to other countries to demonstrate their software.

This “branding” of BAMF’s software stands in stark contradiction to its functionality. The software’s error rate is 20 percent. It is based on a speech sample as short as 26 seconds. People are asked to describe pictures while their speech is recorded, the software then indicates a percentage of probability of the spoken dialect and produces a score sheet that could indicate the following: 74% Egyptian, 13% Levantine, 8% Gulf Arabic, 5 % Other. The interpretation of results is left to the caseworkers without clear instructions on how to weigh those percentages against each other. The discretion left to caseworkers makes it more difficult to appeal asylum decisions. According to the Ministry, the results are supposed to give indications and clues about someone’s origin and are not a decision-making tool. However, as I have argued elsewhere, algorithmic or so-called “intelligent” bordering practices assume neutrality and objectivity and thereby conceal forms of discrimination embedded in technologies. In the case of dialect recognition the score sheet’s indicated probabilities produce a seeming objectivity that might sway case-workers in one direction or another. Moreover, the software encodes distinctions between who is deserving of protection and who is not; a feature of asylum and refugee protection regimes critiqued by many working in the field.

The functionality and operations of the software are also intentionally obscured. Research and sound artist Pedro Oliveira addresses the many black-boxed assumptions entering the dialect recognition technology. For instance, in his work Das hätte nicht passieren dürfen he engages with the labor involved in producing sound archives and speech corpora and challenges “ the idea that it might be feasible, for the purposes of biometric assessment, to divorce a sound’s materiality from its constitution as a cultural phenomenon.” Oliveira’s work counters the lack of transparency and accountability of the BAMF software. Information about its functionality is scarce. Freedom of information requests and parliamentary inquiries about the technical and algorithmic properties and training data of the software were denied as the information was classified because “the information can be used to prepare conscious acts of deception in the asylum proceeding and misuse language recognition for manipulation,” the German government argued.  While it is not necessarily deepfakes like the one Brandes produced to forego a security system that the German authorities are worried about, the specter of manipulation of the software looms large. 

The consequences of the software’s poor functionality can have drastic consequences for asylum decisions. Vice reported in 2018 the story of Hajar, whose name was changed to protect his identity. Hajar’s asylum application in Germany was denied on the basis of a dialect recognition software that supposedly indicated that he was a Turkish speaker and, thus, could not be from the Autonomous Region Kurdistan as he claimed. Hajar who speaks the Kurdish dialect Sorani had been instructed by BAMF to speak into a telephone receiver and describe an image in his first language. The software’s results indicated a 63% probability that Hajar speaks Turkish and the caseworker concluded that Hajar had lied in his asylum hearings about his origin and his reasons to seek asylum in Germany who continued to appeal the asylum decision. The software is not equipped to verify Sorani and should not have been used on Hajar in the first place.

Why the voice? It seems that bureaucrats and caseworkers saw it as a way to identify people with ease and scale language analysis more easily. It is also important to consider the context in which this so-called voice biometry is used. Many people who seek asylum in Germany cannot provide identity documents like passports, birth certificates, or identification cards. This is the case because people cannot take them with them as they flee, they are lost or stolen on people’s journeys, or they are confiscated by traffickers. Many forms of documentation are also not accepted as legitimate by state authorities. Generally, language analysis is used in a hostile political context in which claims to asylum are increasingly treated with suspicion.

The voice as a part of the body was supposed to provide an answer to this administrative problem of states. In response to the long summer of migration in 2015 Germany hired McKinsey to overhaul their administrative processes, save money, accelerate asylum procedures, and make them more “efficient.” In July 2017, the head of the Department for Infrastructure and Information Technology of the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees hailed the office’s new voice and dialect recognition software as “unrivaled world-wide” in its capacity to determine the region of origin of asylum seekers and to “detect inconsistencies” in narratives about their need for protection. More than identification documents, personal narratives, or other features of the body, the voice, the BAMF expert suggests is the medium that allows for the indisputable verification of migrants’ claims to asylum, ostensibly pinpointing their place of origin.

Voice and dialect recognition technology are established by policy makers and security industries as particularly successful tools to produce authentic evidence about the origin of asylum seekers. Asylum seekers have to sound like being from a region that warrants their claims to asylum: requiring the translation of voices into geographical locations. As a result, automated dialect recognition becomes more valuable than someone’s testimony. In other words, the voice, abstracted into a percentage, becomes the testimony. Here, the software, similarly to other biometric security systems, is framed as more objective, neutral, and efficient way of identifying the country of origin of people as compared to human decision-makers. As the German Migration agency argued in 2017: “The IT supported, automated voice biometric analysis provides an independent, objective and large-scale method for the verification of the indicated origin.”

The use of dialect recognition puts forth an understanding of the voice and language that pinpoints someone’s origin to a certain place, without a doubt and without considering how someone’s movement or history. In this sense, the software inscribes a vision of a sedentary, ahistorical, static, fixed, and abstracted human into its operations. As a result, geographical borders become reinforced and policed as fixed boundaries of territorial sovereignty. This vision of the voice ignores multiple mobilities and (post)colonial histories and reinscribes the borders of nation-states that reproduce racial violence globally. Dialect recognition reproduces precarity for people seeking asylum. As I have shown elsewhere, in the absence of other forms of identification and the presence of generalized suspicion of asylum claims, accent accumulates value while the content of testimony becomes devalued. Asylum applicants are placed in a double bind, simultaneously being incited to speak during asylum procedures and having their testimony scrutinized and placed under general suspicion.

Similar to conventional passports, the linguistic passport also represents a structurally unequal and discriminatory regime that needs to be abolished. The software was framed as providing a technical solution to a political problem that intensifies the violence of borders. We need to shift to pose other questions as well. What do we want to listen to? How could we listen differently? How could we build a world in which nation-states and passports are abolished and the voice is not a passport but can be appreciated in its multiplicity, heteroglossia, and malleability? How do we want to live together on a planet increasingly becoming uninhabitable?

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Featured Image: Voice Print Sample–Image from US NIST

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Michelle Pfeifer is postdoctoral fellow in Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and Social Change at Technische Universität Dresden in the Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change. Their research is located at the intersections of (digital) media technology, migration and border studies, and gender and sexuality studies and explores the role of media technology in the production of legal and political knowledge amidst struggles over mobility and movement(s) in postcolonial Europe. Michelle is writing a book titled Data on the Move Voice, Algorithms, and Asylum in Digital Borderlands that analyses how state classifications of race, origin, and population are reformulated through the digital policing of constant global displacement.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens

Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari 

Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso

The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020)—Casey Mecija

The Sonic Roots of Surveillance Society: Intimacy, Mobility, and Radio–Kathleen Battles

Acousmatic Surveillance and Big Data–Robin James

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In summer 2021, sound artist, engineer, musician, and educator Johann Diedrick convened a panel at the intersection of racial bias, listening, and AI technology at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn, NY. Diedrick, 2021 Mozilla Creative Media award recipient and creator of such works as Dark Matters, is currently working on identifying the origins of racial bias in voice interface systems. Dark Matters, according to Squeaky Wheel, “exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.” And now, he’s working with SO! as guest editor for this series (along with ed-in-chief JS!). It kicked off with Amina Abbas-Nazari’s post, helping us to understand how Speech AI systems operate from a very limiting set of assumptions about the human voice. Today Golden Owens explored what happens when companies sell Black voices along with their Intelligent Virtual Assistants. Tune in for a deep historical dive into the racialized sound of servitude in America. Even though corporations aren’t trying to hear this absolutely critical information–or Black users in general–they better listen up. –JS

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In October 2019, Google released an ad for their Google Assistant (GA), an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that initially debuted in 2016. As revealed by onscreen text and the video’s caption, the ad’s announced that the GA would soon have a new celebrity voice. The ten-second promotion includes a soundbite from this unseen celebrity—who states: “You can still call me your Google Assistant. Now I just sound extra fly”— followed by audio of the speaker’s laughter, a white screen, the GA logo, and a written question: “Can you guess who it is?”

Consumers quickly speculated about the person behind the voice, with many posting their guesses on Reddit. The earliest comments named Tiffany Haddish, Lizzo, and Issa Rae as prospects, with other users affirming these guesses. These women were considered the most popular contenders: two articles written about the new GA voice cited the Reddit post, with one calling these women Redditors’ most popular guesses and the other naming only them as users’ desired choices. Those who guessed Rae were proven correct. One day after the ad, Google released a longer promo revealing her as the GA’s new voice, including footage of Rae recording responses for the assistant. The ad ends with Rae repeating the “extra fly” line from the initial promo, smiling into the camera.

Google’s addition of Rae as an IVA voice option is one of several recent examples of Black people’s voices employed in this manner. Importantly, this trend toward Black-voiced IVAs deviates from the pre-established standard of these digital aides. While there are many voice options available, the default voices for IVAs are white female voices with flat dialects. This shift toward Black American voices is notable not only because of conversations about inclusion—with some Black users saying they feel more represented by these new voices—but because this influx of Black voices marks a spiritual return to the historical employment of Black people as service-providing, labor-performing entities in the United States, thus subliminally reinforcing historical biases about Black people as uniquely suited for performing this type of work.

Marketed as labor-saving devices, IVAs are programmed to assist with cooking and grocery shopping, transmit messages and reminders, and provide entertainment, among other tasks. Since the late 2010s they have also been able to operate other technologies within users’ homes: Alexa, for example, can control Roomba robotic vacuums; IVA-compatible smart plugs or smart home devices enable IVAs to control lights, locks, thermostats, and other such apparatuses. Behaviorally, IVAs are designed and expected to be on-call at all times, but not to speak or act out of turn—with programmers often directed to ensure these aides are relatable, reliable, trustworthy, and unobtrusive.

Far from operating in a vacuum, IVAs eerily evoke the presence of and parameters set for enslaved workers and domestic servants in the U.S.—many of whom have historically been Black American women. Like IVAs, Black women servants cooked, cleaned, entertained children, and otherwise served their (predominantly white) employers, themselves operating as labor-saving devices through their performance of these labors. Employers similarly expected these women to be ever-available, occupy specific areas of the home, and obey all requests and demands—and were unsettled if not infuriated when maids did not behave according to their expectations.

White women being the default voices of IVAs has somewhat obfuscated the degree to which these aides have re-embodied and replaced the Black servants who once predominantly executed this work, but incorporating Black voices into these roles removes this veil, symbolically re-implementing Black people as labor-performing entities by having them operate as the virtual assistants who now perform much of the labor Black workers historically performed. Enabling Black people to be used as IVAs thus re-aligns Black beings with the performance of service and labor.

While Black women were far from the only demographic conscripted into domestic labor, by the 1920s they comprised a “permanent pool of servants” throughout the country, due largely to the egress of white American and immigrant women from domestic service into fields that excluded Black women (183). Black women’s prominence in domestic service was heavily reflected in early U.S. media, which overwhelmingly portrayed domestic servants not just as Black women, but as Black Mammies—domestic servant archetypes originally created to promote the myth that Black women “were contented, even happy as slaves.” Characters like Gone with the Wind’s “Mammy” pulled both from then-current associations of Black women with domestic labor and from white nostalgia for the Antebellum era, and specifically for the archetypal Mammy—marking Black women as idealized labor-performing domestics operating in service of white employers. These on-screen servants were “always around when the boss needed them…[and] always ready to lend a helping hand when times were tough” (36). Historian Donald Bogle dubbed this era of Hollywood the “Age of the Negro Servant,” referenced in this reel from the New York Times.

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Cinema and television merely built from years of audible racism on the radio—America’s most prominent form of in-home entertainment in the first half of the 20^th century—where Black actors also played largely servant and maid roles that demanded they speak in “distorted dialect, exaggerated intonation, rhythmic speech cadences, and particular musical instruments” in order to appear at all (143). This white-contrived portrayal of Black people is known as “Blackvoice,” and essentially functions as “the minstrel show boiled down to pure aurality” (14). These performances allowed familiar ideals of and narratives about Blackness to be communicated and recirculated on a national scale, even without the presence of Black bodies. Labor-performing Black characters like Beulah, Molasses and January, Aunt Jemima, and Amos and Andy were prominent in the Golden Age of Radio, all initially voiced by white actors. In fact, Aunt Jemima’s print advertising was just as dependent on stereotypical representations of her voice as it was on visual “Mammy” imagery.

When Black actors broke through white exclusion on the airwaves, many took over roles once voiced by white men and/or were forced by white radio producers and scriptwriters to “‘talk as white people believed Negroes talked’” so that white audiences could discern them as Black (371). This continuous realignment undoubtedly informs contemporary ideas of labor, labor performance, and laboring bodies, further promoted by the sudden influx of Black voice assistants in 2019.

Specifically, these similarities demonstrate that contemporary IVAs are intrinsically haunted by Black women slaves and servants: built in accordance with and thus inevitably evoking these laborers in their positioning, programming, and task performance. Further facilitating this alignment is the fact that advertisements for Black-voiced IVAs purposefully link well-known Black bodies in conjunction with their Black voices. Excepting Apple’s Black-sounding voice options for Siri, all of  the Black IVA voice options since 2019 have belonged to prominent Black American celebrities. Prior to Issa Rae, GA users could employ John Legend as their digital aide (April 2019 until March 2020). Samuel L. Jackson became the first celebrity voice option for Amazon’s Alexa in December 2019, followed by Shaquille O’Neal in July 2021.

The ads for Black-voiced IVAs thus link these disembodied aides not just to Black bodies, but to specific Black bodies as a sales tactic—bodies which signify particular images and embodiments of Blackness. The Samuel L. Jackson Alexa ad utilizes close-ups of Jackson recording lines for the IVA and of Echo speakers with Jackson’s voice emitting from them in response to users. John Legend is physically absent from the ad announcing him as the GA; however, his celebrity wife directs the GA to sing for her instead, after which she states that it is “just like the real John”—thus linking Legend’s body to the GA even without his onscreen presence. Amazon has even explicitly explored the connection between the Black-voiced IVA and the Black body, releasing a 2021 commercial called “Alexa’s Body” that saw Alexa voiced and physically embodied by Michael B. Jordan—with the main character in the commercial insinuating that he is the ideal vessel for Alexa.

By aligning these bodies with, and having them act as, labor-performing devices in service of consumers, these advertisements both re-align Blackness with labor and illuminate how these devices were always already haunted by laboring Black bodies—and especially, given the demographics of the bodies who most performed the types of labors IVAs now execute, laboring Black women’s bodies. That the majority of the Black celebrities employed as Black IVA voices are men suggests some awareness of and attempt to distance from this history and implicit haunting—an effort which itself exposes and illuminates the degree to which this haunting exists. 

In some cases, the Black people lending their voices to these IVAs also speak in a way that sonically suggests Blackness: Issa Rae’s “Now I’m just extra fly,” for example, incorporates Black American slang through the use of the word “fly. As part of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the term “fly” dates back to the 1970s and denotes coolness, attractiveness, and fashionableness. Because of its inclusion in Hip Hop, which has become the dominant music genre in the United States, the term, its meaning, and its racial origins are widely known amongst consumers. By using the word “fly,” Rae nods not only at these qualities but also at her own Blackness in a manner that is recognizable to a mainstream American audience.  Due in part to Hip Hop’s popularity, U.S.-based media outlets, corporations, and individuals of varying races and ethnicities regularly appropriate AAVE and Black slang terms, often without regard for the culture that created them or the vernacular they stem from. The ad preceding Issa Rae’s revelation as the GA specifically invited users to align the voice with a celebrity body, and users’ predominant claims that the voice was a Black woman’s suggest that something about the voice conjured Blackness and the Black female body.

This racial marking was also likely facilitated by how people naturally listen and respond to voices. As Nina Sun Eidsheim notes in The Race of Sound, “voices heard are ultimately identified, recognized, and named by listeners at large. In hearing a voice, one also brings forth a series of assumptions about the nature of voice” (12). This series of assumptions, Eidsheim asserts in “The Voice as Action,” is inflected by the “multisensory context” surrounding a given voice, i.e., “a composite of visual, textural, discursive, and other kinds of information” (9). While we imagine our impressions of voices as uniquely meaningful, “we cannot but perceive [them] through filters generated by our own preconceptions” (10). As a result, listening is never a neutral or truly objective practice.

For many consumers, these filters are informed by what Jennifer Lynn Stoever terms the sonic color line, “a socially constructed boundary that racially codes sonic phenomena such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones” (11). Where the racial color line allows white people to separate themselves from Black people on the basis of visual and behavioral differences, the sonic color line allows people “to construct and discern racial identities based on voices, sounds, and particular soundscapes” and to assign nonwhite voices with “differential cultural, social, and political value” (11). In the U.S., the sonic color line operates in tandem with the American listening ear, which “normalizes the aural tastes and standards of white elite masculinity as the singular way to interpret sonic information” (13)  and therefore marks-as-Other not only the voices and bodies of Black people, but also those of non-males and the non-elite.

Ironically, the very listening practices which make consumers register particular voices and vocal qualities as Black also make Black voices inaccessible to Alexa and other IVAs. Scholarship on Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems and Speech AI observes that many Black users find it necessary to code-switch when speaking to IVAs, as the devices fail to comprehend their linguistic specificities. A study by Christina N. Harrington et al. in which Black elders used the Google Home to seek health information discovered that “participants felt that Google Home struggles to understand their communication style (e.g., diction or accent) and language (e.g., dialect) specifically due to the device being based on Standard English” (15). To address these struggles, participants switched to Standard American English (SAE), eliminating informal contractions and changing their tone and verbiage so that the GA would understand them. As one of the study’s participants states,

You do have to change your words. Yes. You do have to change your diction and yes, you have to use… It cannot be an exotic name or a name that’s out of the Caucasian round. …You have to be very clear with the English language. No ebonic (15).

This incomprehension extends to Black Americans of all ages, and to other IVAs. A study by Allison Koenecke et al. on ASR systems produced by Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Apple discovered that these entities had a harder time accurately transcribing Black speech than white speech, producing “an average word error rate (WER) of 0.35 for black speakers compared with 0.19 for white speakers.” (7684). A study by Zion Mengesha et al. on the impact of these errors on Black Americans—which included participants from different regions with a range of ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds and education-levels—discovered that many felt frustrated and othered by these mistakes, and felt further pressure to code-switch so that they would not be misunderstood. Koenecke et al. concluded that ASR systems could not understand the “phonological, phonetic, or prosodic characteristics of” AAVE (7687), and that this ignorance would make the use of these technologies more difficult for Black users—a sentiment that was echoed by participants in the study conducted by Mengesha et al., most of whom marked the technology as working better for white and/or SAE speakers (5). 

The speech recognition errors these technologies demonstrate—which also extend to speakers in other racial and ethnic groups—illuminate the reality that despite including Black voices as IVAs, these assistant technologies are not truly built for Black people, or for any person that does not speak Standard American English. And where AAVE is largely associated with Blackness, SAE is predominantly associated with whiteness: as a dialect widely perceived to be “lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics,” it is recognized as being “spoken by the majority group or the socially advantaged group” in the United States—both groups which are solely or primarily composed of white people. SAE is so identified with whiteness that Black people who only speak Standard English are often told that they sound and/or “talk” white, and Black people who deliberately invoke SAE in professional and/or interracial settings (i.e., code switching) are described as “talking white” or using their “white voice” when doing so. That IVAs and other ASR systems have such trouble understanding AAVE and other non-standard English dialects suggests that these technologies were not designed to understand any dialect other than SAE—and thus, given SAE’s strong identification with whiteness, were designed specifically to assist, understand, and speak to white users.

Writing on this phenomena as a woman with a non-standard accent, Sinduja Rangarajan highlights in “Hey Siri—Why Don’t You Understand More People Like Me?” that none of the IVAs currently on the market offer any American dialect that is not SAE. And while users can change their IVA’s accents, they are limited to Standard American, British, Irish, Australian, Indian, and South African—which Rangarajan rightly highlights as revealing who the IVAs think they are talking to, rather than who their user actually is. That most of these accents belong to Western, predominantly white countries (or to countries once colonized by white imperialists) strongly suggests that these devices are programmed to speak to—and perform labor for—white consumers specifically.

When considering the primary imagined and target users of IVAs, the sudden influx of Black-voiced IVAs becomes particularly insidious. Though they may indeed make some Black users feel more represented, cultivating this representation is merely a byproduct of their actual purpose. Because these technologies are not built for Black consumers, Black-voiced IVAs are meant to appeal not to Black users, but to white ones. Rae, Jackson, and the other Black celebrity voices may provide a much-needed variety in the types of voices applied to IVAs, but they primarily operate as “further examples of technology companies using Black voices to entertain white consumers while ignoring Black consumers.” Black-voiced assistants, after all, no better understand Black vernacular English than any of the other voice options for IVAs, a reality marking Black speech patterns as enjoyable but not legitimate.

By excluding Black consumers, the companies behind these IVAs insinuate that Blackness is only acceptable and worthy of consideration when operating in service of whiteness. Where Black people as consumers have been delegitimized and disregarded, Black voices as labor-saving assistants have been welcomed and deemed profitable—a reality which further emphasizes how historical constructions of Black people as labor-performing devices haunts these contemporary technologies. Tech companies reinforce historical positionings of white people as ideal consumers and Black people as consumable products—repeating historical demarcations of Blackness and whiteness in the present. 

In imagining the futures of IVAs, the companies behind them would need to reconsider how they interact—or fail to interact—with Black users. Both Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal, the last of the Black-celebrity-voiced IVAs still currently available to users, will be removed as Alexa voice options by September 2023, presenting an opportunity for these companies to divest. Whether or not the brands behind these IVAs take this initiative, consumers themselves can be critical of how AI technologies continue to reestablish hierarchical systems, of their own interactions with these devices, and of who these technologies are truly made for. In being critical, we can perhaps begin to envision alternative, reparative modes of AI technology—modes that serve and support more than one kind of user. 

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Featured Image: Issa Rae gif from the 2017 Golden Globes

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Golden Marie Owens is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. Her research interests include representations of race and gender in American media and popular culture, artificial intelligence, and racialized sounds. Her doctoral dissertation, “Mechanical Maids: Digital Assistants, Domestic Spaces, and the Spectre(s) of Black Women’s
Labor,” examines how intelligent virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States. In her time at Northwestern, she has had internal fellowships through the Office of Fellowships and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She currently holds an MMUF Dissertation Grant through the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and Ford Dissertation Fellowship through the National Academy for Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari 

Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso

Mr. and Mrs. Talking Machine: The Euphonia, the Phonograph, and the Gendering of Nineteenth Century Mechanical Speech – J. Martin Vest

Echo and the Chorus of Female Machines—AO Roberts

Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program —Chelsea Daniel and Samantha Ege

Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States–Vanessa Valdes

On Whiteness and Sound Studies–Gus Stadler

In summer 2021, sound artist, engineer, musician, and educator Johann Diedrick convened a panel at the intersection of racial bias, listening, and AI technology at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn, NY. Diedrick, 2021 Mozilla Creative Media award recipient and creator of such works as Dark Matters, is currently working on identifying the origins of racial bias in voice interface systems. Dark Matters, according to Squeaky Wheel, “exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.” And now, he’s working with SO! as guest editor for this series for Sounding Out! (along with ed-in-chief JS!). It starts today, with Amina Abbas-Nazari, helping us to understand how Speech AI systems operate from a very limiting set of assumptions about the human voice– are we training it, or is it actually training us?

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Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.” I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. “Now I have enabled the accent translation,” he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn.

The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it? (Wilfred Chan, 24 August 2022)

This telephone interaction was recounted in The Guardian reporting on a Silicon Valley tech start-up called Sanas. The company provides AI enabled technology for real-time voice modification for call centre workers voices to sound more “Western”. The company describes this venture as a solution to improve communication between typically American callers and call centre workers, who might be based in countries such as Philippines and India. Meanwhile, research has found that major companies’ AI interactive speech systems exhibit considerable racial imbalance when trying to recognise Black voices compared to white speakers. As a result, in the hopes of being better heard and understood, Google smart speaker users with regional or ethnic American accents relay that they find themselves contorting their mouths to imitate Midwestern American accents.

These instances describe racial biases present in voice interactions with AI enabled and mediated communication systems, whereby sounding ‘Western’ entitles one to more efficient communication, better usability, or increased access to services. This is not a problem specific to AI though. Linguistics researcher John Baugh, writing in 2002, describes how  linguistic profiling is known to have resulted in housing being denied to people of colour in the US via telephone interactions. Jennifer Stoever‘s The Sonic Color Line (2016) presents a cultural and political history of the racialized body and how it both informed and was informed by emergent sound technologies. AI mediated communication repeats and reinforces biases that pre-exist the technology itself, but also helping it become even more widely pervasive.

Mozilla’s commendable Common Voice project aims to ‘teach machines how real people speak’ by building an open source, multi-language dataset of voices to improve usability for non-Western speaking or sounding voices. But singer and musicologist, Nina Sun Eidsheim describes how ’a specific voice’s sonic potentiality [in] its execution can exceed imagination’ (7), and voices as having ‘an infinity of unrealised manifestations’ (8) in The Race of Sound (2019). Eidsheim’s sentiments describe a vocal potential, through musicality, that exists beyond ideas of accents and dialects, and vocal markers of categorised identity. As a practicing vocal performer, I recognise and resonate with Eidsheim’s ideas I have a particular interest in extended and experimental vocality, especially gained through my time singing with Musarc Choir and working with artist Fani Parali. In these instances, I have experienced the pleasurable challenge of being asked to vocalise the mythical, animal, imagined, alien and otherworldly edges of the sonic sphere, to explore complex relations between bodies, ecologies, space and time, illuminated through vocal expression.

Following from Eidsheim, and through my own vocal practice, I believe AI’s prerequisite of voices as “fixed, extractable, and measurable ‘sound object[s]’ located within the body” is over-simplistic and reductive. Voices, within systems of AI, are made to seem only as computable delineations of person, personality and identity, constrained to standardised stereotypes. By highlighting vocal potential, I offer a unique critique of the way voices are currently comprehended in AI recognition systems. When we appreciate the voice beyond the homogenous, we give it authority and autonomy, ultimately leading to a fuller understanding of the voice and its sounding capabilities.

My current PhD research, Speculative Voicing, applies thinking about the voice from a musical perspective to the sound and sounding of voices in artificially intelligent conversational systems. Herby the voice becomes an instrument of the body to explore its sonic materiality, vocal potential and extremities of expression, rather than being comprehended in conjunction to vocal markers of identity aligning to categories of race, gender, age, etc. In turn, this opens space for the voice to be understood as a shapeshifting, morphing and malleable entity, with immense sounding potential beyond what might be considered ordinary or everyday speech. Over the long term this provides discussion of how experimenting with vocal potential may illuminate more diverse perspectives about our sense of self and being in relation to vocal sounding.

Vocal and movement artist Elaine Mitchener exhibits the disillusion of the voice as ‘fixed’ perfectly in her performance of Christian Marclay’s No!, which I attended one hot summer’s evening at the London Contemporary Music Festival in 2022. Marclay’s graphic score uses cut outs from comic book strips to direct the performer to vocalise a myriad of ‘No”s.

Mitchener’s rendering of the piece involved the cooperation and coordination of her entire body, carefully crafting lips, teeth, tongue, muscles and ligaments to construct each iteration of ‘No.’ Each transmutation of Mitchener’s ‘No’s’ came with a distinct meaning, context, and significance, contained within the vocalisation of this one simple syllable. Every utterance explored a new vocal potential, enabled by her body alone. In the context of AI mediated communication, we can see this way of working with the voice renders the idea of the voice as ‘fixed’ as redundant. Mitchener’s vocal potential demonstrates that voices can and do exist beyond AI’s prescribed comprehension of vocal sounding.

In order to further understand how AI transcribes understandings of voice onto notions of identity, and vocal potential, I produced the practice project Polyphonic Embodiment(s) as part of my PhD research, in collaboration with Nestor Pestana, with AI development by Sitraka Rakotoniaina. The AI we created for this project is based upon a speech-to-face recognition AI that aims to be able to tell what your face looks like from the sound of your voice. The prospective impact of this AI is deeply unsettling, as  its intended applications are wide-ranging – from entertainment to security, and as previously described AI recognition systems are inherently biased.

This multi-modal form of comprehending voice is also a hot topic of research being conducted by major research institutions including Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We wanted to explore this AI recognition programme in conjunction with an understanding of vocal potential and the voice as a sonic material shaped by the body. As the project title suggests, the work invites people to consider the multi-dimensional nature of voice and vocal identity from an embodied standpoint. Additionally, it calls for contemplation of the relationships between voice and identity, and individuals having multiple or evolving versions of identity. The collaboration with the custom-made AI software creates a feedback loop to reflect on how peoples’ vocal sounding is “seen” by AI, to contest the way voices are currently heard, comprehended and utilised by AI, and indeed the AI industry.

The video documentation for this project shows ‘facial’ images produced by the voice-to-face recognition AI, when activated by my voice, modified with simple DIY voice devices. Each new voice variation, created by each device, produces a different outputted face image. Some images perhaps resemble my face? (e.g. Device #8) some might be considered more masculine? (e.g. Device #10) and some are just disconcerting (e.g. Device #4). The speculative nature of Polyphonic Embodiment(s) is not to suggest that people should modify their voices in interaction with AI communication systems. Rather the simple devices work with bodily architecture and exaggerate its materiality, considering it as a flexible instrument to explore vocal potential. In turn this sheds light on the normative assumptions contained within AI’s readings of voice and its relationships to facial image and identity construction.

Through this artistic, practice-led research I hope to evolve and augment discussion around how the sounding of voices is comprehended by different disciplines of research. Taking a standpoint from music and design practice, I believe this can contest ways of working in the realms of AI mediated communication and shape the ways we understand notions of (vocal) identity: as complex, fluid, malleable, and ultimately not reducible to Western logics of sounding.

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Featured Image: Still image from Polyphonic Embodiments, courtesy of author.

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Amina Abbas-Nazari is a practicing speculative designer, researcher, and vocal performer. Amina has researched the voice in conjunction with emerging technology, through practice, since 2008 and is now completing a PhD in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, focusing on the sound and sounding of voices in artificially intelligent conversational systems. She has presented her work at the London Design Festival, Design Museum, Barbican Centre, V&A, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biennial, Critical Media Lab, Switzerland, Litost Gallery, Prague and Harvard University, America. She has performed internationally with choirs and regularly collaborates with artists as an experimental vocalist

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

What is a Voice?–Alexis Deighton MacIntyre

Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–-Steph Ceraso

Mr. and Mrs. Talking Machine: The Euphonia, the Phonograph, and the Gendering of Nineteenth Century Mechanical Speech – J. Martin Vest

One Scream is All it Takes: Voice Activated Personal Safety, Audio Surveillance, and Gender Violence—María Edurne Zuazu

Echo and the Chorus of Female Machines—AO Roberts

On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice– Yvon Bonefant

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Queer Youth Articulating Wellbeing Through Reading and Writing Groups “This article begins to reflect on how queer youth, through reading and writing together, might imagine, embody, and make visible under-explored...

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Disruptive Brides and (un)Manly Eunuchs: Reading the Bible as genderqueer to reimagine inclusive faith “When Christians re-emphasise the ‘feminine’ and gender-fluid images and people which have always been present in...

“When I wake up, I can’t even stay up/I slept through the day, fuck/I’m not getting younger,” laments Willow Smith of The Anxiety on “Meet Me at Our Spot,” a track released through MSFTSMusic and Roc Nation in March of 2020. Despite the song’s nature as a “sludgy alternative track with emo undertones that hits at the zeitgeist,” “Meet Me at Our Spot” received very little attention after its initial release and did not chart until the summer of 2021, when it went viral on TikTok as part of a dance trend. The short-form video app which exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, catalyzed the track’s latent rise to success where it reached no. 21 on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming Willow’s highest charting song since her 2010 hit, “Whip My Hair”.

The app currently known as TikTok began as Musical.ly, which was shuttered in 2017 and then rebranded in 2018. By March of 2021, the app boasted one billion worldwide monthly users, indicative of a growth rate of about 180%. This explosion was in many ways catalyzed by successive lockdowns during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the relaxation and subsequent abandonment of COVID mitigation measures, the app has retained a large volume of its users, remaining one of the highest grossing apps in the iOS environment. TikTok’s viral success (both as noun and adjective) has worked to create a kind of vibe economy in which artists are now subject to producing a particular type of sound in order to be rendered legible to the pop charts.

For anyone who has yet to succumb to the TikTok trap, allow me to offer you a brief summary of how it functions. Upon opening it, you are instantly fed content. Devoid of any obvious internal operating logic, it is the media equivalent of drinking from a fire hose. Immersive and fast-paced, users vertically scroll through videos that take up their entire screen. Within five minutes of swiping, you can–if your algorithm is anything like mine–see: cute pet videos, protests against police brutality, HypeHouse dance trends, thirst traps, contemporary music, therapy tips, attractive men chopping wood, attractive women lifting weights, and anything else you can fathom. Since its shift from Musical.ly, the app has also been a staging ground for popular music hits such as Lil Nas X’s’ “Old Town Road”, Lizzo’s “Good As Hell”, and, recently, Harry Styles’ “As It Was.”

The app, which is the perfect–if chaotic–fusion of both radio and video is enmeshed in a wider media ecosystem where social networking and platform capitalism converge, and as a result, it seems that TikTok is changing the music industry in at least three distinct ways:

First, it affects our music consumption habits. After hearing a snippet of a song used for a TikTok, users are more likely to queue it up on their streaming platform of choice for another, more complete listen. Unlike those platforms, where algorithms work to feed a listener more of what they’ve already heard, TikTok feeds a listener new content. As a result, there’s no definitive likelihood that you’ve previously heard the track being used as a sound. Therefore, TikTok works the way that Spotify used to: as a mechanism for discovery.

Second, TikTok is changing the nature of the single. Rather than relying upon a label as the engine behind a song’s success, TikTok disseminates tracks–or sounds as they’re referred to in the app–widely, determining a song’s success or role as a debut within a series of clicks. Particularly during the pandemic, when musicians were unable to tour, TikTok’s relationship to the industry became even more salient. Artists sought new ways to share and promote their music, taking to TikTok to release singles, livestream concerts, and engage with fans. Moreover, Spotify’s increasingly capacious playlist archive began to boast a variety of tracklists with titles such as, “Best TikTok Songs 2019-2022”, “TikTok Songs You Can’t Get Out Of Your Head”, and “TikTok Songs that Are Actually Good” among others. The creation and maintenance of this feedback loop between TikTok and Spotify demonstrates not only the centrality of social media ecosystems as driving current popular music success, but also the way that these technologies work in harmony to promote, sustain, or suppress interest in a particular tune.

Most notoriously, the bridge of Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license”, went viral as a sound on TikTok in January 2021 and subsequently almost broke the internet. Critics have praised this 24-second section as the highlight of the song, underscoring Rodrigo’s pleading soprano vocals layered over moody, syncopated digital drums. Shortly after it was released, the song shattered Spotify’s record for single-day streams for a non-holiday song. New York Times writer Joe Coscarelli notes of Rodrigo’s success, “TikTok videos led to social media posts, which led to streams, which led to news articles , and back around again, generating an unbeatable feedback loop.”

And third, where songwriting was once oriented towards the creation of a narrative, TikTok’s influence has led artists to a songwriting practice that centers on producing a mood. For The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka argues that vibes are “a rebuke to the truism that people want narratives,” suggesting that the era of the vibe indicates a shift in online culture. He argues that what brings people online is the search for “moments of audiovisual eloquence,” not narrative. Thus, on the one hand, media have become more immersive in order to take us out of our daily preoccupations. On the other, media have taken on a distinct shape so that they can be engaged while doing something else. In other words, media have adapted to an environment wherein the dominant mode of consumption is keyed toward distraction via atmosphere.

Despite their relatively recent resurgence in contemporary discourse, vibes have a rich conceptual history in the United States. Once a shorthand for “vibration” endemic to West Coast hippie vernacular, “vibes” have now come to mean almost anything. In his work on machine learning and the novel form, Peli Grietzer theorizes the vibe by drawing on musician Ezra Koenig’s early aughts blog, “Internet Vibes.” Koenig writes, “A vibe turns out to be something like “local colour,” with a historical dimension. What gives a vibe “authenticity” is its ability to evoke–using a small number of disparate elements–a certain time, place, and milieu, a certain nexus of historic, geographic, and cultural forces.” In his work for Real Life, software engineer Ludwig Yeetgenstein defines the vibe as “something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose collection of ideas, concepts, and things that can be identified by intuition rather than logic.” Where Mitch Thereiau argues that the vibe might just merely be a vocabulary tick of the present moment, Robin James suggests that vibes are not only here to stay, but have in fact been known by many other names before. Black diasporic cultures, in particular, have long believed sound and its “vibrations had the power to produce new possibilities of social attunement and new modes of living,” as Gayle Wald’s “Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space,” attests (674). We might then consider TikTok a key method of dissemination for a maximalist, digital variant of something like Martin Heidegger’s concept of mood (stimmung), or Karen Tongson’s “remote intimacy.” The vibe is both indeterminate and multiple, a status to be achieved and the mood that produces it; vibes seek to promote and diffuse feelings through time and space.

Much current discourse around vibes insists that they interfere with, or even discourage academic interpretation. While some people are able to experience and identify the vibe—perform a vibe check, if you will—vibes defy traditional forms of academic analysis. As Vanessa Valdés points out, “In a post-Enlightenment world that places emphasis on logic and reason, there exists a demand that everything be explained, be made legible.” That the vibe works with a certain degree of strategic nebulousness might in fact be one of its greatest assets.

Vibes resist tidy classification and can thus be named across a variety of circumstances and conditions. Although we might think of the action of ‘vibing’ as embodied, and the term vibration quite literally refers to the physical properties of sound waves and their travel through various mediums, the vibe through which those actions are produced does not itself have to be material. Sometimes, they name a genre of feeling or energy: cursed vibes or cottagecore vibes. Sometimes, they function as a statement of identification: I vibe with that, or in the case of 2 Chainz’s 2016 hit, “it’s a vibe.” Sometimes, vibes are exchanged: you can give one, you can catch one, you can check one, So, while things like energy and mood—which are often taken as cognates for vibes—work to imagine, name, and evoke emotions, vibes are instead invitations.

Not only do vibes serve as a prompt for an attempt at articulating experience, they are also invitations to co-presently experience what seems inarticulable. By capturing patterns in media and culture in order to produce a coherent image/sound assemblage, the production of a vibe is predicated upon the ability to draw upon large swathes of visual, aural, and environmental data. Take for example, the story of Nathan Apodaca, known by his TikTok handle as: 420doggface208. After posting a video of himself listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while drinking cranberry juice and riding a longboard, Apodaca went viral, amassing something like 30 million views in mere hours. This subsequently sparked a trend in which TikTok users posted videos of themselves doing the same thing, using “Dreams” as the sound. According to Billboard, this sparked the largest ever streaming week for Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit with over 8.47 million streams. Of his overnight success, Apodaca says, “it’s just a video that everyone felt a vibe with.” To invoke a vibe is thus to make a particular atmosphere more comprehensible to someone else, producing a resonant effect that draws people together.

As both an extension and tool of culture, vibes are produced by and imbricated within broader social, political, and economic matrices. Recorded music has always been confined—for better and worse—to the technologies, formats, and mediums through which it has been produced for commercial sale. On a platform like TikTok, wherein the emphasis is on potentially quirky microsections of songs, artists are invited to key their work towards those parameters in order to maximize commercial success. Nowadays, pop songs are produced with an eye towards their ability to go viral, be remixed, re-released with a feature verse, meme’d, or included in a mashup. As such, when an artist ‘blows up’ on TikTok, it does not necessarily mean that the sound of the song is good (whatever that might mean). Rather, it might instead be the case that a hybrid assemblage of sound, performance, narrative, and image has coalesced successfully into an atmosphere or texture – that we recognize as a/the vibe – something that not only resonates but also sells well. As TikTok’s success continues to proliferate, the app is continually being developed in ways that make it an indispensable part of the popular music industry’s ecosystem. Whether by exposing users to new musical content through the circulation of sounds, or capitalizing upon the speed at which the app moves to brand a song a ‘single’ before it’s even released, TikTok leverages the vibe to get users to listen differently.

@jimmyfallon This one’s for you @420doggface208 #cranberrydreams#doggface208#dogfacechallenge♬ original sound – Jimmy Fallon

We might indeed consider vibes to be conceptual, affective algorithms created in the interstice between lived experience and new media. “Meet Me At Our Spot,” the track through which I’ve framed this article, is full of allusions to youth culture: drunk texts, anxiety over aging, and late-night drives on the 405. It is buoyed by a propulsive bass line that thumps with a restless energy and evokes a mood of escapism. Willow Smith’s intriguing timbre and the pleasing harmonies she achieves with Tyler Cole invite listeners to ride shotgun. For the two minutes and twenty-two seconds of the song, we are immersed within their world. In the final measures the pop of the snare recedes into the background and Tyler’s voice fades away. The vibe of the track – both sonically and thematically – is predicated on the experience of a few, fleeting moments. Willow leaves us with a final provocation, one that resonates with popular music’s current mode: “Caught a vibe, baby are you coming for the ride?”

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Featured Image: Screencap of Nathan Apodaca’s viral TikTok post, courtesy of SO! eds.

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Jay Jolles is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary currently at work on a dissertation tentatively titled “Man, Music, and Machine: Audio Culture in a/the Digital Age.” He is an interdisciplinary scholar with interests in a wide range of fields including 20th and 21st century literature and culture, critical theory, comparative media studies, and musicology. Jay’s scholarly work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Los Angeles Review of Books, U.S. Studies Online, and Comparative American Studies. His essays can be found in Per Contra, The Atticus Review, and Pidgeonholes, among others. Prior to his time at William and Mary, he was an adjunct professor of English at Drexel University and Rutgers University-Camden.

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Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century”–Alexander W. Cohen

Evoking the Object: Physicality in the Digital Age of Music–-Primus Luta

“Music is not Bread: A Comment on the Economics of Podcasting”-Andreas Duus Pape

“Pushing Record: Labors of Love, and the iTunes Playlist”–Aaron Trammell

Critical bandwidths: hearing #metoo and the construction of a listening public on the web–Milena Droumeva

TiK ToK: Post-Crash Party Pop, Compulsory Presentism and the 2008 Financial Collapse—Dan DiPiero (The other “TikTok”! The people need to know!)

Sound has a peculiar relationship to mindfulness; zoning in and out, active and passive forms of listening while we situate our listening practices alongside other daily activities. Especially when it comes to driving, listening to something or someone or just singing aloud by myself, I have realized, helps me drown out other noises of alertness. Over the years I have come to value background music or chatter and especially radio programming that takes the burden of curation and scheduling off my back, in all sorts of tasks that require deep concentration. Enough and more has been said about the visual-bias in various forms of ethnographic inquiry (see Andrew C. Sparkes’s “Ethnography and the senses” for a good example). Without belaboring these arguments, I also find that knowing through listening and listening as a mode of non-haptic yet immersive and intimate engagement can also prove to be a fruitful method of inquiry, especially in our post-pandemic worlds, where it feels a lot harder to establish intimacy. The United Nations noted that radio, in particular, “provided solace” during that period of physical distancing  and social isolation.

For me, radio sparked my accidental realization and foregrounding of sonic methods as an itinerant means of getting to know new things, people and surroundings in life and research when I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-2022 to start a new position as a postdoctoral researcher. Knowing that I would continue living in California for the near future, after eight long years of having deferred driving in America, I decided to learn driving and buy a car. I was also especially excited to be moving to Sunnyvale, a city in the Southern Peninsula, located between more known places like Palo Alto and San Jose. Sunnyvale is often jokingly called the desi capital, perhaps the most Indian of any ‘Little India’ you could find in America. As shorthand, desi, a Hindi word,refers to anyone and everything with ties to the South Asian subcontinent. In more recent years, the term has gained currency especially among South Asian diasporic communities to self-refer to culture, music, food, often to signify the presence and strength of transnational ties (between India and their countries of settlement).

What I hadn’t anticipated was that driving brought about a new connection to the medium of radio, as I started tuning in to take my mind off the jitters that come with the new sounds of an automobile-dependent region: fast moving rubber hitting the freeway tarmac and the lane changes and the scalar adjustments that demand driving tens of miles to ensure you still have a social life stitched together across the vastness of California. I began to find the act of tuning in and out of stations fascinating, especially how the radio as a device holds the parallel realities of so many people with different interests, languages and politics together but separate.  Scholarship and even casual listening shows that non-English radio stations catering to various immigrant and other communities have existed for a long time in the US and elsewhere (I wish pondering the sonic geographies of  Radio Garden, a web-based map interface that allows listeners to access any free-to-air radio stations across the world, wasn’t beyond the scope of this post!). Both as an ethnographer and as an insider-outsider within the larger Indian immigrant and diaspora community (but a newcomer to the Bay Area), tuning into the local desi radio station while driving offered me a good way to enter the desi community of the Bay Area, to know what it means to be desi and perform Indianness in 2022, in a place where I regularly see so many Indians and South Asians every single day.

As a friend who recently visited me in Sunnyvale remarked as we waited for our table at the always-busy Madras Cafe, Sunnyvale feels so much like India! And I felt it too; what she was referring to was not only the very visible presence of Indian people all around town or the abundance of restaurants catering to various sub-regional cuisines from India. What felt different to me here was how relaxed everyone looked in grocery stores, restaurants and elsewhere, how utterly remade Sunnyvale is as a pan-Asian but mostly Indian space that even the smallest performances of fitting in feel unnecessary.  In fact, shopping her reminded me of a point Purnima Mankekar’s Indian narrators made in her iconic essay on Indian grocery shopping in the San Francisco Bay Area (2010), that Indian stores in Sunnyvale and Milpitas as places where “white people look out of place” as compared to the ones in Berkeley.

The juxtaposition of the non-performances and the weight of being comfortably in place in a community like Sunnyvale only settles on the mind and body very slowly, like a faint but familiar smell from home. Words and demands often stumble out of my mouth at the grocery store, as if I am allowed and I will be completely understood.  Immigrant life in America is steeped in language acrobatics, balancing being understood with becoming deliberately opaquely incomprehensible, using one accent for the ones from home, one for those who make you feel at home, and then the American accent for the Americans outside.  The contrast of places like Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas and other similar Northern California cities that have been transformed by immigrant presence is not just one of tangible and observable things, but sonic markers too, like Bolly 92.3FM.

Bolly 92.3FM is the default desiradio station that services the entire San Francisco Bay Area. As the name suggests, for the most part the station plays popular Bollywood songs from recently released movies and albums, but just as other stations do in India, Bolly92.3FM leverages its listener demographics at different times of the day to also play classics and hits from older Hindi films during late night slots. Interestingly, as the presenters repeat the station name and jingle time and again, they also remind you that you are listening to Bay Area’s Bollywood station owned by the Silicon Valley Asian media network. The name Bolly92.3FM is a play on the broad familiarity with Bollywood in the US even as Indian audiences globally have moved away from the older connotations of Bollywood as North Indian cinema with song, dance and people dressed in flashy clothes. Much like the hyper-authentic Indian restaurants that serve regional cuisines such as Andhra, Tamil, Gujarati, Rajasthani and Marathi food to their loyal and affording immigrant patrons, Bolly92.3FM has also configured its programming to cater to different regional and linguistic communities from India in the Bay Area. For instance, Saturday morning and afternoon slots are dedicated to Telugu programs—everything is in Telugu (language) from the hosts discussions to the songs being played as well as the actual topics being discussed—as if the station turns into a different station with the implicit acknowledgement of the substantial cultural presence and possibly the sonic and financial power of Telugu listeners among the wider Indian community here. There are similar slots dedicated to Gujarati language programming.

In addition  to language and topical interests, listening to Bolly92.3FM has been instructive in getting a feel for communal desires, aspirations and anxieties through its advertisement. There are fellow desi real estate agents, tax planners, dentists, travel agencies and coaching centers, each signaling to why they are trustworthy. Some remind their audiences of their shared cultural background as key to them being able to understand their customers’ needs, others also indicate their familiarity with America: one realtor is the only Indian-origin person to feature in a top realtor list, another tax planner’s family has been in the US for three generations and thus he is well aware of the nitty-gritties of transnational estate planning. A known Indian-origin realtor in the area even sponsors his own radio show on the weekends where he takes questions from prospective home buyers and sellers. Before and beyond giving them financial advice, he often explains how fellow Indian immigrants think about financial opportunities, investments, how they might seek social validation from fellow Indians who might see their home and so on. He weaves in such exposition before talking dry financial facts about mortgages. The same tax planner and his co-host occasionally offer historical accounts of changing real estate trends, how certain places used to be affordable for Indian immigrant buyers and how new places are becoming of interest as vacation homes for more affluent Indian immigrants.

Hearing the tax planners and real estate agents plot these dynamic and speculative maps of South Asian financial, cultural and political futures week-after-week felt like witnessing what many historical texts on migration within the Bay Area have described as waves in the past.  As I mentioned earlier, Sunnyvale is not the only ‘Little India’ in the Bay Area, let alone in California, but rather, is a more recent iconic place in the Indian and South Asian diaspora map where the younger and newer immigrants are finding homes. Fremont, Milpitas, and Hayward in the East Bay closer to Oakland, and San Jose in the South Bay, saw similar waves of Indian immigrant settlements in the past, many of whom now far more affluent than their younger counterparts. In my short time since moving here, I learned both from conversations with friends who grew up in the area as well as from communication scholar Anne Marie Todd’s work on the past and present of Santa Clara Valley, this region has not only seen waves of migration from settlers across the world but with each incoming wave and turn in occupational trends from farming to railroads to IT work. Multiple communities have remade cities in the Bay Area over the decades.

I also find advertisements as well as talk shows interesting because they offer a more proximate and concentrated triangulation of otherwise scattered, overheard communal talk – I’ve heard things about Indian immigrants and real estate, their aspirations for their children to get into Ivy league colleges. I have also been asked at the grocery store if I know people looking to get married; I’ve overheard aunties at the grocery store consulting each other about dealing with death, financial loss, planetary alignments and more. But it is through the radio that these private interests, anxieties and futures take more collective and articulate forms.

To speak, to be heard, and to be understood as intended are as important as visual representation to allow for feeling in place in the world and for feeling at home in the United States. Very simply put, in the American context, while Black and Brown vocal expression and volume or the stereotype of loudness have been historically stigmatized as a part of the larger racist depiction of ‘unruly’ bodies, various forms of Asian speech, languages and expression including loudness but also silence and the absence of vocality, have also been racialized against the backdrop of white socio-linguistic normativity.  Specifically, Indian and South Asian immigrants have been repeatedly represented in popular American culture as muted characters whose interiority is either irrelevant to the plot or cannot be accessed. Think of Raj Koothrappali from the show The Big Bang Theory, an accomplished scientist at the prestigious Caltech university who loses his voice around women. In accounts of Indian tech workers in the US from the Y2K era, one finds multiple articles casting them as the back-office worker – good at laborious and boring work but not presentation material. Some of these stereotypes have changed and splintered as more South Asians technologists have gone on to become successful executives and leaders in US companies, but vocality as a form of publicity can be crucial to sonic forms of belonging.

When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was still trying to figure out how to form a community and how to immerse myself in the desi community here, somewhat selfishly to get a glimpse of how Indian presence is remaking the Valley, not only through IT work but also through cultural and political performances. But I also wanted to get to know people, be known by people around. Olakhita means “people known to us” in Gujarati, my mother tongue; in Hindi jaan-pehchaan means to be in each other’s knowing that gives you some claim and affiliation over others without deep intimacy, not quite acquaintances or neighbors like in the American context. Apart from the numerous Whatsapp and Facebook groups aimed at desifolks living in the same neighborhood or city, Bolly92.3FM acts as a beacon for Indians and South Asians spread across San Francisco, the East Bay and the South Bay areas, offering a medium for the various Indian associations and event organizers to reach out to thousands and invite them to Diwali, Dussehra and other festival celebrations as well as any major concerts by visiting Indian artists in the area.

This is the far from the first or only time that a radio station has facilitated the forging of affective ties and social and material connections in diaspora. Rather this post recounts how active and passive listening to and through the station revealed over time how much South Asian presence has transformed the Bay Area. I attended the massive Diwali and Dussehra events advertised on 92.3, and once there, I could recognize so many of the organizers and sponsors’ names – some of them were the same tax planners and realtors that also run ads and sponsored segments on the station. One week in late September, an ad played on the radio, announcing that a famous hotel in downtown San Jose was now able to accommodate more than a thousand guests and offer a special entryway for the baraat procession (when the groom’s party of a few hundred comes dancing up to the wedding venue). The ad ended with the contact details of a South Asian representative of the hotel who could handle all queries related to Indian wedding arrangements!  Bolly92.3FM mediates and shapes the collective desi identity through its programming and advertising, in turn also stitching, materializing and rendering visible a map of the Indian community spread across dozens of non-contiguous cities and neighborhoods in the Bay Area.

It bears noting, however, that the idea of Indianness or desi-ness (an imagined brotherhood among all the expats here) advanced through the radio programs, advertisements as well as the cultural celebrations, is very much a nationalistic and Hindu-dominant one. Although India is an ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse country and not all people of Indian origin in the Bay Area are Hindu, the radio announcers never really celebrate or discuss Eid, Christmas, or Thanksgiving as events of possible interest. Just based on what is said and what is left unsaid, the dominant self-imagination of the Bay Area desi community as advanced through the radio station feels like it quietly aligns with the dominant religious and political imagination of India as Hindu, middle-class, post-religious and post-caste.   

In the process of seeing this map render in my own imagination through regular listening, I also realized how this form of distant listening replicated the mode of jaan-pehchan (getting to know) for the itinerant immigrant-ethnographer. There is always the pre-fieldwork moment, the slightly promiscuous exploratory moment of getting to know and immersing oneself before one can articulate stakes and research questions. It is also often a period of deep uncertainty and ambivalence, since, as ethnographers, responsibility for and towards our field, communities, and interlocutors is always at the center of every project. We are always reminded not to be extractive and to think deeply about power relations even as we attempt to forge meaningful ties with those whom we want to observe and learn from and write about. Much like other visa-workers and international scholars in US academia, being a non-citizen ethnographer engenders multiple kinds of precarities—there is no straightforward or replicable guidebook on how to establish rapport, gain access, build trust and more with a community. More importantly, the itinerant-immigrant ethnographer’s relationships are also always interrupted, prone to arbitrary border restrictions and chronic deracination.

In the early days of digital ethnography, Kate Crawford powerfully argued to reframe acts of lurking (silently and passively hanging out in online communities) as forms of listening and by extension, listening as a concomitant and constitutive practice when we consider participation as speaking or having a voice. In the case of diasporic radio, as I realized, not only is the act of listening quite literal but it also affords and reinforces the vitality of different modes of agentic power and participation, those marked by ambivalence, yet-to-be gained legitimacy; forms of minor participation if you will. Via Crawford, listening and/as lurking also emerges as specifically racially inflected modes of agentic participation against the backdrop of media policy and the emphasis on free expression and speech as the ultimate realization of democratic power.

Among diasporic communities and further among itinerant immigrants within those communities, listening, overhearing and eavesdropping become the de facto modes of democratic and communitarian participation.  Listening to the radio as a way of immersion is not a solution to these enduring dilemmas of ethical ethnography but to borrow from the analogy of Californian driving, listening to the radio, just like other forms of digital and analog lurking, allowed me an ‘on-ramp’ to gradually merge and embed myself in the larger South Asian diasporic community.

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Featured Image: “Driving” by Flickr User AnnaNakami (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Noopur Raval is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in understanding global futures of work, the life and work decisions made by immigrant workers in tech companies, changing values and moral norms and projects of personhood especially in postcolonial settings. Noopur received a PhD in Informatics from University of California Irvine (UCI) in September 2020 and, through July 2022 was a postdoc researcher at the AI Now Institute at New York University. Noopur is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz – Silicon Valley Extension in the Computational Media department, working with Dr Norman Su. In Fall 2023, Noopur will join the Department of Information Studies at UCLA as an assistant professor.

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“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath

The Queer Sound of the Dandiya Queen, Falguni Pathak–-Pavitra Sundar

“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar

SO! LA: Sounding the California Story–Bridget Hoida

“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn–David Goren

Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio–Dolores Inés Casillas

Histories of technology have politics. The way we discuss the emergence and development of media technologies implicates the priorities and interests of those telling the story, and how we understand a technology’s meaning and potential. 

Among podcasters familiar with the history of the medium, Dave Winer– the developer behind the RSS feed –is usually credited as the progenitor of the form. This past summer, however, this narrative was challenged by Podnews editor James Cridland–(good naturedly, I presume)–who suggested that the comedian Robin Williams may actually have been the first podcaster, predating Winer’s RSS (“Rich Site Summary,” or “Really Simple Syndication”) distribution model by a few months. These origin stories have important technical differences that lead to political repercussions: the Winer narrative envisions podcasting as open and decentralized, and therefore theoretically an inherently emancipatory technology. The Williams narrative, in contrast, locates the birth of the medium within a closed, corporate-controlled platform – which just might mean there’s nothing inherrently open or democratic about internet-distributed audio content at all.

Though both perspectives are undoubtedly “great white man” visions of the medium’s history–or more precisely versions of Susan Douglas’s “inventor-hero”–what’s particularly interesting here is how both views implicate a politics of what podcasts are and what they ought to be. Although this quarrel was a dispute between colleagues that was ultimately abandoned, I argue it’s well worth a deeper examination, as the ideological conflict at its center isn’t just about the past, but rather competing visions of podcasting’s future – over the continued flourishing or gradual eclipse of RSS.

Indeed, debates over the technical definition of a podcast, and over who was—and who was not–the first podcaster based on that definition, reveal anxieties among long-time podcasters and developers about corporate consolidation in the industry as well as the apparent irrelevance of technical distinctions to listeners and creators who may not appreciate the way in which walled gardens negate the very thing that makes podcasting so special. Likewise, to suggest that podcasting may have first emerged as a proprietary form may retroactively justify corporate platform enclosures in the present. And, though I’m just as suspicious of corporate hegemony as the next person, nuancing the early history of the medium can help us think through the distinctions between technology and cultural form. 

In the consensus version of podcasting’s history, the emergence of the medium is typically traced to software developer Dave Winer’s publication – with significant contribution from the former MTV VJ and Internet entrepreneur Adam Curry– of RSS (“Rich Site Summary,” or “Really Simple Syndication”) version 0.92 in December 2000, which allowed for the distribution of digital audio files. The first podcast feed followed in January 2001, and, with the launch of Curry’s iPodder podcast aggregator and his program Daily Source Code in 2004, podcasting began to coalesce as both technology and cultural form. In the 20-odd years since, the medium’s technical infrastructure has remained essentially unchanged: RSS continues to be the predominant format of podcast syndication.

So this past July, when Podnews editor James Cridland cheekily suggested that it was not Dave Winer, nor “the podfather” Adam Curry, but comedian Robin Williams who had actually been the world’s first podcaster, industry graybeards were quick to push back on his claim.

Cridland’s argument went like this: As an early investor in Audible.com, Williams launched a bi-weekly talk show called RobinWilliams@Audible in early 2000 (several months before Winer’s pioneering RSS), which listeners could download onto their mp3 players. Subscribers who owned an Audible Mobile Player could even have RobinWilliams@Audible automatically pushed to their device. “Of course, that’s what the first podcast was, too,” Cridland noted, “something you downloaded to your computer, then synched to your mp3 player.”

The crucial distinction, however, was that RobinWilliams@Audible was not distributed via RSS. For some, this meant that the show was definitively not a podcast – and Cridland’s claim patently absurd.

On The New Media Show, for instance, Todd Cochrane, founder-CEO of Blubrry, and Rob Greenlee, VP of Libsyn, spent nearly eighteen minutes on the subject, recounting the early history of online file sharing and concluding that a podcast could only be a podcast if it used RSS. For Audible to suggest that they had been the first in podcasting (Cridland’s post relied in part on Audible founder Don Katz as a source) was ego-driven revisionism.

On Twitter (an ancient social media app where people used to go to eviscerate each other), Cridland’s article provoked a squall of exceptions, which generally argued that downloadable audio without RSS does not a podcast make; and though Audible’s platform may have been innovative, and even shared some characteristics with podcasting, the fact that its programs were limited to the company’s proprietary platform meant that they were definitively not podcasts.

Rob Greenlee, for example, replied to Cridland’s article by clarifying that Audible was a precursor platform for RSS, but that its audio programs were definitively not podcasting. When Cridland pushed back, noting the automatic download feature on Audible, Greenlee’s co-host Todd Cochrane replied that this feature still did not make RobinWilliams@Audiblea podcast; and he insisted that he wasn’t going to budge on this point. A minor flap ensued, which ended with Cridland resignedly saying that he wished he had never written the article in the first place.In the end, even Dave Winer got involved, arguing that a piece of downloadable audio media had to have an RSS feed and be open to anyone, using any client, to qualify as a podcast.

To get a sense of the response to Cridland’s article on Twitter, and to let participants speak for themselves, I have selected a sampling of replies to Cridland’s original tweet teasing the article and reproduced them below. The conversation is arranged roughly in chronological order.

Admittedly, this was a very niche dispute – a handful of predominantly white tech dudes arguing over which white dude(s) had been the first podcaster. After a day or two, they all moved on. 

But however minor (and however much Cridland may have wished he hadn’t written the article), the flap over RobinWilliams@Audible is a useful lens with which to understand contemporary debates over the future of podcasting: about whether the decentralized and open RSS-based ecosystem will long endure, or whether walled gardens—“limited set[s] of technology or media information provided to users with the intention of creating a monopoly or secured information system“—will prevail.

To better understand, however, let’s back up a bit.

By the fall of 2000, Dave Winer had earned a reputation as a pioneer of web syndication – he had been credited with launching the first blog – and someone who, according to the podcaster and author Eric Nuzum, “believed in making systems open, democratic, and easily accessible,” pushing back against the trend toward centralization and proprietary control of Internet infrastructures.

On a trip to New York that October, Winer met up with Adam Curry, who had been closely following his work. Over several hours in Curry’s hotel room, the entrepreneur attempted to convince Winer that web syndication technologies could be leveraged to distribute audio and video files – a vision of the Internet as “Everyman’s broadcast medium” – if only the so-called “last yard” problem of slow DSL connections could be resolved. By his own admission, Winer at first didn’t quite understand what Curry had in mind, but he was open experimenting with using RSS as “virtual bandwidth” that could deliver large media files during off-peak hours. In January 2001, Winer successfully used an RSS enclosure tag to distribute a single Grateful Dead song (it was U.S. Blues), inaugurating the first podcast feed – though what he had created wouldn’t become known as a “podcast” for some time. 

Though interest in RSS-delivered audio files was slow to develop (indeed, even Winer and Curry pursued other projects for a time), “it was not lost on … early adopters,” as Andrew Bottomley has observed, adding “that the technology shifted power to the audience and also opened up opportunities for more democratized radio production” (111-112). The days of corporate gatekeepers exercising oligopolistic control over the production and distribution of audio content seemed numbered; no longer would broadcasting be subject to an economy of scarcity. Theoretically anyone with web hosting, a microphone, and an RSS feed could set themselves up in the radio business.

Since those early days, RSS has become “the currency of podcasting,” to borrow a phrase from Dave Jones, Adam Curry’s Podcasting 2.0 collaborator. Indeed, as Cridland himself wrote in his primer, “What is a Podcast?,” technically speaking, a “podcast” is comprised of an audio file, without DRM restrictions, that is available to download, and is “distributed via an RSS feed using an <enclosure> tag.”  

But RSS is not without its detractors. Last July, for instance, Anchor.fm co-founder Michael Mignano argued that while technical standards like RSS (or HTTP, or SMTP, or SMS) provide a “common language” that allows for the rapid spread of new technologies, standardization inevitably stifles growth. “The tradeoff,” he wrote, “is that a lower barrier to entry means more products get created in a category, causing market fragmentation and ultimately, a slow pace of innovation.” The consequence of this “Standards Innovation Paradox” is that even as podcast listening apps proliferate, because they must conform to the RSS standard, the differences between them are superficial. Proprietary systems, Mignano argued, offer an alternative, allowing developers the flexibility to build – and rapidly improve – dynamic user experiences. 

Naturally, Mignano pointed to Spotify – which acquired Anchor in 2019 – as an example of how closed systems could break the “curse” of standardization: When the company began to expand from music to other forms of audio content, he wrote, there was some speculation that the company would launch a dedicated podcast app. But, “if they had done so, they’d have to contend with the aforementioned ocean of podcast listening apps which were all offering users roughly the same features that were limited by the standard.” Instead, “Spotify used their existing music user base inside of the existing Spotify app to distribute podcasts to hundreds of millions of users.”

But this framing soft pedals Spotify’s aggressive attempts to steer podcasting away from RSS and toward platform enclosure. As John L. Sullivan argued in a 2019 paper, Spotify’s emphasis on exclusive releases (which has included the removal of content previously available via RSS, like The Joe Budden Podcast), and its $340 million acquisitions of Anchor and Gimlet are all part of an effort to control distribution and “maximize the ‘winner take all’ functions of platforms.” More recently, Anchor has stopped automatically generating an RSS feed at the time of publication, making it an opt-in function (meaning that creators have to know what RSS is to have their podcast distributed to directories otherthan Spotify). “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution,” noted one Spotify executive at a recent investor event, “which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology.”

Given the challenges that platform enclosure poses to RSS, its defenders’ insistence that “it’s not a podcast if it doesn’t have an RSS feed, and it’s not a podcast app if you can’t add your own RSS feeds,” as an episode title of Curry and Jones’s Podcasting 2.0 puts it, is understandable. Or, as Cochrane declared on The New Media Show, “until you tear my RSS feed through my dead hands, podcasts technically are podcasts that are delivered via RSS.”

And understandable, too, is the prickly reaction to Cridland’s alternate history: To claim that RobinWilliams@Audible may have been the first podcast is to suggest that RSS – and the open and democratic values which it represents – are inessential; and more troubling, that proprietary systems are deeply rooted in the history of the medium.  

Of course, there’s also the sticky fact that RobinWilliams@Audible premiered before the word “podcast” entered the lexicon. But even this history is messy. In his original coinage, the technologist Ben Hammersley applied the term to a variety of different forms of downloadable audio media, including Audible originals like In Bed with Susie Bright. According to this early conception, in other words, podcasting described a cultural practice rather than a specific distribution infrastructure. 

It is likely, too, that technological distinctions are irrelevant to listeners. Citing data from Edison Research showing that a significant percentage of listeners use Spotify and YouTube to access podcasts (even though content on these platforms don’t meet the strict technical definition of a “podcast”), Cridland has suggested that, for most people, podcasting is simply “on-demand audio. Like a radio show, but on-demand.”

Likewise, the question of whom the first podcaster was is of narrow interest. “Who cares?” an exasperated Cochrane finally concluded.

But reviewing the pre-2004 history of downloadable audio media can open up questions of the interpretive flexibility of technology (how technological artifacts come to have different meanings for different groups of users) and rhetorical closure (when the need for alternative designs diminish) that the late Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker identified as key concepts in the Social Construction of Technology.

And so, rather than arguing about whether RobinWilliams@Audible – or, for that matter, Cochrane’s audio file sharing on FidoNet in the early 1990s – was the “first” podcast, further examination of this complex genealogy suggests the more interesting questions of how and why online distribution of audio files was such a desirable goal that there were severalpaths to its development.  

The flap over Robin Williams and the question of the first podcaster also gives us much needed insight into current discourse about corporate influence in the podcasting space. Also It provided a way for proponents of the decentralized Podcasting 2.0 movement to make a technological distinction between a desire for freedom and a desire for control. While the scuffle itself was short-lived, its dust is far from settling. 

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Featured Image of Robin Williams (2008) by Flickr User Shameek  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.

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It’s baaaaack! For your end-of-the year reading pleasure, here are the Top Ten Posts published within the last three years (totals as of 12/8/22). Read and re-read this brilliance today–and often! And please do listen out for us in 2023– our Racial Bias in Speech AI series co-edited with Johann Diedrick is already in the works for May 2023 and a new CFP related to a print edition (!!) of Sounding Out! just launched! Please take good care, stay safe and well, and we’ll see you in January. Thank you for your readership and continued support. We’re here because you are here. –JS

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10). A Feast of Silence: Listening as Stoic Practice

Andrew Salvati

. . .Over the past decade, Stoicism, which teaches that self-discipline, moderation, and emotional equanimity are key to overcoming hardship and living a good life, has had something of a revival as a self-help paradigm – and Holiday has been one of its most energetic evangelists. Articles in Vice, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, Forbes, Wired, and Sports Illustrated have all taken note of his influence among Silicon Valley tech workers, corporate executives, professional athletes, military personnel, and celebrities to whom he markets the philosophy as a “life-hack”; his six best-selling books on the subject, meanwhile, have positioned him as perhaps the most commercially successful author in a mushrooming genre of Stoic literature; and The Daily Stoic’s A-level guest list, which has included Malcom Gladwell, Camilla Cabello, Matthew McConaughey, and Charlamagne Tha God, has established Stoicism’s cultural cachet as a practical guide for living, and positioned Holiday as its authoritative interpreter. . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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9). Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity

Steph Ceraso

I first heard about voice donation while listening to “Being Siri,” an experimental audio piece about Erin Anderson donating her voice to Boston-based voice donation company, VocaliD. Like a digital blood bank of sorts, VocaliD provides a platform for donating one’s voice via digital audio recordings. These recordings are used to help technicians create a custom digital voice for a voiceless individual, providing an alternative to the predominately white, male, mechanical-sounding assistive technologies used by people who cannot vocalize for themselves (think Stephen Hawking). VocaliD manufactures voices that better match a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, age, and unique personality. To me, VocaliD encapsulates the promise, complexity, and problematic nature of our current speech AI landscape and serves as an example of why we need to think critically about sound technologies, even when they appear to be wholly beneficial. . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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8). Broadcast Kidnapping: How the Rise of the Radio led to the Fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier

Jennifer Garcon

On January 23, 1973, Jean-Claude Duvalier, only 18 months into his life-long appointment, received a call that threatened to profoundly destabilize his nascent presidency. On the other end was Clinton E. Knox, a close political ally and advisor, who also happened to be the US Ambassador to Haiti. Knox, Jean-Claude was informed, along with US consul general Ward Christensen were being held hostage at a residence just outside of Port-au-Prince. To secure the safe return of two high-ranking US officials, the captors demanded the release of political prisoners, a hefty ransom, and a plane to facilitate their escape. The kidnappers “meant business,” reported The Washington Post, Times Herald on Jan 26, 1973, and during the call, Knox warned Jean-Claude of the severity of the situation, that they ”threatened to blow my head off, if they didn’t get what they wanted” . . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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7). “Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn

David Goren 

‘A lot of these stations, especially the Haitian stations, they have such an extensive music library that a song will come on the radio and all of a sudden my mom is like, ‘Oh my God! Your grandma used to have this record and she played it every Saturday!’ says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Now she’s transported back to being on the island, with the big radio that’s a piece of furniture in the living room. People are chatting, little drinks are flowing about, my grandmother milling about in a gorgeous dress. It’s kind of like that whole nostalgia era that unfortunately was probably lost because of the political turmoil in Haiti. So it’s harkening back to a good time, to a simpler time, a better time, a more carefree era.” . . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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6). “One Scream is All it Takes: Voice Activated Personal Safety, Audio Surveillance, and Gender Violence

María Edurne Zuazu 

Just a few days ago,  London Metro Police Officer Wayne Couzens pled guilty to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by, a 33-year-old woman he abducted while she walked home from a friend’s house.  Since the news broke of her disappearance in March 2021, the UK has been going through a moment of national “soul-searching.” The national reckoning has included a range of discussions–about casual and spectacular misogynistic violence, about a victim-blaming criminal justice system that fails to address said violence–and responses, including a vigil in south London that was met with aggressive policing, that has itself entered into and furthered the UK’s soul-searching. There has also been a surge in the installation of personal safety apps on mobile phones; One Scream (OS), “voice activated personal safety,” is one of them. . .[Click here to read the full post!]

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5). Teaching Soundwalks in a Course on Gentrification, Black Music, and Corporate America

Rami Toubia Stucky

On May 5, 2018, the C-ville Weekly, a newspaper based out of Charlottesville, Virginia, published an article titled “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll: new apartment complex promises at least one of those.” The headline referred to the complex being built at 600 West Main St. in Charlottesville. The complex has since been completed and studio bedrooms currently cost more than $1000 a month. As the C-ville Weekly headline shows, the developers were using the term and connotations of “rock ’n’ roll” to sell exclusive – and in many ways unaffordable – housing.

After reading this headline, I began to develop an idea for a summer course at my institution, the University of Virginia (UVA). I ultimately titled that course “Black Music and Corporate America” which I offered online during the summer of 2021 (syllabus available for download via the link above). Although the course discussed varied content – from the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-gendered histories of rock and roll to the endorsement of conspicuous forms of consumption in hip hop – I wanted to spend one unit focusing on the interrelationship between music, corporate America, and gentrification. I strove to solidify this connection by assigning two related articles. The first article, by geographer and sociologist Brandi Thomson Summers, argues that black residents in Washington D.C. adopt go-go music as a form of reclamation aesthetics to combat their city’s increasingly rampant gentrification. In the second article, ethnomusicologist Allie Martin conducts a soundwalk of D.C.’s Shaw District to forefront the experience of a black woman in the city and help displace white hearing as the default standard of interpreting sound (see Sounding Out!’s Soundwalking While POC series from Fall 2019). These two articles served as a foundation for one of the assignments the students had to complete in class: conducting a soundwalk of their own in which they had to walk around a field site of their choosing and think critically about the sounds they were hearing. . .[Click here to read the full post!]

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4). Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions

Laura Wagner

For four years, I spent forty hours a week in a cubicle in a converted tobacco warehouse with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, listening to and describing the entire audio archive of Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter. Though my title was “project archivist,” I am not an archivist by training. But I am compelled to compile, assemble, and preserve stories from lost people and lost worlds. Sound is more intimate than printed words or video. With sound, voices are inside your head, as close as another person can be. As I processed the Radio Haiti collection, I would forget that many of the voices I heard every day belonged to people I never knew in life. Sometimes in my dreams I would see the station’s director, Jean Dominique, alive and laughing. . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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3).Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century

Alexander W. Cowan

If you could listen to your DNA, what would it sound like? A few answers, at random: In 1986, the biologist and amateur musician Susumo Ohno assigned pitches to the nucleotides that make up the DNA sequence of the protein immunoglobulin, and played them in order. The gene, to his surprise, sounded like Chopin.

With the advent of personalized DNA sequencing, a British composition studio will do one better, offering a bespoke three-minute suite based on your DNA’s unique signature, recorded by professional soloists—for a 300GBP basic package; or 399GBP for a full orchestral arrangement.

But the most recent answer to this question comes from the genealogy website Ancestry.com, which in Fall 2018 partnered with Spotify to offer personalized playlists built from your DNA’s regional makeup. For a comparatively meager $99 (and a small bottle’s worth of saliva) you can now not only know your heritage, but, in the words of Ancestry executive Vineet Mehra, “experience” it. Music becomes you, and through music, you can become yourself. . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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2).Sonic Lessons of the Covid-19 Soundscape

Sarah Mayberry Scott

It’s understandable to resist reading or thinking about Covid in late-2021, even as the Delta variant’s new surges are making headlines around the world. Covid has surrounded and overwhelmed us for over a year, and many people’s reluctance to engage meaningfully with it at this time is fueled by feelings of fatigue, mental exhaustion, and frustration. However, I urge in this post that we have a continued responsibility to sustain our sonic engagement and listen to what the Covid-19 soundscape teaches us.

Covid-19, as most of us now know now, is a virus caused by the coronavirus strain SARS-CoV-2. While the symptoms of Covid-19 are many and varied, one symptom seemed most vital and censorious—a nagging and persistent dry cough that became referred to as the “Covid cough” in everyday vernacular. The Covid cough became an intrusive and yet all too familiar presence in the Covid soundscape—an isolated acoustic environment that allows us to study its characteristics. For instance, investigations within the Covid soundscape have studied the noise annoyances of traffic, neighbors, and personal dwellings; have recorded the quieting of the usually bustling streets of New York City; have researched whale stress hormones linked to less noise pollution in our ocean waters; and have analyzed  the reception and aural imagery of sirens. I seek to add to this research by bringing the sounds of the Covid body (or a body perceived to have Covid) into the larger soundscape conversation . . . [Click here to read the full post!]

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1).A Day on the Dial in Cap Haïtien, Haiti

Ian Coss

Fabrice Joseph is a mender, set up on a street corner in Cap Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city. He shows me a red plastic toolbox filled with supplies — thread, wires, scraps of fabric—which he can use to fix a jammed zipper or stitch up a torn backpack strap. I stop because he’s cradling a radio set in his hands, tuned to the city’s most popular station: Radio Venus. 

We meet on a quiet day; Fabrice has been sitting on the stoop for five hours already with no work. Another day he’s engrossed in assembling a large umbrella—the kind food vendors use for shade—but the radio is still on, now propped on a ledge just behind his head. He replaces the batteries almost weekly, because the radio is always on. In the morning Radio Venus plays news, Fabrice tells me, followed by music as the day heats up. Then in the afternoon he’ll hear sports or perhaps a religious program, before the station returns to music in the evening. 

This arc Fabrice describes is designed to follow the arc of his day. In this post, I trace that link: between the rhythms of radio programming and the rhythms of daily life, to show how formatting choices create a heightened sense of ‘liveness’ on Haiti’s airwaves, with all content located in a specific moment: the present moment. . .[Click here to read the full post!]

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Featured Image: “New Years, about to unfurl” by Flickr User Darwin Bell, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2019!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2018!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2017!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2016!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2015!

The beginning of this year witnessed a significant reportage on films inspired by the Kashmir conflict in India, occasioned by the release of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files on March 11, 2022. The polarized reaction to the film, which single-mindedly focuses on the exodus of Kashmiri pandits from the valley and the violence they were subjected to at the hands of their Muslim counterparts, makes visible the complexity of the understanding of Kashmir’s political history in contemporary India. While Agnihotri’s film, whose propagandist agenda in favor of the state won approvals from the ruling political party in India, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider, despite its extremely sensitive and responsible treatment of the problem of militancy in Kashmir was targeted for passing over the plight of Kashmiri pandits. But eight years after its release, Haider, which won five National Awards in 2015, still wields the power to move its audience regardless of their religious and communal bearings through its portrayal of a terrible human tragedy in the wake of Kashmir militancy in the 1990s.

Bharadwaj’s Haider completes his trilogy of cinematic adaptations of Shakespearian tragedies: Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet translate as Maqbool (2004), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014) respectively, in their Bollywood avatars. Bhardwaj, in his unique style, imports the original tragic plots into an identifiable and contemporary Indian context, through the assimilation of the plot material with the personal life stories he tells in his films. The plot of Haider centers around the disappearance and death of Haider’s father, which exposes the dark menagerie of political corruption and murders that Haider’s uncle is embroiled in. The pursuit of this traumatic truth sets the stage for Haider’s alienation from his mother and the motherland.

Integral to Bhardwaj’s style is the use of music in a typical Bollywood blockbuster formula, with song and dance sequences interrupting the linearity of cinematic storytelling. While certain film adaptations of Shakespeare operate simply as vehicles for the transmissions of ideology, Graham Holderness argues in “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure” (published in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism), others “block, deflect or otherwise work on ideology in order partially to disclose its mechanisms.” Holderness evaluates the possibility of the film form to be a radical medium to challenge dominant ideologies or value systems. Analyzing Akira Kurosawa’s film adaptation of Macbeth—Throne of Blood (1957)–he argues in favor of the film’s dynamism to be able to liberate the original text.

Holderness’ reading of Kurosawa raises important questions for the postcolonial film importing from the English literary canon to speak uniquely to a postcolonial audience. In Bhardwaj’s undertaking, this import is singularly anchored and strengthened in a powerful musical idiom. Instead of containing the meanings of the original text, Bhardwaj’s Haider expands and pluralizes the levels of signification that Hamlet produces. By making the stock Hamlet plot be the medium for staging the tragic history of Kashmir, Bhardwaj’s film is a direct address, on one level, to the former imperial master discourse. On a more immediate and radical level, the film hits back very strategically at the Indian state and the numerous killings that have been sanctioned in the name of controlling terrorism in the recent past. In this capacity, the film liberates the textual Hamlet, making its echoes reverberate in a new sound and a new linguistic register.

Through a strategic integration of dance and music–both diegetic (within the frame of the film)  and non-diegetic (for the audience’s listening only)– Bhardwaj’s film not only succeeds in delivering its radical political message to a popular film audience, it also speaks back to the former imperial discourse. Non-musical sounds are also key to Haider (2014) as a careful sonic anchoring of the story. The abstract potential of musical and non-musical sounds open up new horizons of meaning in the film, exceeding the confines of the original verbal register of the literary text. The loud, blaring and constant sound of the army car’s horn, for example, signals the death of Hilal in the beginning scenes of the film triggering the tragic plot. The unsettling tones of despair, melancholia and death which open the film remain a haunting and pervasive presence throughout.

“Jhelum” the song that sings the lament of Hilal’s tragic loss, invokes the river that passes through the valley. The song describes the elemental quality of the river into whose womb-like depths Hilal’s body receded till it was posthumously discovered by villagers. The fading melancholic melody of the song seems to suggest the slow disintegration of Haider’s sanity, as he is seen staring into blankness in several shots as well as attempting to merge with the river in an act of suicide. The opening sounds evoke a song that comes later in the narrative, “Bismil,” that stands in place of the play within a play sequence in Hamlet and expands the affective reach of the themes of death, love and betrayal.

One of the most intriguing moments in the film is the musical rendition of the gravedigger scene, an archetypal commentary on human mortality in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Performed by three old men in a snow-covered graveyard in conspicuously tired voices,  the song “So Jao” (“Sleep!”) has a deceptively bare and sparse quality. The song opens with the rough, scratching of the gravedigger’s shovel scraping the cold hard ground, a sound that becomes the acoustic base for the bizarre lullaby-like deathsong. The choppy, staccato-like rhythmic impact of the metal on the resistant icy ground announcing “the final rest” is executed with a disturbing sonic clarity and certitude. This gritty foreground sound is supported by the reverberating sound of the rubab that transports the tune from an immediate closed verse recitation into an expanded musical interlude, as the vocals echo “Arey ao na…!” (O come…!) stretching the last syllable into a dying, falling note. “So Jao“‘s loaded simplicity dispassionately delivers this bare truth: that all life is inevitably moving towards its end, or as Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) towards its inanimate origin.

While the men who perform “So Jao” are past their prime in life, they are far from being incidental characters in the film as they are in Shakespeare. They are woven into the narrative as militants who protect Haider and do not hesitate to wield heavy duty weapons when the time comes. It comes as no surprise that they are digging their own graves, even as the seriousness and fear of death are subsumed in the larger political cause they serve in the plot. The sound of the shovel overlaps with Gazala’s first phone call to Roohdaar, the embodied ghost who brings Hamlet’s father’s message to the son (the Urdu word rooh literally translates as soul or spirit), signifying an ominous anticipation in the narrative at this point. The grave, as the song says, is ultimately where you sleep your longest sleep. The scene is one of the three men lying supine each in his own hole, with one in the center housing the little boy who enters the frame perkily dancing into the gray and barren scene. His sprint-like entry walk carrying bread and sustenance for the gravediggers, the well-choreographed lifting of his body to the beat of the song heightened just very slightly by the clinking bell sound once every four beats is an unsettling reminder of the happy ignorance that we immerse ourselves in being simultaneously aware and oblivious of the inevitable imminent end. These stark juxtapositions in the gravedigger’s song works as a telling sonic metaphor for the state of hopelessness, confusion and despair that has historically assailed Kashmir for many, many decades. The song is also a commentary on the futility of violence instigated in the name of religion, when man must ultimately surrender to one common fate, one common remainder.

Haider’s presence in the graveyard song introduces the inevitable vectors of vengeance and death that awaits his fate following the knowledge of the truth of his father’s institutional murder. The further breakdown of his psyche and the increasing dissociation from his world is dramatized brilliantly in the song “Bismil” that publicly calls out Khurram on his crime (1.44.59). The song marries the allegorical with folk costumes, and incorporates exaggerated and physically intense dance steps to impose the serious weight and inescapable gravity of the accusation of murder that Haider ascribes to Khurram. The song and dance sequence are staged as a public performance, one that happens a few scenes before in the film too, when Haider is seen surrounded by a crowd in a new avatar with shaved head and grown beard (1.25.53). This distinct change in appearance along with the masques he uses later in Ghazala’s wedding (1.40.51) and the “Bismil” song are markers of Haider’s increasing dissociation from his absurd reality—one that he can only make sense of as a character in a play. Khurram’s crimes are not separate from the questionable workings of the Indian state, and Bhardwaj does a good job tapping into the folk idiom and the song-and-dance format to critique what Haider calls the state’s “chutzpah” (pronounced  tʃəʊzpə, not ˈho͝otspə), the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).  The alteration of the first syllable is possibly to bring in an echo of a popular north Indian abuse word to take a jab at the impunity enjoyed by state officials for the crimes committed on the Kashmiri people.

Haider remains a brave directorial undertaking not only aesthetically but also politically, given that the issue of Kashmir’s independence (azadi) is still a burning issue in India 27 years since 1995, the year in which Haider is set, and 8 years since the film’s release. Bharadwaj’s self-composed music in the film is not simply a placeholder for the dazzling verbal exchanges of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The music in Haider magnifies and intensifies the local mood of the scenes where they feature. This function is not only limited to the background soundtrack which, in its haunting atmospheric quality, renders a hollow despair and anguished hopelessness throughout. The songs additionally step in to carry the expression beyond the register of words and visuals to render a poetic and sonic intensity to the film, making it more memorable and impactful to a wider audience. In Haider, the formula of the Bollywood blockbuster film is effective not only as good entertainment, but also as a means to tie the story together in a haunting soundscape which refuses to fade long after the film ends.

Featured image: screen capture from Haider created by SO!

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Abhipsa Chakraborty is a PhD candidate in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. She holds a BA, MA and MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi, and has worked as an Assistant Professor (Ad-hoc) at University of Delhi. Her research interests include Modernism, Sound Studies, Digital Humanities, and South Asian cultures. She is a trained vocalist in Hindustani Classical Music and hopes to integrate her musical knowledge with her academic research on aurality and narrative styles in 20th-century novels.

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“Happy Homes Have Gramophones” –Gender, Technology, and the Sonic Restaging of Community Before and After the Partition of Bengal“— Ronit Ghosh

“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath

“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar

Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa

As you probably know—whether you want to or not—the jury reached a verdict earlier this summer in the trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. The trial, in the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia, involved defamation and counter-defamation claims by the two actors. Heard published a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she claimed to be “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” Depp sued her for defamation, she counter-sued, and a seven-week spectacle of celebrity, misogyny, and power followed, in which Depp substantially prevailed.

What does a close listening to Depp v. Heard tell us about this particular trial, as well as about sex and power in the courtroom more generally? 

Depp v. Heard did not just randomly become a media circus. As Joanne Sweeny noted in Slate, the judge made two procedural rulings that led to the ensuing frenzy—and greatly tipped the scales toward the plaintiff. Firstly, the judge allowed cameras in the courtroom to broadcast the proceedings. The Code of Virginia leaves this decision largely up to the court’s discretion, but also stipulates that coverage of “proceedings concerning sexual offenses” is prohibited. Despite the content and high-profile nature of this case, Judge Penney Azcarate decided to proceed with the broadcast. 

Azcarate’s decision is strikingly at odds with the court’s emphasis on silence and decorum. Court order CL-2019-2911 stated, for example, that “Quiet and order shall be maintained at all times. Audible comments of any kind during the court proceedings … will not be tolerated.” In fact, Azcarate interrupted proceedings during trial to tell courtroom spectators to keep their mouths shut. During trial, extraneous noise is heard not just as uncivil but as a threat to impartiality and fairness. However, according to the judge’s logic, this threat is only perceived  within the courtroom. 

This brings us to the second procedural ruling of consequence here. Despite the frenzy enveloping the case, Azcarate decided not to sequester the jury. Jury sequestration involves  the members of the jury being isolated  from public and press during a trial, in order to avoid accidental or deliberate exposure to outside influence or information. Video from the courtroom flooded the internet and, as commentators have argued, likely and unduly influenced the jury, who were not isolated and prevented from accessing TV or social media. As Depp’s legions of supporters raged online, social media effectively became part of his legal team. This  work was done in great part through sound. 

Social media online commentary forensically dissected Heard’s oral testimony, noting changes in her breathing patterns or her speech cadence. Often they would hone in on the fact that she “exhale[d] erratically,” or “can talk so fast,” as seen in this Entertainment Tonight compilation:

The online jury adjudicated on all these vocal elements as proof that she was lying. One internet article described her in audiotape evidence as “cackle[ing] like a witch” and alternating between “laugh[ing] hysterically” and using a “baby voice.” Heard’s detractors took her voice as proof that she was emotionless, robotic, calculated, too well-rehearsed—but also that she was chaotic, nervous, crazy. 

In contrast, commentators described Depp’s voice as “calm,” “calming,” and “soothing,” with Tik Tok users hash-tagging ASMR to audio of him. One fan even posted a ninety-minute ASMR video of his testimony. Multiple Twitter users claimed that “you can hear the pain” in his voice, from an audiotape admitted during trial. At other times, he is applauded for “giggling” and laughing during the trial, with fans hearing it as evidence of his authenticity and “kind soul.” One YouTube commentator, Grandma WHOa, writes that they wish he would record an audiobook so they could “listen to his calming, sexy soothing man voice.” 

So far, so predictable. These are well-established, recognizable patterns about how we hear men’s vs women’s voices in public life—e.g. critiques of Hilary Clinton’s shrill, whiny voice. But listening in to the trial also reveals that this isn’t just a case of online fan culture on overdrive. Instead, it shows how broader social dynamics around gender and power don’t just create outside noise, but are built into formal legal practice within the courtroom.

Much of the conflict here follows a common pattern in defamation cases involving sexual violence claims, with questions around who gets to be a victim (see in my forthcoming piece in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory titled “The Tone of Justice: Voicing the Perpetrator-as-Victim in Sexual Assault Cases”). Depp claimed to have suffered through the defamatory statement and through a longer history of abuse by Heard. His fans framed him as a hero and a victim, using the  social media hashtag #HeardIsAnAbuser. On the other hand, they refused to believe Heard’s claims of having suffered abuse. This determination was based at least in part on Heard’s vocal performance and courtroom testimony, with detractors hearing duplicity in her exhalations, her rapid pace, the occasional firmness and confidence of her tone. As one Depp supporter commented on a video of Heard’s testimony,  “There’s no way a victim sounds like this.” 

Yet in a key strategic move, Depp’s lawyers chose to make Heard sound precisely as sexual assault victims often do during trial. Seeking to dismantle her credibility, they looked to the toolkit of how to deal with a victim in court, mobilizing a well-worn set of legal techniques used to interrogate survivors of sexual violence. In one cross-examination, for example, the plaintiff’s counsel declares that Heard’s “lies have been exposed to the world multiple times.” This claim is then manifested through a series of vocal disciplinary tactics to undermine Heard’s testimony and depict her as a false witness.

For instance, the lawyer, Camille Vasquez, repeatedly employs a common interrogation technique of speaking over and cutting off Heard as she is replying to a question. As legal scholars and sociologists have shown, such techniques are often used in sexual assault cases to intimidate and shape perceptions of the complainant. In a pioneering study on courtroom talk during rape trials, Gregory Matoesian, in Reproducing rape: Domination through talk in the courtroom (1993) describes how lawyers reproduce patriarchal relations of dominance and subordination by “usurping” the witness’ ability to respond (186). As he notes, questions—wielded like weapons of attack by skillful lawyers—are more powerful than answers. 

Vocal technique and dynamics are key here. In Vasquez’s cross-examinations, she repeatedly raises her voice to interrupt Heard, disciplining her before the jury and spectators. She laughs at her testimony and infantilizes Heard, at times speaking to her in calm tones before quickly shifting to a harsher timbre. At one point, Vasquez snaps her notes shut and walks back to her seat while Heard is still answering her question. Heard is forced into abrupt silence. Unable to respond to the question she was asked, she audibly loses control of the narrative being spun. Vasquez also frequently speaks over her and directly to the judge, objecting that Heard is being non-responsive. The lawyer performs for the judge and jury her refusal to listen to Heard. 

At other moments, Vasquez’s voice and affect telegraph exasperation, as she audibly sighs while Heard attempts to answer a question. As Heard and Vasquez go back-and-forth over a line of questioning, Vasquez’s voice bristles with irritation as she speaks in clipped tones, with sharp inflection at the end of each line: “Yes?” “Right?” “Yes or no?” These interjections add an aural layer of interpretation to Heard’s testimony in real-time, guiding the jury to hear the witness as evasive and therefore unreliable. Vasquez’s expressions are all part of a careful vocal strategy, implicitly saying to the jury, “Can you believe this woman?” 

Of course, the answer is no. Jessica Winter, writing in The New Yorker, points out that Heard lost in part because of her “tearless crying,” the fact that she appeared insincere. Winter acknowledges that successful testimony is about “affect and presentation”, a reality that is no secret. In fact, jury instructions in Depp v. Heard clearly state that determinations of witness credibility are based in part on witnesses’ “appearance and manner.” Jurors must use their “common sense” to “determine which witnesses are more believable.” 

But how is “common sense” established? Listening closely to this trial reminds us that such understandings are constructed and regulated through sound as well as through determinants of “appearance and manner,” both in and out of the courtroom. Vasquez’s performance, Heard’s subordinated testimony, and the commentary of millions of avid consumers underline that Heard and Depp sound to many people exactly as common sense and conventional norms would dictate. 

A woman claiming abuse and assault at the hands of a more powerful man is always subject to patriarchal ways of listening, even if she is rich, famous, straight, and white. These ways of listening are contradictory. Research shows that “masculine” voices are heard as more authoritative and dominant, while women are often heard as weak, uncertain, lacking confidence. The public ear hears other racialized and gendered voices through similar power inequities, including queer, nonbinary, and LGBT voices or voices of people of color. In the context of sexual assault adjudication, however, Heather Hlavka and Sameena Mulla show in their Law & Society Review article “That’s How She Talks”: Animating Text Message Evidence in the Sexual Assault Trial” “that a confident voice and calm performance can work against a victim-witness in court, by suggesting that she is not passive or meek enough to be a ‘real’ victim.” On the other hand, they note that a victim-witness who cries on the stand may give the impression of performing or acting. Lawyers audibly manipulate these perceptions, as the examples here show, and men (particularly heteronormative, white men in positions of power) reap huge benefits from them.  

Many observers of Depp v. Heard have noted the toxic social media sludge around the case, as well as the danger that the verdict poses to survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault. But listening closely to the proceedings shows us that these outcomes aren’t random and aren’t just part of informal processes like trial by Tik Tok. 

Instead, formal court proceedings manipulate and mobilize social scripts around survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, and around women and marginalized others, to reach their outcomes. We can hear how this strategy plays out through sound and voice, from sighing and interrupting to laughter and silence. The jury instructions in Depp v. Heard state that “Our system of law does not permit jurors to be governed by sympathy, prejudice, or public opinion.” But despite claims that the legal system is based on objectivity and impartiality, we can hear that the law never exists in a bubble – and lawyers often and successfully rely on this very fact. 

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Featured image: “Courtroom” by Flickr user Karen Neoh, CC BY 2.0

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Nomi Dave is a former lawyer, interdisciplinary researcher, and co-director of the Sound Justice Lab at the University of Virginia, where she is Associate Professor of Music. She is currently co-writing  and co-directing a documentary film, Big Mouth, on a defamation lawsuit connected to a sexual violence case in Guinea.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“People’s lives are at stake”: A conversation about Law, Listening, and Sound between James Parker and Lawrence English—Lawrence English and James Parker

Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies—Christine Ehrick

Or Does it Explode?: Sounding Out the U.S. Metropolis in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun—Liana Silva

I first heard about voice donation while listening to “Being Siri,” an experimental audio piece about Erin Anderson donating her voice to Boston-based voice donation company, VocaliD. Like a digital blood bank of sorts, VocaliD provides a platform for donating one’s voice via digital audio recordings. These recordings are used to help technicians create a custom digital voice for a voiceless individual, providing an alternative to the predominately white, male, mechanical-sounding assistive technologies used by people who cannot vocalize for themselves (think Stephen Hawking). VocaliD manufactures voices that better match a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, age, and unique personality. To me, VocaliD encapsulates the promise, complexity, and problematic nature of our current speech AI landscape and serves as an example of why we need to think critically about sound technologies, even when they appear to be wholly beneficial.  

Given the extreme lack of sonic diversity in vocal assistive technologies, VocaliD provides a critically important service. But a closer look at both the rhetoric used by the organization and the material process involved in voice donation also amplifies the limits of overly simplistic, human-centric conceptions of voice. For instance, VocaliD rhetorically frames their service by persistently linking voice to humanity—to self, authenticity, individuality. Consider the following statements made by Rupal Patel, CEO and founder of VocaliD, in which she emphasizes the need for voice donation technology: 

These are just a few examples from a larger discourse that reinforces the connection between voice and humanity. VocaliD’s repeated claims that their unique vocal identities humanize individuals imply that one is not fully human unless one’s voice sounds human. This rhetoric positions voiceless individuals as less than human (at least until they pay for a customized human-sounding voice). 

VocaliD’s conflation of voice and humanity makes me wonder about the meaning of “human” in this context. For example, notions of humanity have been historically associated with Western whiteness—and deployed as a means of separating or distinguishing white people from Others—as Alexander Weheliye points out. Though VocaliD’s mission is to diversify manufactured voices, is a “human-sounding” voice still construed as a white voice? Does sounding human mean sounding white? Even if there is a bank of sonically diverse voices to choose from, does racial bias show up in the pacing, phrasing, or inflection caused by the vocal technology? 

I am also disturbed by the rhetoric of humanity and individuality used by VocaliD because the company adopts the same rhetoric to describe the AI voices they sell to brands for media and smart products. Here’s an example of this rhetoric from the VocaliD AI website: “When you need a voice that resonates, evokes audience empathy, and sounds like you, rather than your competitors, VocaliD’s AI-powered vocal persona is the solution. Your voice — always on, where you need it when you need it.” Using similar rhetorical strategies to describe both voiceless people and products is dehumanizing. And yet, having a more diverse AI vocal mediascape, especially in terms of race, is crucially important since voice-activated machines and products are designed largely by white men who end up reinforcing the sonic color line.

Interestingly, the processes VocaliD uses to create a custom voice reveal that these voices are not, in fact, unique markers of humanity or individuality. It’s hard to find a detailed account of how VocaliD voices are made due to the company’s patents, but here are the basics: VocaliD does not transfer a donated voice directly to a voiceless person’s assistive technology. VocaliD technicians instead blend and digitally manipulate the donated voice with recordings of the noises a voiceless person can make (a laugh, a hum) to create a distinct new voice for the recipient. In other words, donated voices are skillful remixes that wouldn’t be possible without extracting vocal data and manipulating it with digital tools. Despite perpetuating narratives about voice, humanity, and authenticity, VocaliD’s creative blending of vocal material reveals that donated voices are the result of compositional processes that involve much more than people.

Further, considering VocaliD voices from a material rather than human-centric perspective amplifies something important about voices in general. All voices are composed of and grounded in an ecology. That is, voices emerge and are developed through a mixture of: (1) biological makeup (or technological makeup in the case of machines with voices); (2) specific environments and contexts (geography may determine the kind of accents humans have; AI voices have distinct sounds for their brands); (3) technologies (phones, computers, digital recorders and editors, software, and assistive technologies preserve, circulate, and amplify voices); and (4) others (humans often emulate the vocal patterns of the people they interact with most; many machine voices also sound like other machine voices). Put simply, all voices are intentionally and unintentionally composed over time—shaped by ever-changing bodily (and/or technological) states and engagements with the world. Voices are dynamic compositions by nature. Examining voice from a material standpoint shows that voices are not static markers of humanity; voices are responsive and malleable because they are the result of a complex ecology that involves much more than a “unique” human being. 

However, focusing solely on the material aspects of vocality leaves out people’s lived experiences of voice. And based on online videos of VocaliD recipients—like Delaney, a seventeen-year-old with cerebral palsy—VocaliD voices seem to live up to the company’s hype. Delaney appears delighted by her new voice, stating: “I was so excited to get my own voice. I used to have a computer voice and now I sound like a girl. I like that. And I talk more.” Delaney’s teachers also discuss how her new voice completely changed her demeanor. Whereas before Delaney was reluctant to use her assistive technology to speak, her new voice gives her confidence and a stronger sense of identity. As her teacher explains in the video, “she is really engaged in groups, she wants to share her answers, she’s excited to talk with friends. It’s been really nice to see.” For Delaney, a VocaliD voice represents a newfound sense of agency. 

It’s important to recognize this video is not necessarily representative of every VocaliD recipient’s experience, or even Delaney’s full experience. As Meryl Alper notes in Giving Voice, these types of news stories “portray technology as allowing individuals to ‘overcome’ their disability as an individual limitation, and are intended to be uplifting and inspirational for able-bodied audiences” (27). While we should be wary of the technological determinism in the video, observing Delaney use her VocaliD voice—and listening to the emotional responses of her mom and teachers—makes it difficult to deny that donated voices make a positive impact. For me, this video also gets at a larger truth about humans and voice: the ways we hear and understand our own voices, and the ways others interpret the sounds of our voices, matter a great deal. Voices are integral to our identities—to the ways we understand and think about ourselves and others—and the sounds of our voices have social and material consequences, as the SO! Gendered Voices Forum illustrates so clearly. 

It’s worth repeating that VocaliD’s mission to diversify synthetic voices is incredibly important, especially given the restrictive vocal options available to voiceless individuals. It’s also necessary to acknowledge the company has limitations that end up reproducing the structural inequities it tries to address. As Alper observes, “In order to become a speech donor, one must have three to four hours of spare time to record their speech, access to a steady and strong Internet connection, and a quiet location in which to record” (162-63). With these obstacles to donating one’s voice in mind, it’s not surprising that all the VocaliD recipient videos I could find feature white people. Donating one’s voice is much easier for middle to upper class white people who have access to privacy, Internet, and leisure time.

This brief examination of VocaliD raises questions about what a more equitable future for vocal technologies might look/sound like. Though I don’t have the answer, I believe that to understand the fullness of voice, we can’t look at it from a single perspective. We need to account for the entire vocal ecology: the material (biological, technological, financial, etc.) conditions from which a voice emerges or is performed, and individual speakers’ understanding of their culture, race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, sexuality, etc. An ecological approach to voice involves collaborating with people and their vocal needs and desires—something VocaliD models already. But it also involves accounting for material realities: How might we make the barriers preventing a more diverse voice ecosystem less difficult to navigate—especially for underrepresented groups? In short, we must treat voice holistically. Voices are more than people, more than technologies, more than contexts, more than sounds. Understanding voice means acknowledging the interconnectedness of these things and how that interconnectedness enables or precludes vocal possibilities. 

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Featured image: 366-350 You can’t shut me up, Jennifer Moo, CC BY-ND

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Steph Ceraso is an associate professor of digital writing and rhetoric at the University of Virginia. Her 2018 book, Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening, proposes an expansive approach to teaching with sound in the composition classroom. She also published a digital book in 2019 called Sound Never Tasted So Good: ‘Teaching’ Sensory Rhetorics—an exploration of writing, sound, rhetoric, and food. She is currently working on a book project that examines sonic forms of invention in various contexts.

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What is a Voice?–Alexis Deighton MacIntyre

Mr. and Mrs. Talking Machine: The Euphonia, the Phonograph, and the Gendering of Nineteenth Century Mechanical Speech – J. Martin Vest

Only the Sound Itself?: Early Radio, Education, and Archives of “No-Sound”–Amanda Keeler

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

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Conceptualized at a time of rampant increase in anti-immigrant violence, Immigrants Wake America is a creative response to the growing bias and violence against immigrant women in the U.S., as seen in the Atlanta shootings, the rise in hate crimes since the onset of Covid-19, and the US-Mexico border crisis. We believe that storytelling allows us to find similarities and differences between ourselves and others, offering a humanizing counterpart to harmful media narratives. The podcast creates a living archive of stories not yet heard, serving as an audio intervention into how immigrant women’s (hi)stories are narrated and passed on.

Immigrants Wake America is a public humanities, community-engaged project of digital storytelling through podcasts, in partnership with the Tenement Museum in New York. It features storytellers who share their family stories about migration and the centrality of women in their life histories. These storytellers have submitted stories to the Tenement Museum’s digital archive Your Story, Our Story (YSOS),

Founded in 1988, the Tenement Museum, focuses on immigration and immigrants to “foster a society that embraces and values the role of immigration in the evolving American identity.” YSOS cofounded by Annie Polland and Kathryn Lloyd, is a digital archive that houses stories associated with immigration, migration, and cultural identity. Some of the storytellers are first generation immigrants, while others are descendants of immigrants, born and raised in the US; their great-grandparents or grandparents migrated to the US ages ago. Through YSOS, the Tenement Museum invites people across the country to share their stories in the online digital storytelling exhibit. Each story reveals one individual’s experience. Together, the stories help us see how the unique histories shape the nation, and the patterns that bind us together.

Through exploring and curating stories from Your Story Our Story, we facilitate conversations that supplement and expand it. This makes possible the conception of an archive that is both dynamic and collaborative. Such an archive resists the colonization and appropriation of lives and narratives of our storytellers. We navigate through the ethical conundrums that one might structurally and personally face in this collaborative endeavor. In our engagement with the archives at the Tenement Museum, we believe that our podcasting project really opens up the possibilities for an expansion of the archive.

We released our first episode, the Introductory Episode on January 15th, 2022, and have since been consistently releasing one episode per month.

While our podcast does not claim to retrieve or lay out these microhistories in their entirety, at an early stage of its development, we came to realize the potential that the form of the podcast itself offers for a different kind of storytelling. In our podcast, we treat stories as primary documents instead of marginalia. Michelle Caswell (2014) uses the term “symbolic annihilation” to describe the absence or misrepresentation of marginalized communities in archives. She advocates the powerful forces of community archives in countering “symbolic annihilation.” In thinking about archives in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault is concerned with “the density of discursive practices” wherein he observes “systems that establish statements as events and things (145)” This system of statements (as events or things) is what contributes to the law of what can be said. Processes of digital communal archiving such as those done by South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) or the Tenement Museum attempt to extend or expand the systematic possibility of events and things. Caswell and her colleagues have demonstrated the importance and success of the SAADA project. They have also pointed to the impossibility of representation in a traditional archive which is built on violence committed on colonized and enslaved bodies, also eloquently pointed out by Saidiya Hartman’s scholarship.

Through our experience we’ve learnt that podcasts can serve as a transgressive-dynamic expansion of digital archiving, given their unique ability to cut across racial and gendered lines of preconceived sonic notions and their potential to expand the current techniques and media of digital archiving. We map this formal potential of the podcast in the way it intersects with digital archiving in the following ways:

First, narratorial voice.

We wanted our project to act as an intervention in the way in which immigrant women’s (hi)stories are consumed and passed on. We wanted to provide counter narratives. It was essential that the storytellers share their stories in their own voices, literally! The audio medium allows us to produce a space for listening to voices that are otherwise marginalized and/or demonized. 

–Le Li and Shruti Jain

Among the several unique and inspiring stories of resilience that the Tenement Museum houses, one such is a story by an immigrant case manager at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, Goretti Mugambwa. The museum and our podcast make it possible for her story to be narrated by herself in her voice. With her experience of working with the refugee and immigrant community she also does not just remain an individual voice, but acts to further a collective assertion.

Next, sonic variations.

Our storytellers’ voices are not just “characteristics” of the story but are an essential part of the story itself. We believe that each immigrant and their descendent brings to the story their unique tonal texture. This diversity destabilizes what immigrants and their descendants are expected to sound like. The sounds we add in the editing process are minimal. We try not to impose emotional cues and responses upon our listeners. 

–Shruti Jain and Le Li

The multiplicity of voices in our podcast–and therefore in the archive–are not just “characteristics” of the aural storytelling or listening process, but are as much an essential part of the story itself. In line with what The Sonic Color Line reminds us, our work also finds that, “sound frequently appears to be visuality’s doppelgänger in U.S. racial history” (Stoever 4). This leads to the coding of race as not just visual but aural too. We want to clarify that the white constructed ideas of how people of color must sound flatten out the complexities in how people within and across communities do sound. At the same time, these notions of white sonic normativity also create a strong sense of what one must or must not sound like in order to succeed in the racial capitalist world order. The storytellers of our podcast and we ourselves are of diverse backgrounds. This, for us, is a way to demonstrate the “complex range of sounds actually produced by people of color” (Stoever 43). As Nancy Morales argues in “Óyeme Voz: U.S. Latin@ & Immigrant Communities Re-Sound Citizenship and Belonging,” the sound of ‘everyday voices’ mobilized against—and remarking on—the nation-state’s attempts to mark immigrant communities as vulnerable exerts an impactful and profoundly material agency.” With its conversational and collaborative format, our podcast serves as a dynamic medium to represent (his)stories that complicate generic conventions in critical ways.

Then, collaboration.

We have also been personally deeply impacted by the process of working on this podcast. We have made lasting bonds with our colleagues and storytellers alike. The storytellers of our podcast act not just as guests, but as collaborators and stakeholders. Instead of interpreting the stories in our own way and retelling the stories, we collaborate with the storytellers, and facilitate the unfolding of hidden stories by the storytellers. Dr. Lisa Yun, Professor of English at Binghamton University, and Kathryn Lloyd, Senior Director of Programs, Tenement Museum, have been advisors and the executive producers of the podcast. Together with Lloyd and Yun, we built a project on the ethos of collaboration.

The editing process of IWA too, is different. Rather than making individual editorial decisions, we engage the storytellers directly in post-production. After finishing a first edit of an episode collaboratively between ourselves, we then send it to the storytellers for their feedback and approval before releasing it. Sometimes, the storytellers do suggest changes. Based on their feedback, we re-edit the episode and eventually release it after the storytellers approval. We have also innovated methods of community editing, where we edit in groups of as large as 15 people.

Finally, accessibility.

The podcast medium makes Immigrants Wake America an ideal project for the public humanities. As opposed to lengthier podcasts, each episode of our podcast is edited down to 15-20 minutes. These can be used by educators as an in-class resource to generate discussion and activities. Community listeners could tune in during lunch breaks, get-togethers, cooking, driving or doing chores. Our episodes can also serve as conversation starters and help facilitate affective bonds among immigrants and non-immigrants alike.

The final episode of our first season, “Finding Our Grandmother in the Records,” aired just last week, and a second season is in the works.

As a way to expand this project, our second season will feature storytellers from our local community in addition to Your Story, Our Story. We plan to have units within our project dedicated to translation, recording and editing, and creating teaching resources. We aim for meaningful and engaged conversations and try to blur the supposed boundaries between the university and the community. Join us!

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The first season of Immigrants Wake America was sponsored through the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University and a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities New York. Dr. Lisa Yun, Professor of English at Binghamton University, and Kathryn Lloyd, Senior Director of Programs, Tenement Museum, have been our advisors and the executive producers of the podcast. IWA is available on major streaming platforms such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, and Audible.

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Le Li and Shruti Jain are pursuing their PhDs at Binghamton University in the Translation Research and Instruction Program and the English Department respectively. They were Humanities New York Public Humanities fellows (2021-22) and graduate fellows of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at Binghamton University (2021-22). Through their podcast project and their work with digital community archives, Le and Shruti are currently working on exploring intersection between podcasts and digital archiving. They try to capitalize on the unique ability that the form of the podcast offers to cut across racial and gendered lines of preconceived sonic notions, which makes possible the conception of an archive that can be both dynamic and collaborative. Le’s research interests include translation studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and public humanities. Shruti’s PhD focuses on the Enlightenment, British Empire and the relationalities between race and caste formations. 

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig all this good stuff about sound studies pedagogy! Good luck with Fall semester, folks!:

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig

SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes

The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes

Making His Story Their Story: Teaching Hamilton at a Minority-serving Institution–Erika Gisela Abad

Teaching Soundwalks in a Course on Gentrification, Black Music, and Corporate America–Rami Toubia Stucky

Deejaying her Listening: Learning through Life Stories of Human Rights Violations– Emmanuelle Sonntag and Bronwen Low

Audio Culture Studies: Scaffolding a Sequence of Assignments– Jentery Sayers

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

“Toward A Civically Engaged Sound Studies, or ReSounding Binghamton”–Jennifer Lynn Stoever

Listening to #Occupy in the Classroom–D. Travers Scott

SO! Podcast #71: Everyday Sounds of Resilience and Being: Black Joy at School–Walter Gershon

Sounding Out! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul– Brooke Carlson

A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

My Voice, or On Not Staying Quiet–Kaitlyn Liu

(Re)Locating Soundscapes of Schooling: Learning to Listen to Children’s Lifeworlds–Cassie J. Brownell

If You Can Hear My Voice: A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching–Caroline Pinkston

Mukbang Cooks, Chews, and Heals – David Lee

SO! Podcast #80: Refugee Realities Miniseries–Steph Ceraso

“To this day I think about all the strange words I missed out on, all the losses I’m still carrying from faraway…I still think of the time when I spoke one language, and that language was whole.”

Chun 2020

Language can be a site of loss, a wholeness with which one, due to migration, has never really known. In the above passage, artist, Jesse Chun, reflects on how her grandmother spoke words in a language she did not understand, but yearned to hear and feel those sounds after her passing. There is a sonic residue that sticks to diasporic experiences. There are sounds that can stir up a blend of affect and ideation that is comforting when whiteness is unsettling. It is this disjuncture between words, meaning, and their sounds, that drew me to Chun’s work, 술래 SULLAE (2020). This piece reminded me of how sound, in its most ambiguous and queer forms, can hold the contingencies of history, language, memory, family, and the genealogies of loss that mark these sites of colonial dispossession.

술래 SULLAE (2020) is a single channeled video that draws from ganggang sullae, a Korean seasonal harvest and fertility ritual that integrates song and dance and is typically performed by women under the glow of moonlight. The participants hold hands forming a circle that through their movement, expands, disassembles, and changes its form. The songs can be both impromptu or pre-determined and encourages the participants to express their feelings in chorus with one another.

Diana Seo Hyung Lee (2020) suggests that historically ganggang sullae was meant to provide a forum for its participants to express emotions connected to living within patriarchal systems of power and oppression. She writes: “the women participating would not have been able to, in their everyday lives, sing, speak loudly, nor leave the house at night, in the patriarchal society of ancient Korea. This dance was a license for their one release.” In 술래 SULLAE, the dance proves to be a defiant presence. The women flash on screen as an unbreakable chain reinscribing a gendered history with new sounds and images that gesture to emancipatory possibilities.

술래 SULLAE combines archival clips of ganggang sullae, index pages from intonation books, images of Hangul and English consonants and audio splices from YouTube tutorials on how to pronounce English correctly. In the video, language becomes unhinged from expectation but at the same time, given form through history. The sound of the English language is disembodied and spliced into phonemic pulses.  In 술래 SULLAE, Chun has created an encounter with the grammars of polyphony; a simultaneity of sounds that are both restrained by and resistant to the imposition of English on the Korean diaspora. Through what Chun has described as a form of “unlanguaging” following Rey Chow, her audience is witness to new meanings produced through the abstraction, manipulation, and redaction of sounds and symbols from the English language.

Chun’s editing and manipulation of English sounds is intentional. In an interview with Art Forum, Chun shares: “Taking the sound apart but still keeping it within the conceptual framework of English made me think about what else is embedded in making a language. English is tied up with legacies of imperialism; there’s so much unseen violence that is part of how this language is institutionalized.” What remains after the edits is an inventory of sounds that disrupts the primacy of the vowel as central to English word construction and thus, central to colonial imagination.  

Like Chun, I realize that my conceptualizing of language is within an English framework, but my hope is that when we turn to the affective and when we begin to pull language a part, something different, something resistant, is produced.  I am neither an expert in English nor Korean linguistics, it was the sounds in this work that pulled me into it. In thinking with 술래 SULLAE, I’m interested in what becomes possible in the absence of the vowel. I turn to the interruptive potential of consonant sounds to affect and incite methods of communication outside of those steeped in colonial dominance. What does it mean to de-emphasize the function of vowel sounds in language and reorient our listening to the consonant? What do consonant sounds teach us about the sonics of race that underwrite hierarchies of language? What methods of communication become possible when we do away with words and are left with only their sonic substance?

Through her assemblage of consonant sounds in 술래 SULLAE, Chun is making a deliberate choice to describe and animate a politics of language through refusing its colonial enclosures and turning to the aesthetic in order hold the excesses of description. She refuses the vowel in this piece, not by denying its presence, but instead relegating it to the soundless and the unfamiliar, a space of, in her words, “untranslatability.” In this undoing, consonants become the emotive force where new meanings and orientations to the sounds that mark our words are forged.

술래 SULLAE opens with the sound ssshhh; a pairing of consonant sounds that is often associated with insisting on silence, a sound meant to reprimand. Chun extracts and emplaces this sound in a new aesthetic landscape that is independent and unregulated by colonial schemas of enunciation and translation. The prominent soundscapes of the video are consonant sounds and when removed from their phonetic relations to vowels these sounds undo the presumptive structuring or potential reprimand of English. In 술래 SULLAE, we are meant to experience the fullness of the consonants’ timbre…ssshhh, ppp, ddd, tttt, kkkk…these edited clips of sound originally meant to instruct and assimilate speech into English pronunciations now serve a different function. For me, they secure Chun’s political orientation: one that is about the crafting of a world that involves the careful consideration of the logistics, function, and embedded emotions of the sounds that inhabit it.

All languages contain their own unique set of vowels and consonants, but, Anne Carson reminds us that: “The importance of vowels to human speech has remained. There are words in English without consonants, but so central are vowels to word construction that there isn’t a word in English that doesn’t include a vowel.” In speech, consonants sounds are meant to break up the intended agenda of vowels. The ssshhh, ppp, ddd, tttt, kkkk, are antithetical to the circle or the rounded mouth needed to voice a vowel sound. Unlike the openness of a vowel, producing consonant sounds involves a narrowing of the vocal tract. This narrowing is referred to as constriction or the obstruction of breath whereby sound is produced by a form of corporeal tension. Consonant sounds also demand all the mechanics of the mouth: the lips, the teeth, the tongue, and the palette. Shhhh, requires the corners of the lips to lower and rather than rounding, the lips become pursed, and teeth become exposed. Parts of the mouth are drawn in. The soft palate is raised, and the tongue reaches upwards towards the roof of the mouth without touching it and then the tip of the tongue lowers behind the teeth.

Consonants emerge out of collectivity. Where a vowel is sounded without vocal constraint, consonants require more effort. Their sounds are produced through intricate bodily choreographies in the mouth that involve both constriction and collaboration. Ganggangsullae likewise relies on effort and interdependence. Participants collectively determine the speed and/or shape of their dance. They may even become serpentine or separate into smaller circles depending on what the group decides. The dance also provides an aesthetic space for its participants to voice frustration, anger, and tension through song with the hopes of producing reprieve from gendered hardships. Chun has decided to withhold these songs from her audience; we never hear the women singing. Through this erasure, Chun embeds the consonant sound with affective force whereby a politics of language and gendered presence is enunciated through and beyond a form of silencing. The dance redirects trajectories of dominance whereby the shushing takes on a new voice imbued with agency and hope. Because of how Chun isolates and amplifies its sound, ssshhhh is free to take on different meanings and associations. For me, I was reminded of rushing water or gusts of wind, or the sound used to lull my child to sleep. I was brought into another index of knowing and relating.

The sounds of language hold erasures and layered histories often obfuscated by our mundane encounters with them. Largely understood as the most sonorous part of the syllable, vowels produce the loudest speech sounds and their capacity for holding larger amplitudes or louder volumes have been linked to the sonic expression of emotion. Consonant sounds are more pragmatic than vowels. They are known for their functionality, for the ways in which they assemble the semantic structure of words and for their capacities to hold vowels in place or as Anne Carson describes as “delineating meaning amid the flow of open vowel sounds.” Consonant and vowel sounds map out different functional trajectories by virtue of the shape of mouth and orientation of breath that these sounds demand. Like Chun, I’m interested in what political orientations become possible when we source emotion elsewhere, beyond the confines of spoken words imposed upon us.

The word consonant is a noun, a word used to identify or classify, a semantic enclosure that establishes a subject or object. But unlike the word vowel, consonant is also an adjective. A consonant possesses the capacity to describe, to name, to tell us more. Adjectives parcel out description on states of being, in this way, they are inherently phenomenological. In 술래 SULLAE, Chun empties vowels of their sonic substance leaving behind traces of fragmented characters and differently shaped circles in their wake. They are stripped of breath and their symbolic value forming a new method of communication that reroutes expectations of what language, as we know it, can do and sound like. Like, ganggang sullae, the vowel is premised on the shape of a circle, but in 술래 SULLAE, Chun provokes us to think about what becomes possible beyond the circular structuring device, what becomes possible beyond the purview of the violent embeddedness of English and its colonial exigencies.

Chun has noted that the moon that hovers above the ganggangsullae is yet another site of imperial conquest. In Art Forum, Chun states: “when I look up at it to feel comforted or to find solace, I’m reminded of colonial violence and an agenda that’s projected onto it. In that way, the moon also reflected how I see language.” Chun’s turn to consonants signals a reshaping of the colonial frame that does not disavow or idealize the legacies of imperialism on systems of communication, but instead highlights the tensions and obstructions produced in its shadows.

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Featured image: 술래 SULLAE, 2020, single-channel version, courtesy of artist

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Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. She is also a musician and filmmaker, whose work has received a number of accolades and has been presented internationally.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Blank Space and “Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence”  –Casey Mecija

Re-orienting Sound Studies’ Aural Fixation: Christine Sun Kim’s “Subjective Loudness”–Sarah Mayberry Scott

Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien

“Grrrr. . .Nudie Suit” (2006) by Flicker User Romana Klee ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In advance of International Podcast Day on 30 September, Sounding Out! finishes a series of posts exploring different facets of the audio art of the podcast, which we have been putting into those earbuds since 2011. Past posts have examined Gimlet Media’s Fiction Podcast Homecoming, Amanda Lund’s The Complete Woman? Podcast Series, and how podcasts position listeners as “stoic.” Today’s entry examines how country music podcasts do–or do not–consider the sound of the music itself in their episodes. Enjoy! –JS

If you’re a country music fan, you might be aware of the genre’s central contradiction: for all the references to classic, traditional, “real” country music, most of this music has not been preserved. The genre’s history is disappearing. Many of country music’s best recordings will never make it to digital archives or streaming services, save for a few generous YouTubers who upload their personal record collections for public enjoyment. Just try to find Stoney Edwards’ 1971 classic Down Home in the Country or Patti Page’s 1951 collection Folk Song Favorites on the streaming platform of your choice. These albums didn’t even make it to CD.

Books about country music history are even more rare, and some of the most insightful publications are long out of print. If you’re lucky enough to score a copy of Philip Self’s Guitar Pull: Conversations with Country Music’s Legendary Songwriters, for instance, the book will set you back over $70. A search of the nation’s university libraries reveals just four copies available in the entire United Sates. 

Within the academic world, though, a new generation of scholars is bringing country history to the forefront, all while complicating the inaccurate racialized mythos perpetuated by the industry. Among other exciting work, Amanda Marie Martinez recently published on the intersection of punk and country in Reagan-era Southern California, and Francesca Royster has an innovative piece of the power of country artist Valerie June (and dropping new book in October 2022 called Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions!) . The recent essay collection The Honky Tonk on the Left brings together a diverse cast of professors to challenge the received wisdom that the genre is solely home to political conservatism. 

Beyond traditional academic channels, podcasting offers a new way of studying music history. The medium is both popular with the general public and tailor-made for sonic analysis. One of the best examples comes from Cocaine and Rhinestones, a podcast about the history of twentieth century country music. Hosted by Tyler Mahan Coe, the show examines forgotten or misunderstood country history while placing this history within the structural contexts of gender, race and class. Episode 2 of Season 1 breaks down country radio’s sexist gatekeeping, for example. Episode 7 of the first season covers Linda Martell, the first black woman to perform on the Grand Ole Opry, along with the racist label head who kick started her career. In Episode 3 of Season 2, Coe bluntly explains how the “sounds we associate with country music came from poor people working out techniques to produce art on cheap, low quality, often damaged, sometimes straight-up broken instruments.”

The obvious advantage of podcasting as a medium for telling music history is that you can listen to a given song as it’s being discussed. Traditionally, a music fan had to read a book or article, then go track down whatever recordings were discussed. Prior to the internet, this could easily be a multi-year endeavor of parsing through record stores, flea markets and garage sales. Now a fan can search for a song right after they read about it, and with a podcast like Cocaine and Rhinestones that research is already done.

In his 2014 SO! piece, “DIY Histories: Podcasting the Past”, Andrew Salvati argues that “podcasting can help us conceptualize an alternate cultural model of history – one that invites reconsideration of what counts as historical knowledge and interpretation, and about who is empowered to construct and access historical discourse.” While this DIY approach does not overturn elite control over podcasting, it opens space for history as an oral tradition, one which is more intimate and more empowering to listeners than, say, a university lecture or a high-budget, corporately sponsored program. Cocaine and Rhinestones is as DIY as a podcast can be; Coe writes, records and edits every episode himself.

The show’s power is most evident when compared to other recent attempts to bring country music history to a general audience. These popular histories tend to avoid critical analysis of the genre, repeating official narratives without scrutinizing how these narratives became official in the first place.

One example is Ken Burns’s PBS series Country Music (2019). Working with some of the biggest stars in the business, the documentary is more or less a retelling of long-known stories. Despite its $30 million budget, the series doesn’t manage to break new ground, all while smoothing over more complicated portraits for the sake of narrative ease.

The documentary’s most glaring failure is its treatment of race. As Kimberly Mack observes in her article “She’s A Country Girl All Right,” the first episode focuses “exclusively on the black and white origins of country, instead of the racism that obscured this shared history.” Even though the documentary interviews Rhiannon Giddens, an acclaimed musician and expert on the racist obfuscation of country music’s black roots, the documentary employs selective editing and voice-over narration to avoid confronting how these black roots continue to be ignored. Acknowledging the importance of figures such as DeFord Bailey, for example, the first person to perform on the Grand Ole Opry and the first musician to ever record in Nashville, is important, but a simple acknowledgment does not explain how the contributions of such a crucial figure are suppressed through an inaccurate racialized conception of the genre’s history.

In the world of podcasting, Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History offers a disappointing rehash of country’s manufactured white southern roots. The episode “The King of Tears” (Season 2, Episode 6) seeks to reveal the secret behind country’s embrace of sad songwriting, but Gladwell ultimately fortifies an already whitewashed history.

Unlike Ken Burns, Gladwell does not approach country from within the industry. His episode is just one in a series of other, non-musical episodes. Like Ken Burns, though, Gladwell uses selectively edited interviews and voice-over narration to shoehorn a simplistic analysis of country music. Worse still, Gladwell doesn’t even acknowledge the genre’s multiracial origins. The episode presents a two-part theory. First, country music songwriting focuses on sad, autobiographically specific stories. Second, the only reason this sadness is communicable is because country music’s writers, performers and listeners are all part of the same social group. “It’s white, southern Protestants all the way down the line,” he says while discussing a list of critically acclaimed country performers.

The show is well edited and funded through corporate sponsorships. The podcast hops between Gladwell in the studio, on-sight interviews, and lush music clips. There is little discussion of the actual music, however. We hear next to nothing about instrumentation, production decisions or even singing style. When Gladwell wants explain why a particular song is sad, he just plays the song and talks over the recording. Take his analysis of “Golden Ring,” a 1976 duet from Tammy Wynette and George Jones. Gladwell introduces it as “a weeper,” but offers no explanation as to how the song conveys sadness.

A clip of the song starts playing at the 8:17 mark of the episode. The song fades but keeps playing in the background as Gladwell butts in to summarize the plot. He gives an anecdote from the songwriter, then the podcast cuts to an interview with the songwriter. The music stops while the songwriter speaks about a specific lyric, then comes back at full volume so the listener can hear the lyric in the final recording. We then go back to the interview sans music before hearing the final phrase of the song at full volume.

The transitions are smooth, and cutting between three sources of audio keeps the listener’s attention. Only later does the listener realize that very little was actually said about the song. In total, the section is just under a minute and a half, and barely thirty seconds is devoted to listening to the song. All we know is that it deals with divorce. We have no context for the recording and no explanation of why the song is uniquely sad.

Cocaine and Rhinestones offers the inverse––lower production quality with richer analysis. Compared to Coe’s better-funded peers, the show’s audio quality is sparse, especially in the first season. 128kps files in mono can only do so much sonic justice. Such limitations never hinder the historical message, though, and they might even enhance it. Cocaine and Rhinestones does not build a world with sweeping soundscapes and audio effects. It is Coe in his basement, more or less monologuing. There are no interviews. Music clips and the occasional radio or television broadcast are the only other thing you hear aside from Coe’s voice. For some, his voice takes getting used to, namely in the first few episodes of the series. You can hear Coe try to figure out how to talk within the context of a one-man show. His own family apparently chided him for the awkward initial performance, but he quickly found his groove, and by the mid-point of the first season he sounds clear and comfortable.

Coe was able to upgrade to stereo for the second season, allowing for more detailed sonic analysis. Just look at Episode 14 of Season 2, where Coe walks us through the writing and recording of George Jones’ 1970 hit “A Good Year for the Roses.” His analysis starts around the 1:23:28 mark.

As Coe explains, the record “opens with a rhythm section panned to the right and, in the left channel, a mysterious low-end swell, like a heavy dirigible lifting into flight, probably provided by a pedal steel player running their signal through a Jordan Boss Tone unit and a tape delay to mimic a cello.” Coe cuts out so we can hear the effect by itself. He then goes on to describe how those production choices pair with the lyrics to create one of the saddest recordings in Jones’s discography.

Whenever he discusses a moment in the song, he lets it play without voice-over. The transition between Coe’s voice and the song is less smooth than the transitions we hear in Gladwell’s podcast, but the comparatively abrupt cuts allow the listener to give their full attention to Coe, then to the song. By the end of the analysis, which runs significantly longer than Gladwell’s discussion of “Golden Ring,” we’ve listened to a combined minute and thirty seconds of “A Good Year for the Roses.” The setup takes longer, the observations are more detailed, and that patience lets the listener appreciate the devastating impact of specific artistic decisions.  

While Cocaine and Rhinestones tackles everything from minute production choices to centuries-long historical arcs, the format of the show is simple. The first season covers a different artist every episode, while the second season is devoted to the life of George Jones. Episodes typically start with a historical anecdote––this could be the origin of the word ballad or the history of drag––then Coe details a given artist’s life, showing where they came from, what they contributed to the genre, and how their work is embedded within larger historical structures. Coe displays an impressive command of a range of topics, not just related to music but to a variety of historical subjects.

This attention to detail is a testament to Coe’s ability to not only listen but to help others listen with him. Even when episodes cross the two-hour mark, the main takeaway is that you have only scratched the surface. Sources are discussed in the show’s unique closing section, known as the Liner Notes. Coe explains why he chose to tell one story but not another, how a given book is useful (or useless) in relation to other books, and sometimes he will include asides that would have disrupted the episode’s main narrative. This is my favorite part of the show. It’s one of the best examples of annotated citation in any discipline (see season 2’s library here).

By openly discussing sources, not just sharing the books he read but detailing why, for example, a commonly cited source is not as accurate as previously assumed, Coe takes the extra step that big budget country histories won’t take. He shines a light on a suppressed history and explains how that history was suppressed in the first place. Cocaine and Rhinestones doesn’t just cherry pick a few examples to make a point––the show offers a patient, detailed analysis of how we came to understand what we now think of as country music and how the genre can be understood in new ways.

The second season recently ended, and a third is in the works.

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Andrew Clark is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied physics and French. His undergraduate thesis, “Time, Space, and Capital: Walter Benjamin in Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ and René Clair’s Paris qui dort,” examined utopian imagery in early twentieth century Paris. He currently lives in Cincinnati, OH and works at a local brewery. You can contact him at andrewclark.me.

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Can’t Nobody Tell Me Nothin: Respectability and The Produced Voice in Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”–Justin Burton

Mapping the Music in Ukraine’s Resistance to the 2022 Russian Invasion–Merje Laiapea

“The (Magic) Upper Room: Sonic Pleasure Politics in Southern Hip Hop“–Regina Bradley

“I Love to Praise His Name”: Shouting as Feminine Disruption, Public Ecstasy, and Audio-Visual Pleasure–Shakira Holt

Note: To see these tweets and videos embedded on an interactive map, click here.

In the late morning of February 24th, 2022, an American journalist captured a young boy on the grand piano in Kharkiv Palace Hotel playing Philip Glass’s composition ‘Walk to School’. The city of Kharkiv was the first in Ukraine to wake up to missile strikes that very morning – the first day of Russia’s full invasion. It is a child’s peaceful reaction to violent intentions. The conflicting feelings evoked by this one scene alone, while the Russian army was advancing on the city, are powerful. It also became an example of a filmed musical event that gained viral international attention through social media and evoked an expression of solidarity from the song’s authors.

The city of Kharkiv was a key site of Stalin’s ‘brotherly terrors’ in the 1930s, most well-known of which is the Holodomor Famine Genocide of 1932-33, when approximately 4 million people died.  As part of cultural ethnic cleansing, countless Ukrainian intellectuals in literature, theatre, arts, and music were killed. Soviet authorities exterminated hundreds of kobzars in Kharkiv, the wandering and often blind minstrels of Ukraine. Invited under the pretense of attending a musicians’ convention in 1932, notes Viktor Mishalow in his 2008 dissertation “Cultural and Artistic Aspects of the Origins and Development of the Kharkiv Bandura,” the kobzars and the ethnomusicologists who researched and documented their music, were executed.

Stalin’s violent transformation of the rural society essentially ended the kobzardom, and performing on the lute-like instrument kobza was replaced with performances of folk and classical music on the bandura – in an attempt to re-territorialise the tradition. As Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights (2018) argue, ‘the re-territorialisation of local heterogeneous musics to nationalist ends has often signalled the death or near-fatal displacement of regional identities’ (12). These new performances consisted of censored versions of traditional kobzar repertoire and focused on stylised works that praised the Soviet system. As in all occupied regions, the Soviet authorities had identified a music which carried a strong national sentiment and attempted to change its meaning, an example of how musical styles can be made emblematic of national identities in contradictory ways (Stokes 2014).

In addition to being a centre for classical music, the multicultural city of Kharkiv is considered the country’s capital of hip hop, a genre that Helbig (2014) argues that in Ukraine ‘oscillates between the highly politicised and the farcical.’ Throughout the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union the Ukrainian language was suppressed, and the decision to rap in Russian or Ukrainian, continues to politicise the genre. The Russian language opens up a bigger market for artists, but Ukrainian carries a strong national sentiment, especially in light of progress by national leaders such as Yushchenko and Zelenskyy in bringing awareness to the violent events in the region’s history. Interestingly, the most famous Kharkiv group TNMK (Tanok na Maidani Kongo) rap in Ukrainian and interject their lyrics with surzhyk, a creole mix of Ukrainian and Russian typical of eastern Ukraine (Bilaniuk 2006).

Fierce political meanings in Ukrainian hip hop are exemplified by the song most associated with the Orange Revolution – rapper GreenJolly’s ‘Together we are many, we will not be defeated’. Ukrainian lyrics index the communal force of approximately half of the country’s population that opposed the fraudulent presidential election results Helbig (2014). Recorded in four hours, the song embodies the fight against lies, corruption and censorship. The Orange Revolution achieved its re-election goal through peaceful means, and musically it marked a victory for Ukrainian-language songs, especially rock and hip-hop, over Soviet-style and commercial Russian-language pop associated with the Yanukovych campaign, argues Klid (2007, 131).

It is no surprise then, that on February 25th, 2022, a day after Russian invasion, a video emerged of Kyiv university students hiding from shelling singing along to ’22’ by Ukrainian rapper Yarmak. This political hip hop song had soundtracked the later and more serious stage of the Euromaidan, with its title referring to the number of years Ukraine had been independent from the USSR at the time. The lyrics speak of an exploited and beaten 22-year-old girl whose name is ‘Ukraine’, poignant for the later stage of the uprising when police brutality had turned the peaceful protests into deadly street battles (Hansen 2019). Here, the language of music is directly informed by the metaphors of conflict, offering in turn a ‘lexical setting’ for understanding the place of music in it (O’Connell 2010).

Hip hop has gained popularity since the early 90s, a phenomenon which has been attributed to the wider embrace of Western musics and the English language, the ‘cool’ element of the genre as an identity marker for young people signalling connections to the West, and, in part, to how Black expressive culture has the ability to connect with other scenes of resistance, displacement and exclusion: Jewish and Asian, to name a few (Melnick 1999, Wong 2004). Hip hop in Ukraine has become a space in which to negotiate a cultural identity, the revival of the ‘local’ and the influence of the global, the Western cultural space and the lived Soviet history; the shift in the Ukrainian consciousness towards the West, and the long-term effects of Russification.

As such, hip hop in Ukraine takes on interesting aesthetic qualities, resulting in the ‘angry folk rap’ (Hansen 2019) of the Dakh Daughters, or The Kalush Orchestra, the folk rap group representing Ukraine in the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest. After taking up arms as part of the Territorial Defense of Kyiv or supporting humanitarian efforts during the first month of the war, The Kalush Orchestra were seen on the streets of Lviv again on April 2nd performing their winning entry ‘Stefania’.

The song – written for the frontman Oleh Psiuk’s mother – now an ode to all Ukrainian mothers – could be viewed as a utopian space in which regional, national and other ideological affiliations are levelled out ( Biddle and Knights, 2008). The group’s folk-rap song ‘Stefania’ utilises the Ukrainian woodwind instrument of the flute family called Sopilka, in a similar way that singer Ruslana featured the Trembitas – Ukrainian wooden alpine horns – in her winning entry back in 2004.

Ukraine’s music scene is a site of identity discourse to locate a certain kind of ‘rootedness’ in linguistics and folklore – a territorial, inward-looking sense of place (Nederveen Pieterse 1995: 61). The presence of folk elements in contemporary composition reflects a strong ethnomusicological revival, as students and scholars have travelled to rural areas to record the surviving musics. The relationship between musical materials and the sonic projection of territory is complex, and such mixed genres should not be articulated simply as examples of musical hybridity. In Ukraine, they seem to conjure up a liminal ‘interspace’ between a historicised imagination of Ukrainian folk and the hip hop sensibility, where the encounter between folk and hip hop is a meeting of the regional and the global, the latter always ready to absorb and redistribute the former (Biddle and Knights, 2008, 13).

For an oppressive power imposing cultural hegemony by force, a folk song with its deep histories and meanings is dangerous, best felt through this video of Katya Chilly performing ‘The Willow Board’ in Kyiv.

I saw Ukrainian folk music legend Katya Chilly today! Here she is, singing barefoot in Kyiv. Not besieged,not encircled Kyiv. Calm and polite Kyiv, waiting and getting ready for everything pic.twitter.com/4RI51DjlQY

— Nika Melkozerova (@NikaMelkozerova) March 19, 2022

This folk song was traditionally performed while playing a spring game and gained popularity through the Ukrainian film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors from 1965. The film is a masterpiece of Ukraine’s cinematic history and tells the story of Ukrainian Hutsul lovers in the Carpathian mountains. Back in the 60s, Soviet reviewers departed from international acclaim and criticised the film’s fascination with Ukrainian ancestry, as well as its departure from socialist realism – the official genre  in the USSR (Boboshko, 1964). Ukrainian history is punctuated by such subversive cultural products, from the songs created by Ukrainian Sich Riflemen during WW1, or the performance of bard music as protest and dissent in the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, Glasnost and the weakened state of the Soviet Union allowed for the Ukrainian bandura, and surviving kobzas, to be played in public again alongside Western genres, such as rock and electronic – music scenes that balanced themselves on the Westernmost margins of permitted Soviet culture (Smidchens 2014, 209).

One of the most circulated videos of the 2022 invasion is a video of Andriy Khlyvniuk, member of funk-rap group Boombox, performing a song written in 1914 in memory of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen.

This dude is #Ukraine’s most popular hiphop singer. Also immensely popular in #Russia. This is how he spends his days now: pic.twitter.com/Dm4aZlQjXD

— UkraineStream (@ukrainestream) February 28, 2022

‘The Red Viburnum In The Meadow’ represents the national kalyna fruit of Ukraine and implies a connection to blood roots and an ancestral homeland. First remixed by South African artist Kiffness, the video achieved its highest recognition after Pink Floyd featured Khlyvniuk’s vocals in their first release in thirty years, significant to those who remember the rock and roll resistance movements in Eastern Europe which, in the 1970s-80s, formulated a critique of society that ‘literally made the regime face the music’ (Risch 2014, 245).

Because music-making is associated strongly with celebratory occasions, many artists ceased performing and recording as usual, and either enlisted or applied their talents to humanitarian effort. Folk musician Taras Kompanichenko enlisted in the defence forces and was seen performing his kobza to fellow troops.

Okean El’zy’s frontman Svyatoslav Vakarchuk continued to lift the spirits of people hiding in metro stations as these transformed into important sites of musical activity. After three days spent underground, violin student Masha Zhuravlyova picked up her instrument, and through personal expression, helped release stress in the people and pets around her. The thread here is of music as survival, and music as a resource for emotional solidarity in communities that have been subjected to extremes of violence (Stokes 2020). Masha inspired her teacher, violinist Vera Lytovchenko, to perform a 19th century folk song ‘What a Moonlit Night’ in what became a widely circulated video from a Kharkiv shelter. In this rare video from Mariupol where the Russian military hit hardest, newborn baby Nikitos was sang to by her mother in a shelter.

Imagine giving birth in sieged Mariupol, under constant bombardment. Imagine singing to your newborn like this in a bomb shelter. Imagine escaping the blockaded city with him in your arms, risking your life at every single step. Ukrainians don’t have to imagine. This is our life. pic.twitter.com/NqOsROwL2b

— Anastasiia Lapatina (@lapatina_) April 5, 2022

On the whole, the song that has appeared most in this resistance, is the Ukrainian anthem. It appeared in high numbers from the very first days of the invasion; in Kyiv, to help cope with the initial shock and violence of war; or in Mariupol, where a teenager prepared for what was to come.

While the Russians continue to advance on the strategic port city, of Mariupol, I end today‘s Twitter flood with this beautiful video of a teenager singing the anthem on the Freedom Square of Mariupol. He sang there during an air raid. The voice of freedom will prevail pic.twitter.com/LvJfo3gmlW

— Mattia Nelles (@mattia_n) February 27, 2022

In Sumy, the anthem was played out of a window on trumpet after fierce street battles; an act of collective feeling that resulted in pro-Ukraine chants from neighbours, and example of how ’tuning in’ (Schütz 1977) through music can lead to a powerful affective experience that literally embodies social identity (Stokes 2014, 12). The anthem was performed on a daily basis by the Odesa opera singers while filling sand bags on the beach, and repeatedly used in radio warfare to jam Russian military communications.

Au yacht club d’Odessa, les chanteurs d’opéra Yuriy Dudar et Andrey Harlaov sont venus remplir des sacs de sable. Ils font de temps en temps des pauses pour chanter l’hymne national ukrainien pic.twitter.com/PJ76C0ndsZ

— Pierre Alonso (@pierre_alonso) March 8, 2022

The Ukrainian anthem is called ‘Ukraine is Not Yet Dead’, composed in 1863 by Mykhailo Verbytsky to a patriotic poem by ethnographer Pavlo Chubynsky. It was the short-lived anthem of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1917 and restored as such after the restoration of independence in 1992. As it represents both national feeling and a long struggle for autonomy from Russia, it was significant to see it performed by an anti-war protester in Moscow, who was detained as a result.

#Russia More than 2000 people have been detained in Russia during anti-war protests. This is Moscow. This man is singing the state anthem of #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/4rndvpdK2v

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) March 6, 2022

Most interestingly, across Ukraine, the anthem was performed in collective singing sessions next to tanks or in attempts to stop them. Music became the means by which the community appeared as such to itself, and also the means by which it projected itself to the Russian soldiers (Stokes 2014, 12). In the region of Melitopol, one of the first to be captured by Russian forces, civilians gathered to protest the occupation, and, using the anthem as their weapon, successfully made a Russian convoy turn around. As the singing continued on a daily basis, there is a high number of video evidence online, including this clip which captures a protester’s conversation with a Russian soldier. In what some commentators have concluded as an ‘uncomfortable’ exchange for the soldier, the woman says: ’You see we are just regular people? We are not ‘banderas’. Some of my family lives near Moscow’. Near Energodar, one such confrontation turned violent. A group of civilians sang the anthem near a Russian column and the armed troops responded by throwing grenades (trigger warning: violence). In this instance, the music emanating from civilian bodies became a direct target in warfare.

Ordinary people. These amazing, wonderful, unbreakable people who are changing history in Ukraine.
Here they are – singing Ukrainian anthem in the occupied Berdyansk. #StandWithUkraine#visamastercardleaverussia pic.twitter.com/EQcldgqacc

— olexander scherba (@olex_scherba) February 28, 2022

Civilians in occupied towns kept coming together to sing in what Benedict Anderson calls a ‘unisonance,’ a ‘physical realisation of the imagined community’ (Smidchens 2014, 78; Anderson 1991). Signs of musical identity organise strategic, intersectional mobilisations of community around struggles for social and political justice, argues Stokes (2014). Of key interest is this battle of anthems in Kherson on March 20th. In a physical manifestation of the ‘patriotic myth’ (Sugarman 2010) that romanticises the Soviet Union and informs the violent effort to rebuild it, Russian soldiers blasted the USSR anthem from one side of the street, while local groups resisted by singing the Ukrainian anthem on the other.

Occupied #Kherson. Invaders play back the anthem of USSR. Locals sing the anthem of #Ukraine.#StandWithUkraine #UkraineUnderAttack #RussiaInvadedUkraine #Terrorussia #PutinIsaWarCriminal #StopPutin #RussianUkrainianWar #RussiaGoHome #НетВойнe #россиясмотри #Russia pic.twitter.com/mCIEsN7oJJ

— olexander scherba (@olex_scherba) March 19, 2022

A parallel could be drawn with an impromptu piano concert on the police barricades during the Euromaidan in February 2014, where a street piano had become a central location for protests. A group of artists, including singer and ethnomusicologist Ruslana, gathered to perform Western music, while the police on the other side attempted to drown the melodies with Russian pop – a confrontation between political alliances and musical genres that have come to signify the two sides of the conflict. It is an example of how music is used by social actors in specific local situations to erect boundaries, to maintain distinctions, and how terms such as authenticity or even ‘taste’ can be used to justify these boundaries (Stokes 2014).

The revolutionary status the Euromaidan piano came to embody was unforeseen by its creator Markiyan Maceh, who had gotten the idea from the street piano in Lviv. Throughout Euromaidan, the instrument welcomed many well-known and amateur musicians, and soon the idea of ‘the lonely pianist against a row of militia’ became a powerful symbol, proved so by Russian officials labelling it ‘piano extremism’. As a central symbol of the uprising, the piano was placed as close as possible to the police lines to make the police sympathise with the protesters, and, as a version of ‘external identity marketing’ (Brokaw 2001), to provide a striking image to the world’s media. Social performance is a practice in which meanings are generated, manipulated and even ironised (Stokes 2014, 12).

The Western city of Lviv, in Soviet times considered part of the ‘Soviet West’, became a key location where people fled to from the eastern region. The piano outside Lviv central station became a welcoming point for refugees, meeting point of musicians and an outlet for a range of emotions. Played every day, the piano witnessed Svyatoslav Vakarchuk perform his song ‘Hug me’ (‘The day will come when the war ends…’) through tears,a beautiful rendition of ‘What a Wonderful World’, and, perhaps the most powerful in my view, pianist Alex Pian’s performance alongside air raid sirens.

Music allows us to think of a time when there will be no war.

Hans Zimmer’s “Time” amid air raids by Alex Pian in Lviv, Ukraine https://t.co/zj6uz1UqCJ pic.twitter.com/qEGFAb5Va7

— Hromadske Int. (@Hromadske) March 26, 2022

Hans Zimmer’s ‘Time’ took on a new meaning in this moment, described by Pian as his inner protest to ‘sirens, bombs, murders, and war’. Here, the violent conflict is literally inscribed within the life of music and recorded musical values, and provides an articulation of sonic dissonance in the social realm (O’Connell 2010). Three days later, Zimmer projected the video during his London concert as an act of solidarity. The sirens heard in this clip have become a daily soundtrack to urban life in Ukraine, and a key sound of the war, with field recordings going as far as calling it the true anthem of Russia.

An outdoor concert in Lviv on March 26th was cut short due to air raid sirens. The clip of the scene is astoundingly calm as the musicians and audience nod in acceptance and leave quietly to find cover before missile attacks. A month into the war, such activity had become part of everyday life, and outdoor concerts continued to take place on Kyiv’s Maidan Square, in Odesa and in Lviv. In addition to collective gatherings, more private and solo musical moments occured in homes and on the heavily bombed streets, as exemplified in this video of a musician playing ‘My Dear Mother’ by Maiboroda in Kharkiv.

Kharkiv, #Ukraine. Spring 2022. This video gives me goosebumps. The man is playing “My dear mother”, a song that every Ukrainian knows very well. pic.twitter.com/6iCoo5L7bF

— Ostap Yarysh (@OstapYarysh) March 25, 2022

In two instances of solo piano, we are privy to the different phases of the war. Before evacuating, a woman said goodbye to her bombed home in the town of Bila Tserkva, a moment that strikes a hopeful and resistant tone in comparison to this video of a soldier in Irpin almost a month later. From neighbouring Bucha, now synonymous with Russian war crimes, I have mapped only one video –this woman singing along to her music in the sun after spending 25 days in an underground shelter.

Natalia spent 25 days in the basement in #Bucha during the occupation. Now she finally gets to enjoy the warm sun and can sing aloud. The music of choice – a song about love of #Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/aoeBh35fRw

— Marek (@MarekS013) April 9, 2022

My analysis of the music collected in the mapping project is the first step towards understanding some of the ways in which music has appeared in–and is an integral part of–Ukrainian resistance. Each section of the map deserves individual attention, and there is potential for a more comprehensive project and documentary film in the growing numbers of footage (at 180 as of this posting).

I hope the project contributes to thought around music and conflict, specifically in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. While the map has been built from one person’s findings and so far only shows the moments filmed and shared publicly, the large number of entries already tells us much about the resistance, and the crucial role that media products can play in present-day military conflicts.

The focus of any applied ethnomusicology projects should be on Ukrainian war survivors for whom this research could prove beneficial. I also hope the map provides a sense of solidarity and a connection to Ukraine for those who have left and those who remain.

—

Merje Laiapea is a curator, artistic programmer and writer working across sound, music and film. She is completing her Master’s in Global Creative and Cultural Industries in the Music Department at SOAS, University of London. Within the broad realm of music and cultural identity, her research interests include the expressive power of the sound-image relationship, forms of frequency, and multimodal approaches to research itself. She assists with event production and community engagement at SOAS Concert Series and works as Submissions Advisor for the 2022 Film Africa festival. Merje also broadcasts the occasional radio show and DJ mix. To find out more about Merje’s motivation behind the project, click here to read an interview by the University of London.

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BONUS POST: Directly following Merje’s introduction to her music mapping project, SO! has also published is her analysis of the observational research she conducted during the first 55 days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, drawing from the collection of videographic material from online sources she embedded on this public interactive map. To go directly to that post, click here.

As an Estonian national, I have a regional interest in the relationship between music and cultural identity in Eastern Europe. Popular music has been foundational in building and sustaining Estonian national identity, through the Song Festival tradition which started in 1869, and the Singing Revolution at the end of the 1980s. In the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine, there are similarities in how music has facilitated resistance to an oppressive regime or invasion.

While other cultural forms can articulate and show off shared values, only music can offer the immediate experience of collective identity (Frith 2007, 264). Looking into the sensitive representation of music in conflict, therefore, is about exercising hapticity with the precarity and suffering in the videos, and ultimately a work of not only academic, but affective labour.

The map format helps visualise the video evidence as it continues to appear in different parts of Ukraine. For accurate analysis, understanding the context, region, and the phase of war in which a musical event originates, is vital. In different parts of the country on the same date, one city can embody a collective feeling of resistance, while the other grief. The map is useful in analysing regional differences in the types of songs performed, and in ‘placing’ the international cases of solidarity. I decided to map the solidarity mixes that directly engage with the musical footage from Ukraine, and to exclude the high number of global fundraising concerts. All map entries depict in some way the role of music in Ukrainian resistance.

“How can’t I love you, my #Kyiv?”, an anthem of the capital of #Ukraine. A very special song for everyone who has ever lived there and truly loves the city.
pic.twitter.com/7Te6jtFHVm

— Ostap Yarysh (@OstapYarysh) March 7, 2022

The map function is made redundant in posts where the location should not be disclosed for safety reasons, such as this video of soldier Yuriy Gorodetsky performing ‘How Can’t I Love You, My Kyiv’ in a military camp. Additionally, I decided not to embed posts that could inform the Russian military of civilian and humanitarian targets, for example a video from Lviv showing the Philharmonic concert space being used for humanitarian storage.

The focus has been on mapping songs and music, rather than the wider soundscape of war, although sounds such as air raid sirens do appear in some videos. The map includes sections on recorded music, such as this wartime ska track by Mandry, field recordings, and ways in which music has been used in online warfare. Most map entries fall under the civilian resistance category, exploring the following questions:

1. What kind of music appears in this resistance? In terms of genre, is it folk, rock, hip hop, or national patriotic song? Is it Ukrainian or ‘Western’? How do the different examples embody national feeling and safeguarding of a culture?
2. What is the power of these musical moments, for the artists, for Ukrainians, and for the world? What can music achieve in a conflict environment, and how does it evoke moments of solidarity?
3. How does the music reflect the different phases and emotions of the war, from mobilisation, resistance, support, contemplation, to grief?

Similar research questions have been posed by Arve Hansen et al. in A War of Songs (2019) about the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests, in which music carried much of the revolutionary feeling. Adriana Helbig wrote about the Orange Revolution of 2004-05 in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration when the Internet played a huge role in circulating political messages through music, especially as Ukraine’s media was controlled by president Yanukovich (2014). Maria Sonevytsky’s Wild Music (2019) looks at both revolutions and the vernacular Ukrainian discourses of ‘wildness’ as they manifested in popular music during this politically volatile decade.

When looking at Ukraine, we are studying a repeatedly colonised region, where, as part of the former Russian Empire, serfdom was abolished in 1861. Ethnographic research and promotion of a national culture in the decades that followed led to a brief window of independence for Ukraine in 1917, only to be occupied and incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the same year. Unlike Poland and the Baltic states, Ukraine was not independent between the two world wars, which adds depth to Soviet propaganda that permeated the region throughout the 20th century – important context to consider when analysing its struggle for autonomy.

Drawing from Parkes, the relationships of domination and subordination are particularly marked and articulated through music in colonised groups (Parkes 1994). Often, Ukraine is portrayed as a country of two opposing regions: the pro-European West and the pro-Russian East. While there have been two sides opposed to each other since the 2014 Crimean occupation, the linguistic, ethnic, historical and religious divisions in Ukraine cannot neatly fit into this East-West dichotomy. In addition to complicated ethnic boundaries that define and maintain the region’s cultural identities, Ukraine is dealing with a post-colonial struggle to protect its independence from imperialist Russia.

The ‘places’ constructed through Ukrainian music embody these complex issues, notions of difference and social boundaries – the very reason why music is socially meaningful: it provides means by which people recognise identities, places and the boundaries which separate them (Stokes 1994). In a war situation, beyond political and social alliances, we are also looking at music as survival (Stokes 2020).

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Merje Laiapea is a curator, artistic programmer and writer working across sound, music and film. She is completing her Master’s in Global Creative and Cultural Industries in the Music Department at SOAS, University of London. Within the broad realm of music and cultural identity, her research interests include the expressive power of the sound-image relationship, forms of frequency, and multimodal approaches to research itself. She assists with event production and community engagement at SOAS Concert Series and works as Submissions Advisor for the 2022 Film Africa festival. Merje also broadcasts the occasional radio show and DJ mix. To find out more about Merje’s motivation behind the project, click here to read an interview by the University of London.

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Zeno of Citium, the  Hellenistic philosopher who founded the Stoic school at the turn of the third century BCE, once had this advice to give to a garrulous young man: “the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so that we might listen more and talk less.” The more we speak, Zeno was saying, the more self-absorbed and foolish we become; in learning to listen, we temper our own egos and attune ourselves to the truths of the world around us.

This piece of wisdom from a 2,300-year-old philosophy was a part of the marketer and best-selling author Ryan Holiday’s reflection on stillness and silence on the October 4 edition of his Daily Stoic podcast, a daily affirmational that brings listeners “a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do.” In citing Zeno, Holiday’s point was that while our highly mediated culture often rewards loudness, extroversion, and “hot takes,” we might do better to listen, and learn from others, rather than simply talk over them. 

Over the past decade, Stoicism, which teaches that self-discipline, moderation, and emotional equanimity are key to overcoming hardship and living a good life, has had something of a revival as a self-help paradigm – and Holiday has been one of its most energetic evangelists. Articles in Vice, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, Forbes, Wired, and Sports Illustrated have all taken note of his influence among Silicon Valley tech workers, corporate executives, professional athletes, military personnel, and celebrities to whom he markets the philosophy as a “life-hack”; his six best-selling books on the subject, meanwhile, have positioned him as perhaps the most commercially successful author in a mushrooming genre of Stoic literature; and The Daily Stoic’s A-level guest list, which has included Malcom Gladwell, Camilla Cabello, Matthew McConaughey, and Charlamagne Tha God, has established Stoicism’s cultural cachet as a practical guide for living, and positioned Holiday as its authoritative interpreter. 

Among the lessons Holiday draws from Stoicism, the practice of stillness (as his 2019 book puts it) is key: a way of quieting the mind, of “hear[ing] only what needs to be heard,” and really listening to the truth of the world in order to achieve the kind of tranquility (what the Greeks called apatheia) that will help us “think well, work well, and be well.” 

With this emphasis on stillness, silence, and listening, it would seem quite appropriate that Holiday would turn to the aural medium of podcasting to proclaim the ancient wisdoms of Zeno, Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, for the Stoics, listening was a foundational skill through which one cultivated the habits of discipline, self-control, and self-reflection that are the heart of the Stoic way of life (askesis); for it is in quieting ourselves and listening that we begin to open ourselves to the teachings of the masters and think about their application in our own lives.

And Holiday is hardly the only Stoic podcaster. As I write this, a simple search on Stitcher yields over 30 podcasts with “Stoicism” in their titles or descriptions, many of which have been updated in the past month (December, 2021), including the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s Stoic Meditations, Stoicism Discovery, Stoicism on Fire, The Sunday Stoic, The Stoic Handbook, The Walled Garden, Stoic Coffee Break, and Stoic Solutions.

Elsewhere, Stoicism has been promoted by self-improvement podcasters like the tech investor and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss,and retired Navy SEAL and leadership coach Jocko Willink; and – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the ancient Stoics were white men who emphasized values like rationality and self-mastery, which are typically coded as male – it has been advocated as a tactic for modern living by masculinity podcasters like Brett McKay and Ryan Michler.

Navigating this space can often feel like a small world (or, perhaps a promotional circuit): Holiday has been a guest on The Tim Ferriss Show, The Art of Manliness, and Order of Man, and has hosted Willink, McKay, and Ferriss on The Daily Stoic.

A full exploration of this network is outside my scope here. For now, I will consider the ways in which podcasting is particularly well-suited to Stoic askesis; and specifically, how the very act of listening – on our commutes, on long drives, at the gym, on hikes, and in moments of quiet meditation – constitutes what Michel Foucault (who himself drew upon Stoic texts in his later work on ethics) called a technology of the self: those techniques, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”

Part of a larger project investigating the historical emergence of discourses of sex and sexuality in Western culture, Foucault in his later writings and lectures turned his attention away from the normative and disciplinary systems of subjectivation that had previously concerned him, and toward the study of ethical modalities by which individuals actively fashioned their own subjectivity. Focusing particularly on the ethical practices of the ancient world, he discovered a more autonomous framework for individual conduct, one that centered on self-imposed standards and daily habits rather than a prescribed moral code. 

This precept of the “care of the self” (epimeleia heatou), Foucault maintained, could be traced from Alcibiades to the Imperial period, and had impelled individual Greeks and Romans (the free white men, at least) to embark upon their own stylized projects of self-transformation.

Among the practices that interested Foucault – and indeed, the one he understood to be essential to the “subjectivation of true discourse” – was the act of listening. In the first hour of his March 3, 1982 lecture at the Collège de France (published in English in The Hermeneutics of the Subject), for example, Foucault explained that listening is

the first move in as[k]esis … since listening, in a culture which you know was fundamentally oral, is what enables us to take in the logos, to take in what is said that is true. However, if conducted properly, listening also makes it possible for the individual to be convinced of the truth spoken to him, of the truth he encounters in the logos. And, finally, listening is the first moment of the process by which the truth which has been heard, listened to, and properly taken in, sinks into the subject so to speak, becomes embedded in him and begins to become suus (to become his own) and thus forms the matrix for ethos (p. 332).

This emphasis on listening, Foucault noted, is evident as far back as the Pythagoreans, who required initiates to spend five years in silence so as to be able to learn the community’s exercises, practices, and philosophical precepts. The themes of silence and listening were further developed in the culture dominated by Stoicism, Foucault noted, and emerged as a “new pedagogical game” that contrasted with the earlier dialogic model. Now, the master spoke, and the student listened.  

But the nature of audition could be somewhat ambiguous for the ancients, Foucault explained, in that it was a passive (pathetikos) activity, yet it is the primary sense through which we receive the logos, the rational substance that the Stoics believed to govern the universe. In his treatise On Listening, for instance, Plutarch (46 CE – c. 116CE) wrote that it was imperative for young men cultivate the art of listening because they must learn to listen to the logos throughout adulthood, and so must learn to distinguish truth from the artifices of flattery or rhetoric. One must listen to the words of the master attentively, so that the logos might penetrate the soul. “The man who has the habit of listening with restraint and respect,” Plutarch wrote, “takes in and masters a useful discourse, and more readily sees through and detects a useless or false one, showing himself thus to be a lover of truth and not a lover of disputation” (On Listening, IV). 

Perhaps the most striking of the texts Foucault discussed, however (see The Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 343-344), is Philo of Alexandria’s (20 BCE – c. 50 CE) description of the practices of the Therapeutae, a closed community of ascetics who renounced their earthly possessions in order to pursue “perfect happiness,” and the salvation of their soul (De Vita Contemplativa, §12). In his text, Philo takes specific note of the group’s elaborate banquet rituals, during which an elder comes to the fore and gives a discourse on philosophical doctrine or on sacred scripture (“teaching very slowly, lingering and emphasizing with repetitions, engraving the thoughts on the souls” [§76]). During these talks, the audience remained silent and motionless, adopting a precisely prescribed posture intended to fix their attention on the speaker, so that the discourse “does not stay on the tips of the ears, but comes through the hearing to the soul and there remains securely (§31).” In these feasts of silence, mastery of the body is the foundation of the care of the soul.

Though modern Stoic podcasting does not demand nearly this level of physical discipline of its listeners, we are nevertheless encouraged to incorporate podcasting into a daily ritual of silence and reflection – a new, digital feast of silence. As we listen through our headphones, in our cars, or in some other quiet personal space, we are joined in intimate connection with our hosts, who guide us in our contemplation of timeless Stoic wisdoms, engraving these thoughts in our minds so that we might have them ready at hand in order, as Holiday often says, to make them the principle of our actions.

It is this possibility of principled living that is perhaps at the heart of Stoicism’s twenty-first century appeal. As Elizabeth J. Peterson has written, in our age of seemingly perpetual crisis, Stoicism’s resurgence is undoubtedly due to its reputation as a practical guide for surviving difficult times. “Between President Trump, Brexit, the Middle East and the domestic issues in virtually every country,” she writes, “it’s not difficult to see why many people, across the world, need a source of clarity, calm, and fortitude.” (And that was before the pandemic, which occasioned a spate of articles explaining how Stoicism might help us endure a moment of profound uncertainty).

But the headlines aren’t the only source of our anxieties; we have plenty of it in our own lives. At a time of deepening economic precarity, in which we are routinely urged to become self-reliant, self-enterprising subjects in order to maximize our value in the marketplace, Stoicism offers a ready-made coping mechanism with a pedigree of centuries: at once a framework for cultivating emotional resilience, and a self-help paradigm for transforming ourselves into more disciplined, effective, and successful individuals. 

When co-opted by late capitalist culture, when marketed as a “life-hack” and configured as an ethics of personal success, then, Stoic principles quite easily align with neoliberal imperatives that we endlessly labor on ourselves in order to better compete in an agonistic struggle for personal fulfillment and economic security. From this perspective, even the advice that we embrace stillness becomes a way of momentarily refreshing ourselves, only to return to work to “persevere” and “succeed.”

One of the most trenchant critiques of Stoicism is that by advising us not to concern ourselves with that which we cannot control (see Epictetus, The Discourses, 2.5.4-5), it is fundamentally a philosophy for living in the world as it exists, and not for challenging it (indeed, Stoicism’s popularity among the Roman elite indicates something of its congeniality with the established order). And while, as Sara Ahmed has written, “neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neoliberalism,” it is nevertheless worth considering how an ostensibly self-directed ascetic practice is complicit in more hegemonic (neoliberal, patriarchal, and misogynistic) templates of subjectivity.

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Featured Image: “Marcus Aurelius Headphone Stand!” by JM3is3D @Etsy. Image used for purposes of critique.

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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.

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‘No Place Like Home’: Dissonance and Displacement in Gimlet Media’s Fiction Podcast “Homecoming”–-Miranda Wilson

SO! Podcast #78: Ethical Storytelling in Podcasting–Laura Garbes, Alex Hanesworth, Babette Thomas, Jennifer Lynn Stoever

SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

In honor of International Podcast Day on 30 September, Sounding Out! brings you Pod-Tember (and Pod-Tober too, actually, now that we’re bi-weekly) a series of posts exploring different facets of the audio art of the podcast, which we have been putting into those earbuds since 2011. Enjoy! –JS

I’ve listened to an inordinate about of podcasts in the past year and half; the number of hours would be shocking. I’ve written about this previously: how audio, friendly voices in my ears, was a more comforting medium than television or film. In early 2021, Vulture’s Nicholas Quah published findings about the continuing rise of podcasts, suggesting that American audiences are intensifying their interest in the medium. He writes, “The case began to be made that podcasting, more so than many other new media infrastructures, was uniquely suited to meeting the moment,” suggesting that the pandemic has buoyed the medium extensively. His findings also show that podcast audiences are engaging more directly and are growing in diversity. The running joke about the medium is that everyone has a podcast. I certainly do. Comedians do. Talk show hosts do. Politicians do. In a recent episode of Bitch Sesh: A Real Housewives Breakdown Podcast, hosts Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider joke that now every Real Housewife feels the need to start her own podcast, too.

In this 2021 moment, the series The Complete Woman? has become more relevant than ever, particularly in relation to the rise of conversations about the “Karen,” and a particular kind of white woman who attempts to wield social and racialized power. The podcast is marked as a “Baby Boomer” parody – or a fictional show directed at a fictional Baby Boomer audience. It’s eviscerating that culture, however, in its caricaturing of Marabel May and her friends, interrogating contemporary conversations about whiteness and middleclass-ness; its dark humor lies not in outdated gender roles, but in how incredibly close to home it all hits. It’s not a distant past, but a current reality.

The Complete Woman podcast directly destabilizes nostalgia, even as it draws on older audio formats. In the series, comedian Amanda Lund parodies real-life mid 20^th-century marriage self-help author Marabel Morgan, who promoted women’s deference to their husbands through evangelical Christianity – her book is titled The Total Woman, as mentioned by Vulture writer Nathan Rabin, a critical enthusiast of Lund’s series. The fictional Marabel May (voiced by Lund) is a housewife living in 1960s America with her husband, Freck (Matt Gourley). The Complete Woman series is set up as audio companions – diegetically understood as vinyl records – to Marabel’s book of the same name, which she penned after successfully saving her “disaster” of a marriage. She claims, “I believe it’s possible for any woman to manipulate her husband into adoring her in matter of weeks.” Each episode of the series focuses on a different aspect of womanhood or features a “checking-in” with Marabel and her “neighborhood gal” friends, aggressive Joanie (Maria Blasucci), muddled Barbara (Stephanie Allynne), and jovial divorcee Rita (Angela Trimbur).

The segments featuring Marabel chatting with her neighborhood girlfriends are particularly insightful, as each woman expresses her own warped version of the mid-century American marriage. They also combine the outdated instructional segments with more modern casual conversations, highlighting The Complete Woman’s addressing of women’s emotional labor, as well conventional housework. These segments also illuminate the distinctly female-driven nature of the series, as these voice actresses tend to improvise the discussions at hand. The back-and-forth between these women is both satirical and demonstrative of a sense of fun in their parody, and, at times, sincere friendship behind-the-scenes. Though a harsh satire of women’s positions in American culture, the show reveals a sense of community as Lund features her friends, all working comedians and actresses based in Los Angeles who find creative outlets in podcasting.

Format here, is significant too. The podcast directly satirizes an older format–self-help vinyl records–and its usage – questioning the ideologies of the past and present. The series conceptual set-up is nostalgic, but the content is not. The Complete Woman is unique in its use of format to draw on nostalgia for these pedantic vinyl recordings; the specificity of the audio and structure of the series suggests Lund has some fondness for these bygone formats. But the formatting is also used to critique and comment on the historical sexism and patriarchalism of marriage. While this is done with humor, the satire presented by the series sounds shockingly grounded in reality. 

To understand the concept of The Complete Woman series, let’s examine the opening episode’s introductory narration. The first episode begins with the show’s recurring “groovy” 60s-style music, signaling a move to the past. While the show is about women for women, a male narrator is the first voice heard – an immediate indicator of Marabel May’s deference to men, and thus the imaginary audience’s, as well. The narrator states, “Welcome to The Complete Woman, the audio-companion to the number one bestselling book of the same name, written by Marabel May. It’s 1963, divorce is on the rise, the tides are changing, and marriages are drowning.”

The voices in the podcast sound echo-y and distant, reminiscent of listening to an old recording, which positions the listener as a participant – as if they are indeed in a struggle marriage and choosing to play this record and get advice from the fictional expert. Marabel then, in a deadpan manner, states, “Hi, I’m Marabel May, bestselling author, unaccredited marriage expert, and stay-at-home wife. Are you stuck in an unhappy marriage? Feel like there’s no hope in sight? You’re not alone. I receive millions of letters in the mail every day from sad people just like you. Here’s what they have to say.” Melancholic piano music starts playing as different voices – both male and female – express their unhappiness in their marriages: for example, “I mean how many nighttime headaches can one woman get?” Marabel comes back, after the sound of a record scratch, “But wait, there’s hope!” Again, the recording aspect pulls the audience into the fictional space of Marabel May and her dire need to save marriages.

The 60s-style music picks back up as the male narrator begins again, “Marabel May’s Complete Woman course is scientifically proven to improve your marriage – or your husband’s money back!” Marabel states, “But don’t take it from the faceless announcer guy. Take it from the countless, faceless, voices I’ve helped.” More voices of men and women are heard praising Marabel’s method: for example, “I used to get upset when dinner wasn’t on the table when I got home from work. Now, I know I’m right.” Marabel responds to these:

Thank you. Are you ready to take the next step toward marital bliss? You’ve read my bestselling book, now it’s time to jump into the audio companion. I suggest you listen to this record in a calm, quiet setting. Lock your children in their rooms and put your pets in a basket. Pour yourself an afternoon swizzle and settle in. You’re about to impart [sic] on a life-changing journey. Your husbands will thank you!

This exchange suggests both that the audience is enveloped into the diegesis of the podcast, but also the series’ dedication to a bygone format – though the dialog is humorous, the concept of The Complete Woman as a vinyl audio-companion never wavers.

The Complete Woman purposefully – and at times very uncomfortably – puts the listener in the position of someone who is genuinely interested in Marabel and her friends’ worldviews, who aligns with her outdated sexist and racist ideas: Marabel refers to “Oriental China,” and Barbara refers to “not being in Calcutta” when oral sex comes up in conversation. While lampooning these behaviors, the podcast is also forcing its listeners to reckon with them, to consider their own thinking as they are positioned as an audience who would agree with everything Marabel is saying.

What is additionally powerful about The Complete Woman is its reliance on authenticity in its sound. The doctrinaire voices of both the male announcer and Marabel May are so identifiable as typical affected self-help narration; their voices are upbeat but never hurry or seem too excitable – they maintain an evenness that is uncanny. Their tone and manners of speech undermine what the characters are actually saying, making this fictionalized companion album seem all the more legitimate, as if this series was found in a used record store – a kitschy yet forgotten audio self-help guide from the 60s. The intonation of the voices is overtly making fun of white voices assuming and exerting authority, no matter the absurdities that being spoken. The medium allows the audience to move in and out of positions: as genuine followers of Marabel May, as listeners of what might be a kitschy thrift store find, and as comedy fans. The sound maneuvers the audience constantly, suturing them to the aural space of the podcast in a myriad of ways.

The Complete Woman parodies albums like Folkways Records produced in the mid-twentieth century, not just in its material, but also the length of the podcast episodes – a little over twenty minutes, just enough to fit perfectly on a vinyl side. The 1963 Folkways produced Understanding of Sex is a symptomatic example of precisely what the podcast is trying to mock, a pedantic authoritative voice, with liner notes boasting backing by doctors. Important, too, is the Folkways record’s completely white, heteronormative take on sex – which is here discussed solely in the context of maintaining a happy marriage. The Complete Woman’s devotion to the medium is humorous, but also in how it  brandishes its critique of modern womanhood: its commitment to authenticity betrays how much Marabel’s teachings disturbingly relate to the modern moment.

The original The Complete Woman was followed up by four more series including the most recent, The Complete Christmas. I, however, want to dissect an example of scenes from The Complete Wedding’s second episode “Bridal Colors” in order to demonstrate how the series utilizes the podcasting format to position the audience as both in and out of the joke.

This episode uses sound to highlights the absurdist, yet bitingly relevant, commentary on wedding planning, both then and now. “Bridal Colors,” with women’s discussion of picking the perfect dress and color scheme for their weddings, especially underlines not only the parody of mid-century culture, but contemporary obsession with wedding planning. With the internet and influencer culture as an endless source of consumption, advice, and color palettes, modern wedding planning does not seem so different from Marabel’s suggestions – particularly in how both exude whiteness, middleclass-ness, and heteronormativity. Those resonances suggest that, despite The Complete Woman parodying a mid-century mindset and the use of older sound technologies, the analog and the digital are applied in very similar ways to maintain a status quo.

After giving the audience a quick quiz to help them figure out their “seasonal” colors, Marabel gives some specific suggestions for planning the perfect wedding. It is important to quote her entire speech on wedding scenarios in its entirety to fully understand how the series uses voice in concert with content to create its cutting yet absurd nature. Marabel speaks, as she always does, in a clear, enthusiastic, pedantic, very raced and gendered voice:

It’s science! – but for ladies. I’ll walk you through a few likely scenarios. I suggest taking notes with a pencil and paper. If you don’t have access to pencils or paper, chocolate syrup on a large cutting board is your best bet. If you’re a Winter having a city hall wedding, try a tea-length going away dress or a handsome woolen ensemble in French white with a veil-less headdress. Your flowers may be carried as a sheath or as an old-fashioned nosegay, pinned to a prayer book. Muffs are encouraged but not required. If worn, they must be flame-retarded [sic] or pre-burned. If you’re a Spring having a formal church wedding, try a long-trained brocade dress in true white and carry an impressive bouquet of American beauty roses, along with an ivory rosary. Jewelry may be delicate and preferably real. No feathers! – unless of course it’s a live canary, pinned to a broach borrowed by your mother-in-law’s estranged secretary. If you’re a Summer having a semi-formal wedding at home, try an ankle-length silk organza garden dress in bridal blush. Shoes are optional, but if worn must be made of glass blown by your tallest male relative on your maternal side. Sarah Bernhardt peonies are appropriate but no more than a half-dozen lest you come off looking braggadocio… is a word I learned!

Marabel’s voice is very candid, and she speaks quickly, as if this ridiculous list of arbitrary rules is a reminder for the audience of concepts of which they’re already aware. This monologue is exemplary of the series’ style – twisting banal aspects of material culture into absurdity to highlight the pressures put on women to perform and perfect things like weddings, marriage, and motherhood. “It’s science! – but for ladies” focuses on this fictional ideal that there is a formula that can lead to the perfect marriage, or that any aspect of idealized womanhood can be perfected if you just follow these easy steps. Woman’s work is implied here to be banal, because it is something expected, and if one fails, the consequences are dire.

While listening to Marabel go on is wildly absurd, it is also mocking a one-size-fits all mentality about weddings, and womanhood in general. The wedding comes to represent a particularly coded – white, middleclass, heteronormative – aspirational cultural practice that, in this midcentury moment of Marabel, is becoming solidified as something one is “supposed to do” and supposed to do in a certain way. It suggests to the audience, too, that these practices, while shifting, haven’t completely gone away. There are still expectations, traditions, and rituals that are widely expected to be performed by woman, relating not just to marriage, but work, sex, motherhood – the list goes on. This midcentury moment is still strongly felt in the contemporary moment, so as Marabel rattles off a list of what seem like insane rules – “Shoes are optional, but if worn must be made of glass blown by your tallest male relative on your maternal side” – they aren’t all that far off from today. These notions of perfected womanhood, too, are strongly structured by ideals held over from that time about race, class, and gender. 

In “Bridal Colors,” the ladies of The Complete Woman also sit down to reminisce about their wedding themes – though Marabel is initially keen on having the ladies recall their roles in her own special day. When Marabel uncouthly mentions how much salve she used to clear up the many bug bites she received at Barbara’s backyard wedding, Rita sunnily jumps in with, “You know a little trick is you put toothpaste on ‘em.” Marabel, comically deadpan, replies (you can hear the massive eyeroll just from her voice), “Oh, Rita.” Heard on the recording, the voice actresses all burst out laughing at what sounds like an improvised moment. The absurdity of their conversation is brought to a halt by an honest suggestion, and it is quickly incorporated into the scene.

Voices shaking with a bit of laughter are heard throughout the series, but this stands out as particularly noticeable. It highlights the improvised nature of some of these group scenes by audibly breaking both the ‘60s narrative and the aesthetics of many contemporary hyper-edited studio podcasts. It would not be unheard in either moment to cut out the laughter or re-record the scene, but it is kept in, obvious to the audience. This laughter breaks the authenticity to the medium and works to successfully suture the podcast space to that of contemporary listeners. There is no frame to restrict, not only what can be heard, but what can be said. The diegesis spills into the space of the audience – they, too, are in the joke, for a moment no longer positioned as the fictional audience of Marabel May, but a comedy podcast audience. This builds a sense of community between listener and creator, as seemingly intimate moments of gaffes become integral to the both the diegesis of the podcast, but also the listening experience. In the case of The Complete Woman the format welcomes mistakes and improvisation as voices break out of characterization to comment on the reality behind the format – which is itself an important part of podcasting.

The comedy of The Complete Woman series is dark at times, as Lund notes both the limitations of women’s roles throughout the 20th century and highlights the ways in which things have not changed. While The Complete Woman is not directly calling on its audience to act, it is addressing the complexities of nostalgia for a previous moment by noting how, in some ways, it closely resembles the contemporary one. There is nostalgia found in the audio-companion concept of the series, but the content – while humorous – can be quite deep and painful. The Complete Woman does not succeed because it draws fondly on former sound technologies, but rather because it – often harshly – points out the pitfalls of nostalgia; Marabel May’s twisted world of the idealized straight white 1960s middle class housewife is often a direct commentary on the current position of women. The show suggests both that this kind of thinking hasn’t shifted much, but also, and more significantly in this moment, the conversation surrounding middle class white women’s complicity in upholding systemic racism. While the original The Complete Woman was released years before these conversations became widely prevalent, it holds up a satirical, yet bitingly revelatory mirror to the contemporary moment.

The podcast also amplifies the voices of the community of women behind it, who are looking critically at this moment in history by reframing and reengaging. It is worth noting Lund is a cofounder of the women-run Earios podcast network, that “strives to elevate the podcasting market with intelligent, diverse, subversive content BY WOMEN, FOR EVERYONE.” It is through comedy – ironically and inaccurately territorialized as a very “masculine domain” in the U.S. entertainment industry – and the genuineness of these scenes which break open the diegetic sound space of the podcast, that the audience can hear – and connect to – the very real women behind-the-scenes of the parody. Ultimately, through looking at series like The Complete Woman, it becomes clear that podcasting is more than a return to familiar formats (radio) – it is creating something new. Improvisation and comedy are particularly significant: the moments of improv and mistakes can create genuine connection.

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Megan Fariello is a Chicago-based writer with a background in cultural studies. She is currently a contributor with Cine-File, and has recently published work in Film Cred and Dismantle. Megan is also a PhD graduate from the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University. This article draws and expands on work from her dissertation, titled The Techno-Historical Acoustic: The Reappearance of Older Sound Technologies in the Contemporary Media Landscape, which intervenes in the disciplines of cinema and media studies and sound studies, examining how the rise of aurally-focused narratives in contemporary media – including television and podcasting – are recasting processes of nostalgia.

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This Is How You Listen: Reading Critically Junot Diaz’s Audiobook-Liana Silva

The Theremin’s Voice: Amplifying the Inaudibility of Whiteness through an Early Interracial Electronic Music Collaboration–Kelly Hiser

In honor of International Podcast Day on 30 September, Sounding Out! brings you Pod-Tember (and Pod-Tober too, actually, now that we’re bi-weekly) a series of posts exploring different facets of the audio art of the podcast, which we have been putting into those earbuds since 2011. Enjoy! –JS

Last month, Gimlet media released the audio-feature length podcast The Final Chapters of Richard Brown Winters, starring Catherine Keener, Parker Posey, Bobby Cannavale, Sam Waterston, and Darrell Britt-Gibson, many of the same cast members from their critically-acclaimed podcast Homecoming, and also co-written by Eli Horowitz, Homecoming’s co-creator and co-showrunner. Along with the podcast’s famous move to Amazon TV in 2017, Gimlet’s podcast reunion prompted me to re-listen to Homecoming, trying to figure out how its signature use of audio—characterized by Horowitz as “letting the scenes and the conversation create the action instead of describing the action”—propelled the series to its success in the first place.    

Homecoming concerns characters connected with afictional military rehabilitation facility in Tampa, Florida, that ostensibly prepares soldiers suffering PTSD for a return for civilian life. The soldiers are subjects of an experimental drug treatment program devised by the US Defence Department-affiliated Geist Group to erase traumatic memories of combat and eliminate resistance to re-deployment.  Set in a specifically post-9/11 political milieu, the series plays out in the implied real world context of multiple and on-going US foreign military interventions. Homecoming foregrounds the sonic/auditory modes associated with war–in particular covert electronic surveillance–working to create an atmosphere infused with suspicion, secrecy and deception. In Homecoming’s dissonant sonic/narrative environment ‘home’ is as perilous as the frontline. 

Dissonance and displacement inherent in the auditory experience are overarching themes in Homecoming and manifest in an atmosphere of uncertainty regarding temporality, memory, identity and ideas of “home” itself. The sonic world of Homecoming is infused with a sense of discord—recorded audio is subject to manipulation and misinterpretation—and the voice is a site of multiplicities that destabilise concepts of identity and reality. The podcast’s pervasive “out of tune-ness” produces a heightened state of listening – a hypervigilance – both in Homecoming’s characters as they attempt to decipher multiple conflicting aural “intel,” and in the podcast’s audience as we do likewise. It is this dissonance that compels Homecoming’s listeners to prick up our ears and listen more keenly.

GETTING “SITUATED”

The series’ distinctive non-linear, explicitly sound technology-mediated storytelling style takes the form of an “enigmatic collage” of sound artifacts: recorded therapy sessions between Heidi Bergman (Catherine Keener), a case worker/counsellor at the Homecoming facility, and Walter Cruz (Oscar Isaac), a soldier whose recovery she is monitoring; fraught phone conversations between Heidi and the heavily-compromised senior management at Geist; covert surveillance tapes of interaction at the facility between Walter and fellow soldier, Schrier (Babak Tafti), and between Walter and Heidi; and a series of voice messages ostensibly left by Walter on a mobile phone he has given to his mother.  

In “Mandatory,” Homecoming’s opening episode, in a fragment of a recorded counselling session between Heidi and her client Walter Cruz, the second in a succession of these fragments that play out over Series One, Heidi tells Walter that her objective is to help to get him “situated” now that he’s back. Through abrupt temporal shifts between the recorded past and the present, the series reveals that this objective was always already thwarted and that Walter’s “situation” in the present is unfixed, unknown and potentially unknowable. Homecoming’s specific atmospheric aural/narrative mode conveys an unsettling sense of fractured selves in an ever-more fractured sonic landscape. Walter functions in this landscape as a reflexive site of multiple sonic presences. At once static and mutable, fixed and shifting he “exists” and is transmitted across a range of sound technologies. Though captured by these recordings, at the same time he evades capture by those seeking him out.

In Homecoming, Walter’s presence is constructed through absence, which positions him as a kind of acousmêtre, described by Michel Chion in The Voice in Cinema as “one who is not-yet-seen but is liable to appear at any moment” (21). Chion has described how “an entire story… can hang on the epiphany of the acousmêtre”…the quest to bring the acousmêtre into the light” (23). In considering the podcast form, being “seen” can be understood as the conveying of presence, that is, the technical and affective means through which a character is felt or experienced. In Homecoming’s specific reflexive use of sound technology to construct Walter as present yet “unseen,” Walter is everywhere and nowhere, always there but at the same time always not there. The series finds a means of achieving what Chion has suggested is unachievable in radio and, by inference, in the podcast – “playing with” presence, partial presence and absence (21). This affective ‘play with presence’ works too to challenge concepts of the ‘disembodied’ voice and speaks to Christine Ehrick’s call in “Gendered Soundscapes” for a more nuanced exploration of the voice/body relationship. As Ehrick puts it – “if the voice is not the body, what is it?”.

In “Mandatory,” Walter is specific about his willingness to adhere to the conditions of his treatment: “I want to be in compliance,” he tells Heidi.  Yet Walter’s multiple itinerant sonic selves seem to resist compliance. Though his presence in Homecoming is constructed through a series of seemingly fixed recordings that might suggest change is precluded, Walter is, paradoxically, a site of radical change. In his technology-contingent presence in the series, Walter, having removed himself from circulation, becomes a ‘soldier-body’ in revolt, resisting placement, compliance and commodification. Goldberg and Willse have identified the “soldier-body” as a “temporary” conduit of “the networks of technoscience and capital [that allows] these networks to adapt and survive” in “Losses and Returns: the Soldier in Trauma” (266-267). It is an argument that manifests in Homecoming in Geist’s covert pharmacological strategies to remediate the psychological fragmentation of war trauma in order to render the ‘soldier-body’ utterly compliant and redeployable. Walter’s perpetually withheld presence revokes his soldier-body’s viability as bio-capital and is framed in the series as an existential threat to the military-industrial complex.

“IF WE’RE NOT IN FLORIDA, WHERE ARE WE?”

Ideas of place and presence, particularly in relation to the non-compliant soldier-body, are further problematized in Homecoming in the sole interaction we hear between Walter and Schrier, another returned soldier, in yet another mode of voice recording. In Episode 2, “Pineapple,” within an internet-based call, Heidi’s boss Colin plays her a surveillance recording from the Homecoming cafeteria, one of several instances in the series of the multiple-layering of sound technology. We listen in as  Walter and Schrier eat the pineapple-based dessert they’ve been served and debate Schrier’s “pineapple-induced” doubts about their actual location. For an agitated Schrier, pineapple is pineapple-no-longer but a repository of a sinister excess of meaning – a sign that “they,” the military, are “really laying it on thick with this Florida shit.”  Are they in Florida or not? Schrier demands evidence: “the only reason we think we’re in Florida is because that’s what they told us”. These duplications, both actual (the recording) and suspected (a fake Florida), produce an atmosphere layered with dissonance and uncertainty.

While Shrier’s suspicion of a fake Florida proves unfounded, this other duplication (the surveillance recording) has catastrophic consequences for him. In Episode 6, “Hysterical”, we learn that after being dropped from the Homecoming treatment programme, Schrier was abruptly taken off the medication that was being administered to him without his knowledge (via the pineapple, as it happens). In yet another fraught call with a distressed Heidi, Colin matter-of-factly recounts the disastrous aftermath for Schrier: “he bit off a chunk of his tongue, spit it at an orderly, then he tried to hang himself. They’ve got him in restraints.”

Not only do the Homecoming soldiers bring traces of war home with them – traumatic memories and symptoms of PTSD – but the place to which they return turns out to bear traces of a war zone. The America of Homecoming is a liminal space, an environment that harbours hidden dangers. While ostensibly home turf, America is a space that functions, in an orchestrated clandestine manner, as an outpost of war, or rather, encompassed within what Ben Anderson has identified as the borderlessness of “total war” (169-171).  For Schrier, sonic capture within the Homecoming surveillance recordings pre-figures further physical capture. Ultimately, he ends up hospitalised and literally restrained.

“HEY MA, IT’S ME, IT’S WALTER…”

Though carceral, a place of enclosure that gestures toward the enclosure inherent in the idea of “total war,” the sonic space of the recorded voice artifact in Homecoming exists also as a site of resistance. Walter’s presence in Season Two manifests via a series of voicemail messages left on a cell phone he has given to his mother, Gloria (Mercedes Ruehl). In Episode 8, “Cipher,” Colin, masquerading as a lawyer taking a class action against the government on behalf of the soldiers maltreated at the Homecoming Facility (one of several fake identities he assumes), persuades Gloria to hand over this phone. As if also infected with Walter’s restlessness, the audio files of these messages migrate from Gloria’s phone to the Geist Server to Heidi’s laptop before we actually hear them. The messages provide a cartographic trace of Walter’s movements west, then north, then south and provide those tracking him, Colin and Heidi, with the first hard evidence of his possible whereabouts. Or at least they seem to.

Again Homecoming draws attention to technologies of reproduction and their influence in how we “conceptualise the voice and its powers” as Weidman states in her essay on “Voice” in Keywords in Sound (236). Walter’s phone is understood as an extension of his affective presence. When subsequent faked messages are left on the phone—the first constructed by Gloria to throw Walter’s trackers off the scent, the second by Heidi in order to entrap Colin—it is this aura of authenticity, the misplaced faith in the faithfulness of the sound recording that serves to legitimate the fakes. The messages, both real and faked, carry the aura of the original voice but their increasingly uncertain status signals “the ontological plasticity of the voice” that Nick Prior has articulated in “On Vocal Assemblages” (489), how “the voice sounds out in a social space comprised of a whole panoply of discourses, techniques and machines that objectify and posit it as a particular kind of object and information”(495). In this instance simulation is an act of ‘pushback’ against networks of power, against the seemingly-fixed borders of recording technology, it is an act that for Walter effects a kind of escape. He remains ‘un-situated.’ Perhaps the safest place for Walter, the only place like home, is in the ‘no place’ of the digital recordings in which he manifests.

Farokh Soltani describes the podcasting form as “the key transformative development in the history of audio drama” in “Inner Ears and Distant Worlds: Podcast Dramaturgy and the  Theatre of the Mind” because of the way it “detaches drama from the economic, institutional and political requirements of the radio broadcast” (189). The vast trove of alternative, ‘unsanctioned’ voices podcasting has made audible can be said to resonate with the discernible hum of difference, the form itself can be understood as inherently dissonant. Its fundamental alterity imbues it with the affective essence of dissonance that Sean Gurd articulates in Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (2016) as “extra-audible information…[a kind of] roughness, a richer, grainier, less-polished sound” (11). The sense of palpable auditory/affective ‘roughness’ or dissonance permeates Homecoming sonic world, frequently in the foregrounded presence of sonic ‘dirtiness’ but always in its distinctive non-linear assemblage and in its inherent critique of the far-reaching and devastating impacts of war. Homecoming’s audio and structural strategies, shifting both temporally and between sonic modes, demand too that we, the listeners, like Walter and Heidi, are actively and continually engaged in the urgent process of attempting to find our bearings, to get ourselves ‘situated.’

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Featured Image: “American Redaction,” by Jared Rodriguez / truthout (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Miranda Wilson is a Creative Practice Ph.D. Candidate in Film Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her creative and scholarly thesis (Supervisor, Prof. Annie Goldson) interrogates and experiments with the ways in which voice/image positioning in documentary can and might invigorate screen space as a site of common space and counter-space. Her research encompasses strategies of indirect representation, in particular with regard to gender and voice/image relations; ensemble narratives that work to de-centre the protagonist; low/no budget filmmaking methods that democratize the means of production and documentary practice that is as much about interrogating the documentary form as it is about the subject it engages with. The research project seeks to detect and articulate documentary space in which individuals cohere as a citizenry and everyday practices of democracy are enlivened. Miranda also holds a BA Honours (First Class) from the University of Auckland. Her graduate studies have encompassed research into sound and dissonance; sound/image relations; documentary theory and practice; and representations of spatial transgressions in cinema space.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

The Sonic Roots of Surveillance Society: Intimacy, Mobility, and Radio-Kathleen Battles

SO! Podcast #80: Refugee Realities Miniseries—Amanda Patton, Ahmad Frahmand, Melvin Mora Rangel, and Brad Joseph 

SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes

A Manifesto, or Sounding Out!’s 51st Podcast!!! – Aaron Trammell

Acousmatic Surveillance and Big Data-Robin James

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome! We are excited that today’s post on Wu Tsang’s Anthem, currently on view at the Guggenheim through September 6, 2021, is written by Freddie Cruz Nowell, co-author of the exhibition texts! He is related to the curator of the exhibition and cares deeply about the collaborative, creative endeavors of Wu Tsang & Moved by the Motion.

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The artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang (b. 1982) creates atmospheric performances, video installations, and films that envelop audiences into spaces where narratives become sensually ambiguous, collective experiences. Tsang’s new site-specific installation, Anthem (2021), was conceived in collaboration with the singer, composer, and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland (b. 1944, Philadelphia) and harnesses the Guggenheim Museum’s cathedral-like acoustics to construct what the artist calls a “sonic sculptural space.”

Occupying the entire rotunda, Anthem revolves around an immense, eighty-four-foot curtain sculpture that flows down from the building’s glass oculus. Projected onto this luminous textile is a “film-portrait” Tsang created of Glenn-Copeland improvising and singing passages of his music, including a cappella descants and his rendition of the spiritual “Deep River.” Filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, near Glenn-Copeland’s home in rural Nova Scotia, this non-linear video alternates between scenes of the musician performing with various instruments and stunning landscape shots of the eastern seaboard sky.

Harnessing the generous sound-reflecting quality of the Guggenheim’s concrete walls, Anthem weaves Glenn-Copeland’s voice and body percussion into a larger tapestry of other voices and sounds placed along the museum’s circular ramp, building a soundscape that wraps around the space. When I asked the exhibition’s curator X Zhu-Nowell about the striking ethereal, translucent quality of the curtain sculpture, X remarked,

It was a collaboration with the textile company Kvadrat. Wu visited their showroom a few times to select textile from thousands of the samples. This particular textile called power is semi translucent (created almost a hologram feeling), but still able to capture the light from the projectors very well. Wu once said that ‘when there is a curtain in the space, it turns the space into a stage.’ Curtain is very important to Wu’s practice.

The installation’s dimmed light ambiance also veils the fourteen speakers that Tsang positioned along this darkened path, each of which plays a uniquely composed track that accompanies Glenn-Copeland’s music.

Working in collaboration with musician Kelsey Lu and the DJ, producer, and composer duo of Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda, Tsang conceived this arrangement of sounds as a series of improvisatory responses inspired by the call of Glenn-Copeland’s voice. The musical responses created by this diverse group of musicians include ethereal string tremolos, dreamy whisper sequences, and impromptu drum patterns, among other ambient sounds that help cultivate an alluring and reverberant listening environment.

Harnessing the generous sound-reflecting quality of the Guggenheim’s concrete walls, Anthem weaves Glenn-Copeland’s voice and body percussion into a larger tapestry of other voices and sounds placed along the museum’s circular ramp, building a soundscape that wraps around the space. X Zhu-Nowell described the process for the exhibit’s speaker placement:

We had a few mock-up to test the speaker placement. The two loudspeakers are placed on the rotunda floor because it’s unique capacity to fill the entire rotunda. The 12 additional Bose speakers were placed throughout ramp 3 – 6. We evenly distributed them, 3 speakers for each ramp. Ultimately, the goal is to work with the unique acoustics of the building, and working with the decay, allowing the time and space for the sound to bound on the concrete walls. The piece is 18 mins long, and in a continuous loop. It was not designed to cultivate a single prime viewing location. Instead, the piece was built to be experienced as one move through the space, and 18 mins is around the pace of one walk from the bottom of the rotunda floor to the top of ramp 6.

Visitors are encouraged to traverse upward from the bottom of the museum to the top of the building, and vice versa, and explore how Anthem ascends and descends along the spiral path.

The title of this exhibition, Anthem, draws from lesser-known histories of the word meaning antiphon, a style of call-and-response singing associated with music as a spiritual practice. Unlike a conventional anthem, which amplifies the power of a song through loudness and uniform sound, this installation enhances the call of Glenn-Copeland’s voice by combining it with ambiguous vocal timbres, changing tints of ambient sound, and other heterogeneous sonic and visual textures. Within this lush yet complicated auditory environment, Tsang’s Anthem also cultivates moments of quiet, rest, and reflection, reimagining the rotunda as a compassionate atmosphere for collective listening and looking. 

In addition to the immersive video installation on view in the rotunda, this exhibition also includes a touching companion film, titled “∞,” which visitors can access behind a luxe pleated curtain that divides the first floor side gallery from the main space. This video is a short interview that Tsang shot during the filming of Anthem of Glenn-Copeland and his partner, Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland, a theater artist, storyteller, and arts educator.

This dialogue captures autobiographical aspects of the couple’s intertwined creative process and artistic development, reflecting on myriad meanings of love in relation to their lives and work. Within the context of the oppressive and exploitive conditions of transgender “visibility” in contemporary culture, Tsang’s seemingly conventional yet uncommon record of this elderly and interracial couple exists in tension with the normative frame of transgender representation. It also extends the conversation within Tsang’s artistic practice around the centrality of collaboration, specifically long-term and intimate collaboration.

Since 2016, Tsang has frequently worked with a “roving band” of interdisciplinary artists called Moved by the Motion, cofounded with the artist Tosh Basco. Core members of this revolving cast include Maroof, Pineda, the dancer Josh Johnson, the cellist Patrick Belaga, and the poet and scholar Fred Moten. Anthem exemplifies how she uses collaboration as an aesthetic strategy for undoing conventional modes of authorship and to make space for marginalized narratives. For Tsang, “making art is an excuse to collaborate.”

On View at the Guggenheim, New York City, July 23-September 6, 2021

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Featured Image: Still of banner/ installation View of Wu Tsang’s Anthem (2021) at the Guggenheim, courtesy of curator X Zhu-Nowell

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Frederick Cruz Nowell is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at Cornell University. He is a scholar with a specialty in historical avant-gardes, and cross-disciplinary research into the history of music theory, contemporary art, and popular music. His dissertation research (Supervisor, Prof. Andrew Hicks) lies at the occult intersection of artistic experimentalism, Euro-American counterculture, and the history of music theory in the early twentieth century. It traces how speculative music-theoretical concepts (i.e., cosmic harmony, biological rhythms, color-harmony, and ontologies of sympathetic vibration) fused into the practices of European avant-garde artists via fashionable occult religious movements  (i.e., Theosophy and Anthroposophy) and various cults of health and beauty (i.e., harmonic gymnastics, Eurythmics, free body culture (Freikörperkultur)). Intimately intertwined with one another, these social developments were integral to the larger infrastructure of the unwieldy “back to nature” Lebensreform (the reform of life) movement, which laid the foundations for progressive counterculture in the twentieth century. 

Before pursuing graduate studies in musicology, Frederick was a University Fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of Art, Theory, & Practice, where he received an MFA. He also holds a BFA from SAIC (the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Since 2018, he has co-curated exhibitions with X Zhu-Nowell under the moniker Passing Fancy.

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Instrumental: Power, Voice, and Labor at the Airport--Asa Mendelsohn

SO! Amplifies: Anne Le Troter’s “Bulleted List”

“Finding My Voice While Listening to John Cage“–Art Blake

SO! Amplifies: Shizu Saldamando’s OUROBOROS

SO! Amplifies: Mendi+Keith Obadike and Sounding Race in America

Sound and Curation; or, Cruisin’ through the galleries, posing as an audiophiliac–reina alejandra prado

On May 5, 2018, the C-ville Weekly, a newspaper based out of Charlottesville, Virginia, published an article titled “Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll: new apartment complex promises at least one of those.” The headline referred to the complex being built at 600 West Main St. in Charlottesville. The complex has since been completed and studio bedrooms currently cost more than $1000 a month. As the C-ville Weekly headline shows, the developers were using the term and connotations of “rock ’n’ roll” to sell exclusive – and in many ways unaffordable – housing.

After reading this headline, I began to develop an idea for a summer course at my institution, the University of Virginia (UVA). I ultimately titled that course “Black Music and Corporate America” which I offered online during the summer of 2021 (syllabus available for download via the link above). Although the course discussed varied content – from the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-gendered histories of rock and roll to the endorsement of conspicuous forms of consumption in hip hop – I wanted to spend one unit focusing on the interrelationship between music, corporate America, and gentrification. I strove to solidify this connection by assigning two related articles. The first article, by geographer and sociologist Brandi Thomson Summers, argues that black residents in Washington D.C. adopt go-go music as a form of reclamation aesthetics to combat their city’s increasingly rampant gentrification. In the second article, ethnomusicologist Allie Martin conducts a soundwalk of D.C.’s Shaw District to forefront the experience of a black woman in the city and help displace white hearing as the default standard of interpreting sound (see Sounding Out!’s Soundwalking While POC series from Fall 2019). These two articles served as a foundation for one of the assignments the students had to complete in class: conducting a soundwalk of their own in which they had to walk around a field site of their choosing and think critically about the sounds they were hearing.

Throughout the summer sessions, students completed three main assignments related to the course topic. They had to think about marketing themselves and thus wrote a cover letter for a job or internship they were interested in pursuing in the future. We also, as a class, sent a suggestion to literary scholar John Patrick Leary, who has created a list of “keywords of capitalism:” buzzwords that get adopted in corporate lingo; we suggested “rockstar” as a term and offered him a brief explanation why:

Students also had to conduct a soundwalk. I asked them to model it after Martin’s and to also take into consideration Summers’ arguments about gentrification, white policing of black sound, and a community’s response to attempts to silence their music and culture.  

The soundwalks I received merit sharing with readers of Sounding Out for three primary reasons: 1) The assignment benefited from the online format, especially since students could conduct soundwalks in Charlottesville as well as in their homes across the country. 2) the students made compelling arguments that deserve recognition. 2) the students brought up issues that teachers interested in assigning soundwalks in the future might want to preemptively address.

Students who walked around Charlottesville focused mostly on The Corner, the portion of the city where most of UVA’s student body eats, shops, and drinks. As one student noted, during the regular semester, hundreds of students populating The Corner on any given day during the semester can silence out – literally – the concerns of the homeless and the panhandlers who make the area their home. However, over the summer, Charlottesville’s Corner becomes significantly less populated and, as this student noted, much more silent. As a result of this silence, pedestrians might be much more attuned to Charlottesville’s rampant inequality. This student, over the course of their summer soundwalk on The Corner, came to a radical conclusion: while communities might need moratoriums on evictions, or moratoriums on construction, maybe Charlottesville needs a moratorium on student noise as well.

In addition to focusing on inequality, many students’ soundwalks pointed out discrepancies between what they saw and what they heard while on their soundwalks. Another student writing about The Corner noted how, as a transfer student, the music that they heard emanating from a barbershop helped make them feel at home in Charlottesville. Businesses on The Corner have historically not been entirely welcoming to people of color. Additionally, most pedestrians and patrons of The Corner are white. However, this student remarked how comfortable they felt on The Corner because they could hear one of their favorite artists, Moneybagg Yo, playing from the sound system of the barbershop they were going to visit. Long before they could visually see the business, the soundscape let this student know they were welcome. In this way, this barbershop helped create a sense of community in a similar way that the broadcasting of go-go music from Shaw’s many businesses helps create in Washington D.C.  

Another student focused specifically on the contradictions between the activism they “saw” demonstrated in their upper-class Boston suburb and the activism they “heard” while walking around their neighborhood. This student noted that residents of their neighborhood strove to create an inclusive atmosphere by putting up “Black Lives Matters” and “Immigrants Welcome” yard signs. However, they also cited Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s work – who we read in class – and noted the presence of what Stoever calls the “sonic color line.” As this students’ own field recordings of their neighborhood illuminated, most residents of this neighborhood valued silence. Harlemites during the 1940s and 1950s, as Stoever writes, certainly appreciated restful nights, but her scholarship also demonstrates how dominant narratives constructed black communities as “noisy,” “chaotic,” and “dangerous,” and white ones as “silent,” “efficient,” and “disciplined.” Although residents in this Boston suburb think of themselves as progressive and demonstrate their liberalism through visual signifiers such as yard signs, this student concluded that they still live in a community that privileges certain (silent) soundscapes. In doing so, such communities continue to perpetuate the sonic color line.

Admittedly, several students living in America’s suburbs struggled to conceive of the sounds they heard as worthy of discussion. For instance, the sounds of cars made frequent appearances in their writing but were often dismissed as inconsequential. Instead, students lamented that they were not experiencing a vibrant public sphere that resembled the setting of Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing (a film we watched together in class), as if that representation wasn’t a very particular historicized and localized representation. On an individual basis, I tried to get students to think more critically about the sounds of cars in their neighborhood. We read about the role of automobile in the development of G-Funk during the early 1990s as well as the death of Jordan Davis, who was murdered in his car for playing rap too loudly. However, neither article resonated with students’ experience on their soundwalks since they were simply hearing cars passing by their houses or driving down the street. Most of the time, they could not tell what type of music was being listened to at all inside the car nor could they hear it emanate onto the street.  

Therefore, teachers, depending on the living conditions of their students, might want to preemptively include discussions of car culture within American society. After all, more than go-go music broadcasted from storefronts, or second line parades, or music playing from boomboxes, or the noise of nature, (my) students typically hear cars in their day-to-day life. As a result, teachers assigning soundwalks may want to talk about the role of highway construction and the automobile industry on suburbanization and white flight. Discussions of automobiles within the context of environmental racism might also be useful for students to consider. Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition also discusses the immense time and energy corporations have devoted to car sounds and soundscapes within cars, buffering occupants from car noise as well as that of the neighborhoods outside.

In addition, I found that students need a more robust historical understanding of suburbanization in the United States, particularly alongside an understanding of their own racial and ethnic histories. Some students living African American suburbs could have benefited from some contextualization about when and how they came to be. Talking about suburbanization in general, the development of White suburban liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s would have helped the student living in a Boston suburb make more sense of the politics of their neighborhood. Karen Tongson’s Relocations also provides context for shifts in America’s suburban landscape after sweeping changes in immigration law in 1965, as well as a rethinking of expressions of sexuality in the suburbs. These are just some topics I wish I had focused on more to help prepare my students for their soundwalks.

Future teachers may feel inclined to refer to the conclusions my students came to, as well as the literature I wish I had included in course, as they think about assigning soundwalks in their own classes. Both my students and I appreciated the soundwalk assignment and its invitations to listen differently. Teaching soundwalks in a course focusing on “Black music and marketing strategy” prompted my own necessary meditation as a non-Black scholar working in this field. Guided by Loren Kajikawa’s new research on “Music, Hip Hop and the Challenge of Significant Difference” that examines how the popularity of courses on black music help subsidize a university’s classical music offerings, I want to incorporate future discussions of Black music as sonic diversity marketing in contemporary higher ed, both at the microlevel of scholarship and the macro- institutional level, which remains far from equitable despite ongoing challenges to its status quo. For students, the soundwalks–in their words–allowed them to learn about themselves and think differently about the area in which they live. They also become more attuned to their surroundings–questioning what makes a neighborhood and for whom?–and how different cultures use their voices where they live, necessary skills for our moment that will help us envision a world beyond it.

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Featured Image: Wall Mural right next to Bowerbird Bakeshop in Charlottesville, VA, image by Tom Mills, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Rami Toubia Stucky is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia and scholar of the music of the African diaspora, music of the Americas, commercial culture, intercultural exchange, and music and migration. Sometimes he composes/arranges jazz music and plays drums. He is currently writing a dissertation on the arrival of Brazilian bossa nova to the United States during the 1960s. He runs a personal and professional website dedicated mostly to talking about the songs his sister likes. 

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig all this good stuff about sound studies pedagogy! Good luck with Fall semester, folks!:

The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes

Making His Story Their Story: Teaching Hamilton at a Minority-serving Institution–Erika Gisela Abad

Deejaying her Listening: Learning through Life Stories of Human Rights Violations– Emmanuelle Sonntag and Bronwen Low

Audio Culture Studies: Scaffolding a Sequence of Assignments– Jentery Sayers

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

“Toward A Civically Engaged Sound Studies, or ReSounding Binghamton”–Jennifer Lynn Stoever

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig

SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes

Listening to #Occupy in the Classroom–D. Travers Scott

SO! Podcast #71: Everyday Sounds of Resilience and Being: Black Joy at School–Walter Gershon

Sounding Out! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul– Brooke Carlson

A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

My Voice, or On Not Staying Quiet–Kaitlyn Liu

(Re)Locating Soundscapes of Schooling: Learning to Listen to Children’s Lifeworlds–Cassie J. Brownell

If You Can Hear My Voice: A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching–Caroline Pinkston

Mukbang Cooks, Chews, and Heals – David Lee

SO! Podcast #80: Refugee Realities Miniseries–Steph Ceraso

It’s understandable to resist reading or thinking about Covid in late-2021, even as the Delta variant’s new surges are making headlines around the world. Covid has surrounded and overwhelmed us for over a year, and many people’s reluctance to engage meaningfully with it at this time is fueled by feelings of fatigue, mental exhaustion, and frustration. However, I urge in this post that we have a continued responsibility to sustain our sonic engagement and listen to what the Covid-19 soundscape teaches us.

Covid-19, as most of us now know now, is a virus caused by the coronavirus strain SARS-CoV-2. While the symptoms of Covid-19 are many and varied, one symptom seemed most vital and censorious—a nagging and persistent dry cough that became referred to as the “Covid cough” in everyday vernacular. The Covid cough became an intrusive and yet all too familiar presence in the Covid soundscape—an isolated acoustic environment that allows us to study its characteristics. For instance, investigations within the Covid soundscape have studied the noise annoyances of traffic, neighbors, and personal dwellings; have recorded the quieting of the usually bustling streets of New York City; have researched whale stress hormones linked to less noise pollution in our ocean waters; and have analyzed  the reception and aural imagery of sirens. I seek to add to this research by bringing the sounds of the Covid body (or a body perceived to have Covid) into the larger soundscape conversation.

It is of vital importance to attend to the Covid soundscape while we are still in it because the Covid soundscape is bound by time and place and is ever-changing. Once Covid is eradicated, our access to the sounds surrounding it disappear as well. So, I dwell in the soundscape where the Covid cough is still an everyday reality. With the Covid cough present in approximately sixty percent of Covid cases according to WebMD, the cough quickly became the virus’s warning bell, identifying who might be infected with the virus. In the early days of the viruses’ rapid spread in the United States, coughing became an acoustic red flag—a sign that danger could be near. So much about the virus and its spread was unknown, and the uncertainty heightened desires for control and reassurance. Because of this, we attended to coughing in ourselves and others, consciously and unconsciously, in ways we probably never had before.

All of this auditory attention focused on coughing is a process of listening. Different from hearing—perceiving sounds—listening requires attentiveness and consideration. Listening to sounds, as Ceraso states, “influences our feelings and behaviors as we move through the world” (176). I, like Eckstein and other sound scholars, insist that sound is an argument and that sounds have persuasive power. Sounds can evoke different responses from different people—perhaps your favorite song elicits painful memories for someone else. Listening then, can be personal. However, sound studies scholars know, and Covid-19 has amplified, that listening is also shaped by social and cultural contexts (Rice, “Listening”). During the pandemic, people listened to bodies in ways that were shaped by the news, the medical community, the culture, and the environment. While listening as a medical practice is used to diagnose and treat, the listening I refer to here is not one of compassionate care, but rather a practice of fear, surveillance, and othering.

For many people—in the United States, particularly white, hetero, cis-gendered, able-bodied, people—their bodily sounds came under social and cultural scrutiny for the first time——bringing up issues of autonomy and self-control. “It’s just allergies,” folks muttered while passing someone in the grocery store, just as a cough that could no longer be suppressed escaped their lips. Suddenly, as suspicious eyes were cast every which way, people felt compelled to disclose their medical histories to complete strangers in order to have their coughs—their bodily sounds—be deemed socially acceptable and their public presence allowable. Shildrick reminds us that bodies are leaky, but Western medicine and practice reinforce European-descended cultural teachings that our bodily boundaries should be secure (i.e. not leaky) and that otherness should be excluded. The “Covid cough” taught many of us for the first time that our bodies are leaky, noisy, and permeable, and they are not always under our command. Listening to our bodies took on an all-new meaning as we attended to our bodily sounds in hyper-vigilant ways.

Attending to the leaky, noisy nature of bodies, however, was certainly not new to everyone. Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line details the hypervigilance and rigid compliance long demanded of Black and brown bodies—often violently—by the white listening ear’s norms regarding “propriety” and personhood.  Ehrick’s concept of the “gendered soundscape” thinks through surveillance in regard to female-presenting bodies and vocal gender. Casillas’s notion of “listening loud(ly)” while Chicanx, Martin’s Black feminist soundwalk methodology , and Blake’s discussion of the “gas station voice” many trans people take on to protect themselves from attack reminds us that the stakes for surveillance are higher at the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, accent, and citizenship status, but that resistance can also be also quite powerful.

For individuals with health conditions, impairments, or disabilities, too, concerns about control and disclosure are not recent issues, as their bodies have long been listened to in ways non-disabled bodies simply have not. For example, for a time after my mother had emergency surgery for colon cancer, her body required the use of a colostomy bag. One day she and I were shopping in a department store when a sales clerk heard my mother’s body leak (i.e. make sounds that we’ve been taught to believe are only acceptable in private spaces and bathrooms). The sales associate listened to my mother’s body in a way that bordered on disgust and looked at her in a way that beckoned my mom to justify her leaky, fallible body.

This kind of listening—the surveillance of others’ bodies—is used to regulate and control bodies, and is a long-standing tradition in disability history. For instance, St. Pierre  highlights the embodied act of stuttered speech that is not only constructed by cultural norms but that challenges our cultural fantasy of the body as an invisible channel for communication and disrupts the disabled/able-bodied binary. Mills’s research on deafness and hearing technologies explores the irony and paradox that hearing aids and cochlear implants were invented to “treat” the invisible disability of deafness, but yet visibly mark their wearers. And while not explicitly writing of disabled bodies, Booth and Spencer contend that non-vocal bodily sounds are rhetorical and therefore create rhetorical challenges and provoke us into attempted management of the sounds our body produces. Individuals with impairments, diseases, and disabilities have long been listened to, scrutinized, and surveilled in these ways. Such listening is culturally bound and rooted in the ableist myth that bodies should be self-contained and controlled at all times.

As the Covid-landscape meant that our ability to visually surveil bodies was diminished due to masks, barriers, and plexiglass partitions, our impulse to sonically surveil became heightened. Thus, many of us listened differently.  Our fears of being surveilled were heightened by the fear of the Other—in this case, the fear of being othered as unwell. Our anxiety about the Covid cough was attached to ableism and the horror of being perceived as sick because, as Davis states, the “nightmare of the body is one that is deformed, maimed, mutilated, broken, diseased” (Normalcy: Link 7). The Covid cough reminded all of us that we are not as self-controlled and autonomous as we would like to think, and that we are all capable of being–or of becoming–a dissed (diseased or disabled), othered body, if we are not already.

But what if we could revisit the Covid cough and consciously listen to it in other, less fear-driven ways? If we move from listening to the cough as a surveillance practice and situate our listening as a critical rhetorical practice–a practice that examines the relationship of discourse and power and advocates for social change–then we can begin to think about what the Covid cough can teach us. Novak and Sakakeeny claim that sound only becomes known through its materiality. The Covid cough is indelibly material and embodied; it requires lungs and airways, breath and mucus. The Covid cough, distinguishable from other coughs, was described similarly by medical professionals around the world, reminding us that while listening is a highly cultured act, our sound bodies are comprised of blood, bones, and organs—substance that tethers our listening practices to a material body. We are, as Eidsheim claims in Sensing Sound, interconnected in material terms: “we cannot exist merely as singular individuals” (20). The stuff and guts of our material bodies reminds us of our connectivity, of our shared humanity, of our oneness.

The sound of the Covid cough, then, assures us of our vulnerability—a vulnerability precipitated by our lived, material body. It is important to note that not all individuals have been equally vulnerable. Individuals who are immunocompromised and essential workers, for instance, were much more susceptible to being exposed to the Covid-19 virus, as was anyone unable to work to home and many Black and brown Americans made more vulnerable by years of racist neglect by the nation’s health care system. But, still, no one is invincible. The sounds of the Covid-19 soundscape reify this truth and reinforce that through our material bodies, we are interconnected; we are all sound, and sounding, bodies.

Covid-19 brought, and is still bringing, daily horrors. The sounds of the Covid-19 soundscape are not yet absent from our consciousness or our communities. My hope is that by re-immersing ourselves into its soundscape, we can continue to remember that our fight against Covid-19 is a collective one and that we all have a shared responsibility toward our fellow humans. It is also important for sound studies to think critically and rhetorically about normalized listening practices and how those practices shape cultural understandings of what it means to be sick or disabled. Listening is not only an embodied practice; it also has bodily implications. While the Covid-19 soundscape heightened our awareness of our own vulnerability and, for some, their fears of “the other”—and (hopefully) some reflexivity on how one’s own listening can drive practices of othering—it also reassured many of our connectivity, for better or worse.

We remember those whose lives were lost to Covid-19. We listen to honor them and we listen to learn. . .and hopefully we can listen to one another with renewed empathy to build new collectivities that will forever change the Covid soundscape, along with the many other intersecting inequities that collectively brought us here too.

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Featured Image: Coronavirus, Playground on Lockdown, Sheffield, UK, Image by Tim Dennell (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Sarah Mayberry Scott (Ph.D., University of Memphis) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Her research centers on representations and rhetorics of deafness. Scott is particularly interested in how sound impacts the Deaf community and how multi-modal literacies can be of particular interest and utility. She explores these issues in her works, “Re-Orienting Sound Studies’ Aural Fixation: Christine Sun Kim’s ‘Subjective Loudness,’” (2017), “Disability Gets Dissed: How Listening Rhetorically with Cultural Humility Amplifies the Concerns of Disability Culture,” (2021), and “Toward a More Just Rhetorical Criticism Through Situated Listening” (in press).

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SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes

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“A focus on listening [with technology] shifts the idea of freedom of speech from having a platform of expression to having the possibility of communication” (K. Lacey)

One of the biggest social media event of the past decade, #metoo stands out as a pivotal shift in the future of gender relations. Despite its persistence since October 2017, #metoo is still under-theorized, and since its permutations generate countless hashtag sub-categories each passing week, making sense of it presents a conceptual quagmire. Tracing its history, identifying key moments, mapping its pro- and counter-currents present equally tough challenges to both data science and feminist scholars.

Meta-communication about #metoo abounds. Infographics and visualizations attempt to contain its organic growth into perceivable maps and charts; pop news media constantly report on its evolution in likes, counts, and retweets, as well as—and increasingly—in number of convictions, lawsuits, and reports. At the same time, #metoo has arguably created a discernible listening public in the way that Kate Lacey (2013) argues emerged with national radio: women’s stories have never been listened to with such wide reach and rapt attention.

The project I discuss here takes ‘hearing’ #metoo a step further into the auditory realm in the form of data sonification so as to to re-imagine an audience compelled to earwitness not just the scope but the emotional impact of women’s stories. Data sonification is a growing field, which from its inception has crossed between art and science. It involves a conceptual or semantic translation of data into relevant sonic parameters in a way that utilizes perceptual gestalts to convey information through sound.

Brady Marks and I created the #metoo sonification you’ll hear below by drawing from a public dataset spanning October 2017 to the early Spring of 2018 obtained from data.world. Individual tweets using the hashtag are sonified using female battle cries from video games; the number of retweets and followers forms a sort of swelling and contracting background vocal texture to represent the reach of each message. The dataset is then sped up anywhere between 10x to 1000x in order to represent perceivable ebbs and flows of the hashtag’s life over time. The deliberate aim in this design was to convey a different sensibility of social media content, one that demands emotional and intellectual attention over a duration of time. Given Twitter’s visual zeitgeist whereby individual tweets are perceived at a glance and quickly become lost in the noise of the platform the affective attitude towards “contagious” events becomes arguably impersonal. A sonification such as this asks the listener to spend 30 minutes listening to 1 month of #metoo: something impossible to achieve on the actual platform, or in a single visualization. The aim, then, is to interrupt social media’s habitual and disposable engagements with pressing civic debates. 

A critique of big data visualization

To date, there have been more than 19 million #MeToo tweets from over 85 countries; on Facebook more than 24 million people participated in the conversation by posting, reacting, and commenting over 77 million times since October 15, 2017. In a global information society ‘big data’ is translated into creative infographics in order to simultaneously educate an overwhelmed public and elicit urgency and accord for political action. Yet ideological and political considerations around the design of visual information have lagged behind enthusiasm for making data ‘easy to understand’. At the other end of the spectrum, social media delivers personalized micro-trends directly and in real time to always-mobile users, reinforcing their information silos (Rambukkana 2015). Between these extremes, the mechanisms by which relevant local, marginalized or emergent issues come to be communicated to the wider public are constrained.

With this big idea in mind, the question we ask here is what would it mean to hear data?  Emergent work in sonification suggests that sound may afford a unique way to experience large-scale data suitable for raising public awareness of important current issues (Winters & Weinberg 2015). The uptake of sonification by the artistic community (see Rory Viner, Robert Alexander, among many others) signals its strengths in producing affective associations to data for non-specialized audiences, despite its shortcomings as a scientific analysis tool (Supper, 2018). Some of the more esoteric uses of sonification have been in the service of capturing what Supper calls ‘the sublime’ – as in Margaret Schedel’s “Sounds of Science: The Mystique of Sonification.”

Who’s listening on social media?

Within the Western canon of sound studies “constitutive technicities” (Gallope 2011) or what Sterne calls “perceptual technics” embody historically situated ways of listening that center technology as a co-defining factor in our relationship with sound. Within this frame, media sociologist Kate Lacey traces the emergence of the modern listening public through the history of radio. Using the metaphor of ‘listening in” and “listening out,” Lacey reframes media citizenship by pointing out that listening is a cultural as well as a perceptual act with defined political dimensions:

Listening out is the practice of being open to the multiplicity of texts and voices and thinking of texts in the context of and in relation to a difference and how they resonate across time and in different spaces. But at the same time, it is the practice and experience of living in a media age that produces and heightens the requirement, the context, the responsibilities and the possibilities of listening out (198)

According to Lacey, a focus on listening instead of spectatorship challenges the implicit active/passive dualism of civic participation in Western contexts. More importantly, she argues, we need to move away from the notion of “giving voice” and instead create meaningful possibilities to listen, in a political sense. Data sonification doesn’t so much ‘give voice to the voiceless’ but creates a novel relationship to perceiving larger patterns and movements.

Our interactions with media, therefore, are always already presumptive of particular dialogical relations. Every speech act, every message implies a listening audience that will resonate understanding. In other words, how are we already listening in to #metoo?  How and why might data sonification enable us to “listen out” for it instead? In order to get a different hearing, what should #metoo sound like?

Sonifying #metoo: the battle cries of gender-based violence

It is unrealistic to expect that your everyday person will read large archives of testimony on sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Because of their massive scale, archives of #metoo testimony pose a significant challenge to the possibility for meaningful communication around this issue.  Essentially drowning each other out, individual voices remain unheard in the zeitgeist of media platforms that automates quantification while speeding up engagement with individual contributions. To reaffirm the importance of voice would mean to reaffirm inter-subjectivity and to recognize polyphony as an “existential position of humanity” (Ihde 2007, 178). This was the problem to sonify here: how to retain individual voices while creating the possibility for listening to the whole issue at hand. Inspired by the idea of listening out, myself and artist collaborator Brady Marks set out to sonify #metoo as a way of eliciting the possibility for a new listening public.

The #metoo sonification project intersected deeply with my work on the female voice in videogames. My choice to use a mixed selection of battle cry samples from Soul Calibur, an arcade fighting game, was intuitive. Battle cries are pre-recorded banks of combat sounds that video game characters perform in the course of the story. Instances of #metoo on Twitter presumably represent the experiences of individual women, pumping a virtual fist in the air, no longer silent about the realities of gender-based violence. So hearing #metoo posts as battle cries of powerful game heroines made sense to me. But it’s the meta layers of meaning that are even more intuitive: as I’ve discussed elsewhere, female battle cries are notoriously gendered and sexualized. Listening to a reel of sampled battle cries is almost indistinguishable from listening to a pornographic soundscape. Abstracted in this sonification, away from the cartoonish hyper-reality of a game world, these voices are even more eerie, giving almost physical substance to the subject matter of #metoo. Just as the female voice in media secretly fulfils the furtive desires of the “neglected erogenous zone” of the ear (Pettman 2017, 17), #metoo is an embodiment of the conflation of sex with consent: the basis of what we now call ‘rape culture.’

Sonifying real-time data such as Twitter presents not only semantic (how should it sound like) but also time-scale challenges. If we are to sonify a month – e.g. the month of November 2017 (just weeks after the explosion of #metoo) – but we don’t want to spend a month listening, then that involves some conceptual time-scaling. Time-scaling means speeding up instances that already happen multiple times a second on a platform as instantaneous and global as Twitter. Below are samples of three different sonifications of #metoo data, following different moments in the initial explosion of the hashtag and rendered at different time compressions. Listen to them one at a time and note your sensual and emotive experience of tweets closer to real-time playback, compared to the audible patterns that emerge from compressing longer periods of time inside the same length audio file. You might find that the density is different. Closer to real-time the battle cries are more distinctive, while at higher time compressions what emerges instead is an expanding and contracting polyphonic texture.

Vocalizations of female pleasure/affect, video game battle cries already have a special relationship to technologies of audio sampling and digital reproduction as Corbett & Kapsalis describe in “Aural sex: the female orgasm in popular sound.”  This means that the perceptual technics involved in listening to recorded female voices are already coded with sexual connotations. Battle cries in games are purposely exaggerated so as to carry the bulk of emotional content in the game’s experiential matrix. Roland Barthes’ notion of the “grain of the voice”—the presence of the body in (singing) voice—is frequently evoked in describing the substantive role that game voices play in the construction of game world immersion and realism. In the #metoo sonification, I decontextualize the grain of the voice—there are no visual images, narrative, or gameplay; the battle cries are also acousmatic, in that there are no bodies visually represented from which these sounds emanate.

https://soundcloud.com/ambient-sonic/metoo_december2017_x500?in=ambient-sonic/sets/metoo-sonification-excerpts

The battle cry in this #metoo sonification is the ultimate disembodied voice, resisting what Kaja Silverman (1988) calls the “norm of synchronization” with a female body in The Acoustic Mirror (83). As acousmatic voices, these battle cries could be said to exist on a different conceptual and perceptual plane, “disturbing the taxonomies upon which patriarchy depends,” to quote Dominic Pettman in Sonic Intimacy. (22). In other words, the sounds exist in a boundary space between combat sounds and orgasmic sounds highlighting for the listener the dissonance between the supposed empowerment of ‘speaking out’ within a culture that remains staunchly set up to sexualize women; something one can hardly ignore given the media’s reserved treatment of #metoo.

Liberated from the game world these voices now speak for themselves in the #metoo sonification, their sensuality all the more hyper-real. The player has no control here, as the battle cries are not linked to specific game actions, rather they are synchronized autonomously to instances of #metoo confessionals.  In fact, the density of the sonification as time speeds up will overwhelm listeners with its boundlessness; echoing how contemporary media treats the sounds of the female orgasm as a renewable and inexhaustible resource, even as reports of sexual harassment and gender-based violence continue to pile on in 2021. Yet we intend that the subject matter resists pleasure, rendering the sonic experience traumatic as the chilling realization sets in that listeners are hailed to accountability by #metoo. The experience should instead be unsettling, impactful, grotesque, and deeply embodied. 

Concluding remarks

Listening both metaphorically and literally goes to the very heart of questions to do with the politics and experience of living and communicating in the media age. In her paper on the sonic geographies of the voice, AM Kanngieser notes in “A Sonic Geography of Voice“: “The voice, in its expression of affective and ethico-political forces, creates worlds” (337). It is not just in the grain but in the enunciation that battle cries find their political significance in this sonification. As the hyper-real gasps and moans of game heroines animate individual moments of #metoo the codification of cartoonish voices resists being subconsciously “absorbed into the dialogic exchange” (342) of habitual media consumption. Listening to the sonification is instead an experience of re-coding the voice, reconfiguring the embedded meanings of game sound to a new and contradictory context: a space that challenges neoliberal appropriations of radical communication and discourse (348). This is not data sonification that delights the listener or simply grants them access to ‘information’ in a different format; rather it calls on the listener to de-normalize their received technicity and perceptions and to connect to the emotional inter-subjectivity of this call to action.

Most importantly, the #metoo sonification invites the auditeur to listen in, to take an active role in the reconfiguration of meanings and absorb their political dimensions. These are the stories of #metoo; these are the voices of women, of men, of marginalized peoples, emerging from the zeitgeist of Twitter to ask us to earwitness gender-based violence. We are a new listening public, wanting and needing to create new worlds. A critical bandwidth is the smallest perceivable unit of auditory change, in psychology terms. This sonification begs the question, how many battle cries will it take for us to end gender-based violence by fostering equitable worlds?

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Featured Image: “Listen to What You See” by Flickr User Hernán Piñera (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor and the Glenfraser Endowed Professor in Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile media, sound studies, gender, and sensory ethnography. Milena has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning and computational literacy, formerly as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Research on Digital Learning at York University. Milena has a background in acoustic ecology and works across the fields of urban soundscape research, sonification for public engagement, as well as gender and sound in video games. Current research projects include sound ethnographies of the city (livable soundscapes), mobile curation, critical soundmapping, and sensory ethnography. Check out Milena’s Story Map, “Soundscapes of Productivity” about coffee shop soundscapes as the office ambience of the creative economy freelance workers. 

Milena is a former board member of the International Community on Auditory Displays, an alumni of the Institute for Research on Digital Learning at York University, and former Research Think-Tank and Academic Advisor in learning innovation for the social enterprise InWithForward.  More recently, Milena serves on the board for the Hush City Mobile Project founded by Dr. Antonella Radicchi, as well as WISWOS, founded by Dr. Linda O Keeffe.

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Hearing Eugenics—Vibrant Lives

Just a few days ago,  London Metro Police Officer Wayne Couzens pled guilty to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by, a 33-year-old woman he abducted while she walked home from a friend’s house.  Since the news broke of her disappearance in March 2021, the UK has been going through a moment of national “soul-searching.” The national reckoning has included a range of discussions–about casual and spectacular misogynistic violence, about a victim-blaming criminal justice system that fails to address said violence–and responses, including a vigil in south London that was met with aggressive policing, that has itself entered into and furthered the UK’s soul-searching. There has also been a surge in the installation of personal safety apps on mobile phones; One Scream (OS), “voice activated personal safety,” is one of them.

Available for Android and iOS devices, OS claims to detect and be triggered by a woman’s (true) “panic scream,” and, after 20 seconds and unless the alarm is cancelled, it will send both a text message to the user’s chosen contacts and an automated call with the location to a nominated contact. The app is meant to help women in situations where dialing 999, (assumed to be the natural and preferred response to danger), is not viable for the user and, in the ideal embodiment, this nominated contact, “the helper,” is the police. OS did automatically contact police (and required a paid subscription) in 2016, but it did not work out well and by 2018, was declared a work in progress: “What we really want is for the app to dial 999 when it detects a panic scream, but first, we need to prove how accurate it is. That’s where you come in. . .” OS is currently in beta and free (while in beta). It is unclear whether the developers have given up with that utmost expression of OS. 

OS is based on the premise that men fight and women scream —“It is an innate response for females in danger to scream for help”—and its correct functioning requires its users to be ready to do so, even if such an innate and instinctive response doesn’t come naturally to them: “If you do not scream, the app will not be able to detect you.” However, there are two discriminations in terms of scream analysis, in how the app discriminates while listening for and to screams, and in failing to detect or respond to them. The first has to do with who can use the app (i.e., whose panicked screams are able to trigger it) in the first place. This is presented in terms of gender and age—for the moment, OS can listen to “girls aged 14+ and women under 60,” where cisgender, as in anything OS, is taken for granted.   It is, however, a matter of acoustic parameters set by the developers (notably, of reaching a certain high pitch and loudness threshold). Which is why the app was implemented to include a “screamometer” for potential users to scream, hard, figure out, and see whether they can reach “the intensity that is needed to set it off” (confetti means they do). The second one discriminates true panicked screams from other types of screams (e.g., happiness, untrue panic). As presented by the developers, both discriminations are problematic and misleading, and so is “the science behind screaming” One Scream‘s website boasts of. 

The app does not quite distinguish true from fake screams, nor joy from panic for that matter.  Instead, One Scream listens for “roughness,” which a team of scream researchers—it truly is a “tiny science lesson” —has identified as scream’s “privileged acoustic niche” for communicating alarm.  According to this 2015 study in Current Biology,  “roughness” is the distinctive quality of effective, compelling human screams (and of artificial alarms) in terms of their ability to trigger listeners and in terms of perceived urgency. Abrupt increases in loudness and pitch are not unique to screams. The rougher the scream, then, the greater its perceived “alarmess” and its alarming effect. That’s why developers say OS “hears real distress,” essentially “just as your own ear.” However, other studies suggest your own ears might not be so great at distinguishing happiness from fear and scream research, and particularly the specific “bit” OS builds on, by and large assumes, relies on, and furthers the irrelevance of “real” on the scream vocalizer end.  

In OS’s pledge to its users, the app’s fine-tuning to its scream niche—i.e., to rough temporal modulations between 30 and 150Hz—is as important, as is the developers (flawed) insistence on the irredeemably uniqueness of true panic’s scream vocalizations, which they posit are instinctive and can’t be plotted or counterfeit: “Experience has shown that it is difficult for women to fake their scream.” Yet, current scream analysis and research primarily and largely relies on screams delivered by human research subjects (often university students, ideally drama students) in response to prompts for the purposes of studying them as well as, especially, on screams extracted from commercial movies and sound effect libraries. The same applies to the other types of vocalizations (e.g., neutral and valenced speech, screamed sentences, laughter, etc.) produced or retrieved for the purposes of figuring out what it is that makes a scream a scream, and how to translate that into a set of quantifiable parameters to capitalize on that knowledge, regardless of the agenda. 

Because of their interest for audio surveillance applications, screams are currently a contested object and a hot commodity. Much as is the case with other scream distinction/detection enterprises, the initial training of OS most likely involved that vast and available bank of crafted scream renditions—by professional actors, machines, combinations of those, by and for an industry otherwise partial to female non-speech sounds—conveniently the exact type of “thick with body” female voicings OS is also invested in. For some readers, myself included, this might come across as creepy and, science-wise, flimsy. 

Scream research often relies on how human listeners recruited for the cause respond to audio samples. Apparently, whether the scream is “real,” acted, or post-produced is neither something study subjects necessarily distinguish nor a determining factor in how they rate and react. In terms of machines learning to scream-mine audio data, it is what it is: “natural corpora with extreme emotional manifestation and atypical sounds events for surveillance applications” are scarce, unreliable, and largely unavailable because of their private character. That is no longer the case for OS, which has been accruing, and machine-learning from, its beta-user screams as well as how users themselves monitor/rate their screams and the app’s sensibility. OS users’ screams might not be exactly ad lib, as users/vocalizers first practice with the “screamometer” to learn to scream for and as a means to interface with OS, but it’s as natural a corpora as it gets, and it’s free for the users of the screams. OS not only echoes “voice stress analysis” technologies invested in distinguishing true from fake or in ranking urgency, but, as part and parcel of a larger scream surveillance enterprise, also public surveillance technologies such as ShotSpotter, all of which Lawrence Abu Hamdan has brilliantly dissected in his essay on the recording of the police gunshots that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

Chilla is a strikingly similar app developed and available in India—although there’s a nuanced difference in the developer’s rationale for Chilla, which in its pursuance of scream-activated personal safety also aims to compensate for the fact that many girls and women don’t call “parents or police” for help when harassed or in danger. As presented, Chilla responds both to assaults and to women’s ambivalence towards their guardians. The latter is, too, a manifestation of the breadth of gender-based violence as a socio-cultural problem, one that Chilla is trained to fail to listen to and one that, because of OS’s particular niche user market, is simply out of the purview of its UK counterpart.

That problem–and that failure–is neither exclusive to India nor to scream-activated personal safety apps. Calling 999 in the UK, 911 in the US, or 091 in Spain, where I am writing, doesn’t come naturally to many targets of sexual and gender-based violence because they don’t conceive police as a help or because, directly, they see it as a risk—to themselves and/or to others. As Angela Ritchie has copiously documented in Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, women of color and Black women in particular are at extremely high risk for rape and sexual abuse by police officers, as high as 1 in 5 women in New York City alone.

OS, then,  is framed as a pragmatic, partial answer to a problem it doesn’t solve: “We should never have to dress in a certain way…but we do.” The specifics of how OS would actually “save” or even has saved its users in particular scenarios go unexplained, because OS is meant to help with feeling safe; getting into the details, and the what ifs, compromises that service. This sense of safety has two components and is based on two promises: one, that OS will listen to your (panic) scream, and, two, as of now via the intermediacy of your contacts, the police will go save you. The second component and its assumed self-evidence speaks to the app’s whiteness and of its target market of white, securitized, cisgender female subjects. 

Over and above its acoustic profiling, the app is simply not designed with every woman in mind. OS’s branding is about a certain lifestyle—of going for early runs and dates with cis-men, of taking time for yourself because you’re super busy at your white-collar job and going for night runs, of taking inspiration from “world” women and skipping if running isn’t for you.  This lifestyle is also sold: sold as always under the threat of rape–despite its “rightfulness”–sold in a way that animates the feelings of insecurity and disempowerment that One Scream advertizes itself as capable of reversing.  Safety, then, is sold as retrievable with OS. 

Wearable or otherwise portable technologies to keep women “safe,” specifically from sexual assaults, are not new and are varied. These have been vigorously protested, particularly from feminist standpoints other than the white, securitized, capitalist brand OS professes—because, in (partly) delegating safety on technologies women then become personally responsible for, these technologies  further “blame” women.  For authorities and the patriarchy, this shift in blame is a relief. In discussing the racialized securitization of US university campuses, Kwame Holmes notes how despite “reactionary attacks” on campus feminism (e.g., so-called “snowflakes” complaining about bad sex) and authorities’ effective reluctance to acknowledge and challenge rape culture, anti-sexual assault technologies tend to be welcomed and accepted. As Holmes also notes, there’s no paradox in that. Those technologies flatten the discussion, deactivate more radical feminist critiques and potential strategies, and protect the status quo—not so much women and not those who, whenever an alarm sounds and especially when security forces respond, readily become insecure.  

It is not a stretch to think that OS could potentially amplify the insecurities of Black and brown people subject to white panic (screams) and to its violence, something other audio surveillance technologies are already contributing to, at least it’s not a greater stretch than to entertain situations in which police would show up and save an OS user before it’s too late. Even if it’s never triggered, as developers seem to assume will be the case for the majority of installed units—”Many people have never faced a situation where they have had to panic scream”—it’s trapped in a securitization logic that ultimately relies on masculine authority, one that calls for the expansion of CCTV cameras, wherein women are never quite secure (see Sarah Everard’s vigil). 

One Scream’s FAQs cover selected worries that users have or OS anticipates they might have. Among these, there are privacy concerns (i.e., does it listen to your conversations?) and the fear the alarm will activate “when it shouldn’t.” In the Apple Store user reviews, there’s a more popular type of concern: OS not responding to users’ screams. In other words, there’s simultaneously a worry about OS listening and detecting too much and about OS failing to listen “when it matters.” These anxieties around OS’s listening excesses and insufficiencies touch on (audio) surveillance paradoxical workings: does OS encroach on the everyday life of those within users’ cell phones’ earshot while not necessarily delivering on an otherwise modest promise of safety in highly specific scenarios? There’s a unified developer response to these concerns: OS “is trained to detect panic screams only.”

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Featured Image: By Flicker User Dirk Haun. Image appears to be a woman screaming on a street corner, but is actually an advertisement on the window of a T-Mobile cell phone shop (CC BY 2.0)

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María Edurne Zuazu works in music, sound, and media studies, and researches the intersections of material culture and sonic practices in relation to questions of cultural memory, social and environmental justice, and the production of knowledge (and of ignorance) in the West during the 20^th and 21^st centuries. María has presented on topics ranging from sound and multimedia art and obsolete musical instruments, to aircraft sound and popular music, and published articles on telenovela, weaponized uses of sound, music and historical memory, and music videos. She received her PhD in Music from The CUNY Graduate Center, and has been the recipient of Fulbright and Fundación La Caixa fellowships. She is a 2021-2022 Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. 

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Sounding Out! Podcast #63: The Sonic Landscapes of Unwelcome: Women of Color, Sonic Harassment, and Public Space

Echo and the Chorus of Female Machines—AO Roberts

Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies–Christine Ehrick

The mention of “air guitar” might conjure images of the Bill and Ted series. Or Risky Business. Or maybe even Joe Cocker at Woodstock. You might think of air guitar as an embarrassing fan gesture. So when you hear there’s an annual U.S. Air Guitar competition, you might imagine an entirely superficial practice without any artistic merit. Maybe you just think of it as gimmicky. Or a celebration of the worst aspects of classic rock fandom and the white male guitar heroes that often populate its pantheon. In all honesty, I thought all of these things at first, until I began to take the competition seriously. 

I did not realize, for example, that air guitar competitions have an enduring history since the late 1970s, existing as an incredibly influential popular music pantomime practice that informs platforms like TikTok. I did not realize how invested contemporary competitors could be—dedicating years to learning the craft. And I did not realize how these reconstructions of guitar solos could creatively rupture the relationship between guitar virtuosity and privileged identities in popular music’s past.

The U.S. Air Guitar Championships began in 2003 as the national branch of the Air Guitar World Championships, which began in 1996 in Oulu, Finland. The competition emerged as a bit of a joke alongside the Oulu Music Video Festival. Eventually, two people—Cedric Devitt and Kriston Rucker—founded U.S. Air Guitar, which expanded across the country (thanks, in part, to the influential documentary Air Guitar Nation). Today, folks compete in order to advance from local to regional to the national competition, ultimately hoping to be crowned the best air guitarist in the nation and sent to Finland to represent the United States (think: Eurovision but air guitar). United States air guitarists do incredibly well in the international competition, although they face formidable air guitarists from Japan, France, Canada, Australia, Russia, and Germany (as well as less-formidable air guitarists from elsewhere).

In each competition, competitors perform as personas, such as Rockness Monster, AIRistotle, Agnes Young, and Mom Jeans Jeanie. They don elaborate costumes. They painstakingly practice elaborate choreographies and compete in some of the most famous musical venues in the country—from Bowery Ballroom to the Black Cat. Competitors stage routines that bring a particular 60-second rock solo to life, using their bodies to simulate playing the real guitar (what air guitarists call “there guitar”). Think of these as gestural interpretations of the affective power of guitar solos, rather than a mechanical reproduction of particular chords, frets, and licks. They use their bodies to draw out timbre, rhythm, and pitch, and they also play with the juxtaposition of their own identities and those of the original artists. Judges evaluate performances based on three criteria:

· Technical merit (does the pantomime more or less correspond to the guitar playing in the music?)

· Stage presence (is it entertaining?)

· ‘Airness’ (does the performance transcend the imitation of the real guitar to become an art form in and of itself?)

Scores are given on a figure skating scale, from 4 to 6. So a perfect score is 666 from the three judges. Winners in the first round advance to the second round, where they must improvise an air guitar routine to a surprise song selection. 

As part of my ethnographic work on air guitar, I competed in a local competition, where I was crowned third best air guitarist in Boston in the year 2017 (a distinction that will likely never appear on my CV). I have also conducted fieldwork in Finland twice and attended countless competitions in the U.S. I judged the 2019 U.S. Air Guitar Championships in Nashville alongside Edward Snowden’s lawyer, which resulted in a three-way air off to crown a winner. 

Competitions depend on recruiting new competitors, celebrity judges, and large crowds, all of which can be at odds with creating an inclusive community. Organizers have worked hard to eliminate racist, sexist, ableist, and other forms of discriminatory language from judges’ comments. Women within U.S. air guitar have formed advocacy groups. The proceeds of the most recent competitions have been donated to Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which took up the case of a disabled Black veteran named Sean Worsley who was incarcerated for playing air guitar to music at a gas station. Both organizing bodies at the national and international level emphasize world peace as central to their mission. 

Air guitar routines are themselves political statements too. These acts of musical interpretation enable women, BIPOC, and disabled performers to author sounds credited to guitar idols, like Eddie Van Halen or Slash. Performers make arguments about their access to popular music, using only their bodies. Sydney Hutchinson’s work  examines how air guitar can challenge Asian American stereotypes and gendered conceptions of dance. 

My current work revolves around disabled air guitarists. Andres SevogiAIR drew me in, as a result of his expressive flamenco-inspired seated style he called “chair guitar.” He passed away but left me with an enduring appreciation for air guitar’s ability to challenge conventional virtuosity, a term that can often reproduce an ableist link between physical ability and musical virtue. I came to appreciate how air guitarists could invent imaginary instruments that serve their particular bodies. I witnessed competitors coupling chronic illness and impairments with air guitar routines, as well as competitors using air guitar to fully amplify their struggles with cancer.

I also came to appreciate how air guitarists embrace stigma (e.g., madness, craziness, and gendered forms of listening), turning taboo into a source of creativity. This led to academic writing that traces the history of madness in relation to air guitar, showing how imaginary instrument playing has often been pathologized, and yet contemporary disabled air guitarists reclaim these accusations of insanity as a source of power. 

* * *

A few weeks ago, I received a request from Lieutenant Facemelter to judge the Midwestern Online Regional U.S. Air Guitar Competition. I accepted. As with many things these days, the contemporary competition has morphed into a Twitch-hosted online spectacle, featuring combinations of live and pre-recorded elements. One woman gave birth between first- and second-round performances (made possible by a multi-day filming period for an asynchronous part of the online competition). One man’s air guitar performance evoked an exorcism in his basement. Another middle-aged competitor competed while suffering the side effects of his second shot of coronavirus vaccine, ultimately winning the competition with a pro-vaccination message. His parents appeared in the livestream when he accepted the award, and the host of the show–the Master of Airimonies–jokingly said to them: “You two must be so proud.” 

I think of U.S. Air Guitar as a stained-glass window, through which prisms of popular music history shine through. The competition can bring troubling facets of that history to light, but the competition can also revise that history (or, at least, reimagine how that history can influence the future). Either way, performers celebrate the idea that rock solos live most powerfully in the embodied listening practices of everyday people. Listening becomes the subject of these performances–the source material for these persuasive displays of music reception. Indeed, air guitar can be one of the strangest things you’ll never see. 

The competition continues this summer. 

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Featured Image: US Air Guitar National Finals, The Midland Theater, Kansas City, MO, August 9, 2014, by Flickr user Amber, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Byrd McDaniel | Byrd is a scholar who researches disability, digital cultures, and popular music. He currently works as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. His forthcoming book–Spectacular Listening— traces the rise of contemporary practices that treat listening as a performance, including air guitar, podcasts, reaction videos, and lip syncing apps. Byrd is enthusiastic about work that addresses any facet of air guitar, including global and historical approaches. He welcomes outreach from those who want to research these topics.

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SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Digital Analogies: Techniques of Sonic Play–Roger Moseley

Experiments in Aural Resistance: Nordic Role-Playing, Community, and Sound—Aaron Trammell

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Then, Jennifer Garcon recounted one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life. Last week, Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University) and wrote its archival descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

We continue the series in Brooklyn this week, where amidst gentrification and millennials seeking upscale vegan quesadillas, the ‘culture of the transistor’ is alive and well. Pirate radio stations broadcasting music and news in Haitian Creole have loyal followings, mostly of an older generation for whom radio was the primary medium during their youth. Listening brings back memories of a prosperous 1940s and 50s Haiti that recent narratives centered on catastrophe tend to bury. David Goren, who has not just written about but also mapped Brooklyn’s pirate stations, reminds us that these aural communities connect past and present, and perhaps future as well.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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‘A lot of these stations, especially the Haitian stations, they have such an extensive music library that a song will come on the radio and all of a sudden my mom is like, ‘Oh my God! Your grandma used to have this record and she played it every Saturday!’ says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Now she’s transported back to being on the island, with the big radio that’s a piece of furniture in the living room. People are chatting, little drinks are flowing about, my grandmother milling about in a gorgeous dress. It’s kind of like that whole nostalgia era that unfortunately was probably lost because of the political turmoil in Haiti. So it’s harkening back to a good time, to a simpler time, a better time, a more carefree era.”

Every day, the skies of New York City fill up with unseen clouds of radio signals spreading over immigrant neighborhoods. These culturally charged clouds of radio energy burst with a flow of content that continually shifts and transforms, following the lifecycle and rhythm of the streets.

From clandestine studios tucked behind store fronts, DJs transform time and physical space with Konpa, Reggae and Soca music, mixing the sounds of ancestral homes with the thump and challenge of adapting to a new life in the United States. Jolted by electrified fingers of Signal, the old radio poetry of hiss and hum leaps from a scattered forest of antennas connected to transmitters hidden away inside rooftop sheds. In Brooklyn, the signals alight on Flatbush Avenue, blasting from radios in dollar vans, bakeries, churches and on street corners and kitchen tables. By accessing an analog technology that (outside of the radio itself) is essentially free for the listener, economically marginalized communities avoid the subscription and data fees built in to the conveniences of the digital life. Listeners, often the elders of the community, extend metal antennas and position the radios just so, trying to catch the elusive vibrations of crucial music, news and information that are seldom felt in New York City’s legal and mostly corporate owned media soundscape. 

“These underground, unlicensed or pirate stations have been around for as long as there has been radio,” Martinez says. The legality of radio stations stems from The Communications Act of 1934, legislation that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency tasked with penalizing unlicensed stations and shutting them down. “The focus really was on the listeners.” says Rosemary Harold, chief of FCC Enforcement ‘because what had happened before licensing became what we know as today, was that listeners weren’t able to consistently hear radio broadcasts. And now we’re kind of in a modern iteration of that.” 

Others, like pirate radio historian John Anderson, see the Act as unfairly slanted towards commercial interests, awarding “the highest powers and clearest channels” to stations that sold advertising, tilting the medium away from serving specific communities. “By privileging commercial speech over non-commercial speech and by basically saying if you are a special interest, we will not award you a license.” Anderson says. “You create the conditions for there to be dissension over the media policy, which will lead people into radical actions, like putting stations on the air without permission.” In Flatbush, stations broadcast primarily to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians and Orthodox Jews. The Haitian stations are particularly active in East Flatbush with just under a dozen broadcasting daily in Kreyol to the large Haitian community. 

“I came across it at a very young age. There was this really popular station back in the late 80s, Radio Guinee, and it was based in Brooklyn.” Joan Martinez says. “Nobody knows where it was, there are suspicions. But all I know is from Friday night all the way to Sunday night, you would just hear a series of these stations every weekend and it would be the place where you could listen to the latest in Haitian pop music, rap music. It was also the news, my parents and their friends would all sit around the radio and they would just be politicking in the living room getting really loud, you know, dancing, singing along that sort of thing. It was just like a meeting ground and the radio was guiding it.” 

This phase of New York City pirate radio rose from the ashes of a previous scene dating to the late sixties: a dozen or so stations sporadically run mostly by white teenagers: a mix of hippies, radicals and electronically inclined misfits. By 1987, this loose collective of friends and rivals devolved into infighting after a short-lived attempt to broadcast from international waters off Jones Beach. This created room for new pirate radio voices from diverse communities that were increasingly being pushed off the legal airwaves by high costs, format consolidation, and  “the low power desert”, an FCC-led phaseout of small community broadcasters. The local pirates joined a growing national wave of progressive pirate radio activity taking  advantage of a new generation of cheap FM transmitters imported from China or homebrewed in makeshift workshops by free radio activists.

By the early 90’s, immigrant community-focused broadcasters In New York City flipped the unspoken rules of the earlier pirates who broadcast mainly late at night on a few pre-determined “safe” frequencies, instead filling the FM dial from bottom to top, day and night. In 2000, under pressure from a nationwide increase in pirate radio activity, the FCC introduced a new license class: Low Power FM (LPFM) but opposition from National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters shut down the issuing of new licenses. That severely limited LPFM’s availability in major urban markets due to rules requiring LPFM’s to be “three click aways” from existing stations. Local pirates felt they had no alternative but to continue broadcasting and some stations in Flatbush have been on the air for decades. Despite the passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011, opening a new licensing window with relaxed spacing requirements, few new frequencies were available in NYC due to an already crowded dial. The continued pirate presence is enabled by a sort of safety in numbers, an FCC enforcement team hampered by a low budget and a bureaucratic process of enforcement. 

Though the stations exist to serve their communities with news and culture and maybe make a little money for their owners and dj’s, they can and do cause interference for listeners of licensed stations, particularly low-powered non-commercial broadcasters like WFMU, a beloved freeform music station. Interference near their frequency has inspired the Brooklyn Pirate Watch Twitter group to keep a wary eye on pirate operations.

Interference aside, FCC commissioners and staff publicly fume at the pirates for a range of potential public safety violations, some more theoretical than others and claim they are somehow harming their own communities, and wonder finally, why don’t they just stream on the internet. By viewing radio piracy purely from a legal perspective, critics miss the cultural and historic forces driving the Haitian pirates. During the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) Haitians had access to only two stations broadcasting in Kreyol, rather than French, the language of the elite. One was Radio Lumiere, a religious station and the other Radio Haiti-Inter, a fiercely independent voice whose director Jean Dominque was assassinated in 1999.

“The peasant in Haiti, while he’s working on his farm you know he had a transistor.” Says Dr. Jean Eddy St. Paul, Director of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. ‘And many peasants, they don’t have money to buy tobacco to smoke, but they will have money to buy the battery to put in the transistor. The first generation of migration, in the US, was during the 1960s and for many of those people the culture of transistor was part of their everyday life, so they’re still maintaining the culture of transistor. For them, having a radio station is very important.’ 

In July 2019, on a side street in East Flatbush, I met a man calling himself “Joseph” aka “Haitian” (“because I’m a pure Haitian!”), part of a group that keeps Radio Comedy FM on the air. “There’s no owners and committee. It’s a bunch of young guys”. Joseph says, “We have to do something positive for our community. Right now the Marines are in Haiti and we don’t know what’s next! CNN don’t show you this! BBC don’t show you this! So what we do, we have people in Haiti that call us and tell us what’s going on and will send us pictures. This is how we get our information. And bring it to the people…. I have family over there, my mother’s still there. So I have to know what’s going on. 

At this point in the digital age, it’s an open question how long these analog pirate stations will remain relevant, as their audiences age, neighborhoods gentrify and younger listeners gravitate to social media platforms. The answer seems to lie with their elderly and impoverished listeners. “They don’t have enough money to buy the newspapers understand?.” Joseph says.” For him that makes it worth it to keep Radio Comedy on the air despite a crackdown from the FCC backed by the PIRATE Act signed into law in 2020 that increases fines to $100,000 a day up to $2 million. But the legislation lacks funding to enforce the new regulations. With a federal statute still in place reducing fines down to the ability to pay, it’s unclear whether the PIRATE Act will be anything more than another in an escalating series of scare tactics. 

“If they don’t want us to do it just make it easy for us. Let’s make a meeting with those guys [the FCC],” Joseph says. ‘We’re going to provide the air for you. A frequency. You’re going to pay for example, $500 a month even $1,000 a month.’ We will be more than happy to do it. “

Though the FCC has recently suggested the possibility of a new round of LPFM licenses in the future, the already crowded nature of NYC’s FM band makes it unlikely that new frequencies will be made available to the current pirate stations. In addition the FCC doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding illegal activity by granting a license to former pirate broadcasters, which was a prohibition in LPFM’s earlier licensing periods. And for the moment, Joseph, who’s been running unlicensed stations since 1991 (‘it’s an addiction’) is equally unlikely to cede the airwaves. He sees Radio Comedy as not just a radio station, but a community lifeline. 

 “You know many children we save? There was a bunch of guys…Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian trying to form a gang. We talked to them, bring them to the station. Most of them have a diploma now. Without the radio, most of them probably get locked up or dead.” 

Even with the PIRATE act on the books, the number of stations on the air in Brooklyn has remained steady with an average of about 25 per day and the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened their mission. In March 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 lead to NYC’s lockdown, the unlicensed Haitian broadcasters and the other West Indian stations in Brooklyn took a step closer to their listeners, increasing their air time and enhancing their formats to deliver information about the virus both in New York and in their countries of origin amid the heavy toll it took on the community.

Click here to hear Station IDs for Radio Lumiere, Radio Independans, and La Voix du Peuple!

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Featured Image: Antenna in Flatbush, courtesy of David Goren

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An award-winning radio producer, David Goren has created programming for the BBC, Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and NPR’s “Lost and Found Sound” series, as well as audio-based installations for Proteus Gowanus Radio Cona and the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective. In 2016, he was an artist-in residence at Wave Farm, a center for the transmission arts.

Since 2014, David has been recording New York City’s prodigious pirate radio activity and researching the evolution of this grassroots community radio movement resulting in the release of  “Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD” (2018) for KCRW’s “Lost Notes” podcast, New York City’s Pirates of the Air for the BBC World Service (2019) and the “Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map 2.0” (2020)  which was featured in The New Yorker. He presented “Tracing Neighborhoods in the Sky,” as part of the Fall 2019 Franke Lectures at Yale University. In January 2021, the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map became a partner of the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions–Laura Wagner

Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century–Alexander Cowen

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Last week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life.

The sweeping stories of Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University), its more than 5300 recordings fully digitized and described in English, French and Haitian Creole) come together in this all too brief account. Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording and wrote the descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

—-

For four years, I spent forty hours a week in a cubicle in a converted tobacco warehouse with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, listening to and describing the entire audio archive of Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter. Though my title was “project archivist,” I am not an archivist by training. But I am compelled to compile, assemble, and preserve stories from lost people and lost worlds. Sound is more intimate than printed words or video. With sound, voices are inside your head, as close as another person can be. As I processed the Radio Haiti collection, I would forget that many of the voices I heard every day belonged to people I never knew in life. Sometimes in my dreams I would see the station’s director, Jean Dominique, alive and laughing.

Radio Haïti-Inter was inaugurated in the early 1970s. Dominique, an agronomist by training, quickly became the most recognized journalist in Haiti. His professional partner and wife, Michèle Montas, Radio Haiti’s news editor, was a Columbia Journalism School graduate who trained several generations of Haitian journalists. Dominique was part Ida B. Wells, part Edward R. Murrow, part Sy Hersh, part Studs Terkel, part Hunter S. Thompson. He was an investigative journalist who uncovered human rights abuses, government corruption, and corporate malfeasance. He was an activist who possessed the charisma of a theater star, the crackling wit of a satirist, and the public intellectual’s gift for insight and analysis. After Dominique was assassinated on April 3, 2000, more than fifteen thousand mourners attended his funeral.

In 2013, Montas donated the archive of Radio Haïti-Inter — more than 1600 open-reel tapes, more than 2000 audio cassettes, and approximately 100 linear feet of paper records — to Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, under the condition that it be digitized and made available to the widest possible public in Haiti. Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council on Library and Information Resources, today the Radio Haiti Archive is a free, publicly accessible, trilingual digital collection. Its over 5300 audio recordings represent the most comprehensive archive of late 20th-century Haitian history. Radio Haiti still speaks, despite government repression, multiple exiles, the assassination of Dominique, the attempted assassination of Montas in December 2002, the closure of the station in 2003, and the 2010 earthquake. That the archive exists is a miracle. 

According to its mission statement, the Rubenstein Library “builds distinctive collections of original materials and preserves them for use on campus and around the world. In support of Duke University’s mission of ‘knowledge in service to society,’ we collect a diversity of voices in a wide range of formats… We invite students, scholars, and the general public to explore the world through our unique collections.” the library seeks to preserve the voices of marginalized people, and make various kinds of materials (including sonic media) available to audiences beyond Duke, beyond the United States, and beyond academia.

In Radio Haiti’s broadcasts, rural farmers, activists from poor urban neighborhoods, sex workers, marketwomen, Vodou patriarchs, and refugees narrate vivid stories of their lives and worlds. The aurality of radio allowed speakers and listeners who were not traditionally literate to participate in the political life of Haiti. Likewise, the aurality of the Radio Haiti collection makes it a trove of information that appears nowhere else. It is invaluable for academic researchers and ordinary audiences alike. It is a people’s history of Haiti, told through voices that are silenced in the written record.

Most libraries in poor countries like Haiti lack the resources to restore, digitize, and process audiovisual materials, but wealthy institutions in wealthy countries tend to neglect sonic archives. Unlike written records, audio is difficult to skim, and therefore harder for researchers to use. The rights considerations are often fraught. Audiovisual archives are expensive and difficult to preserve, digitize, and process; as a result, many projects, including Radio Haiti, depend on highly competitive external grants. While these days many universities prize Black archival collections (sometimes to the point of commodification, as Steven G. Fullwood argues), it’s another matter when those collections are audio, especially non-English language audio. In Radio Haiti’s case, the audio is in Haitian Creole and French. All of these factors made Radio Haiti a complex project. But I believe the complexity of a project like Radio Haiti could be mitigated if institutions were to truly make custodianship of marginalized collections a priority. In other words, some of the complexity isn’t inherent to the collection, but rather to the system that was not built to accommodate it.

As I processed Radio Haiti, I ached for the cane-cutters that the Duvalier dictatorship effectively sold to the Dominican Republic, former political prisoners describing horrific torture,  and migrants risking their life at sea. But it was not my trauma. In some ways, this project was challenging because I am not Haitian, but it was also easier because the anguish was not my own. I understood the archive’s importance, but I did not feel the pain in my bones. 

So, yes, the material in the archive could be heavy, but the project was difficult mainly because the current practices of US academic libraries are incompatible with a project like Radio Haiti. For the last year and a half of the project, there was no remaining grant money or internal funding for an intern fluent in Haitian Creole or French to earn a living wage. When I proposed seeking additional funding to support an intern to help describe the audio, I was told it would be unfair to other staff who are likewise underpaid. In order to finish before my own grant-funded salary ran out, I listened to and created multilingual narrative description for an average of ten recordings a day. Every day was a race against time. I was reprimanded for “overdescribing” the audio, and told, “Don’t do the researcher’s job for them.” Library leadership and I did not share the same objectives. Despite their stated commitment to digitize Radio Haiti and make it available to the Haitian public, they still considered traditional academic researchers the target audience, while I was thinking of ordinary people in Haiti, trying to access the audio on a secondhand smartphone with a limited data plan.

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor ask, “what happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of recordkeepers and archivists less as sentinels of accountability… and more as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility?” They call for empathy between the archivist and the creators, subjects, users, and audience of the archive. I believed that “slow processing” — providing detailed, trilingual description of each Radio Haiti recording — was a necessary act of empathy, and the only way to honor the voices in the archive and make the collection truly available to Haitian audiences. If I provided only “minimal description,” Radio Haiti’s audio would remain lost. 

The work was exhausting. I began to have panic attacks. One administrator encouraged me to develop “strategies for self-care.” “Self-care,” which places the responsibility onto the individual worker, is not a solution to burnout. What I needed were more resources.

Like everyone else in the neoliberal US university, archivists are bound by concrete considerations of political economy. They are being asked to do more with less: they must eliminate backlogs and process more collections more quickly, without improvements in salary, staffing, or workspace. Library work remains a feminized profession, one that downplays and erases the intellectual labor of those workers who “merely” process collections. The archivist is the invisible technician, while researchers discover. And so my intent is not to impugn any individual. Rather, I point to the structural factors and cultural attitudes — including institutional white supremacy — that make traditional archives inhospitable to collections like Radio Haiti. 

Former archivist Jarrett Drake contends that “the purpose of the archival profession is to curate the past, not confront it; to entrench inequality, not eradicate it; to erase black lives, not ennoble them.” As a white American woman, my personal experiences were obviously not comparable to those of archivists and scholars of color who endure racism regularly, but my time as the Radio Haiti project archivist revealed to me how Black archival collections are subjected to structural racism. The Radio Haiti collection was created by and for Black people. It centers the voices, perspectives, and experiences of Black people. It is a sonic archive, in a field that prioritizes traditional paper collections. It is largely in Haitian Creole, a disparaged language spoken mostly by Black people. It is from a country that has been colonized, exploited, invaded, occupied, vilified, pitied, embargoed, evangelized, and intervened upon for centuries. And finally, its primary audience is not anglophone academics, but Haitian people. 

Many library workers at predominantly white institutions make extraordinary efforts to combat systemic white supremacy, but low-level staff cannot create change when the larger institution remains hidebound. Bringing Radio Haiti back to Haiti required intellectual work, passion, and love. To represent diverse voices and make a collection like Radio Haiti truly accessible to a worldwide public, traditional archival institutions must undergo a radical transformation. They must confront assumptions about what makes a collection “difficult to process,” commit resources to collections that foreground the voices of marginalized people, and support the work of staff who give those collections the care they deserve.

Editor’s Note: Minor changes have been made since publication for clarity and to add links to sources. Nothing substantive has been changed. 12:48 PM EST, 5/3/2021

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Featured Image: Picture of a painting of Radio Haiti tied to a cross with the inscription (in translation): “The proverb goes: each firefly lights the way for itself [every man for himself]. We say: unity makes strength. Let’s help Radio Haiti-Inter lay its cross down so that it is not crucified.” Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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From 2015 to 2019, Laura Wagner was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her writings on the earthquake and the Radio Haiti project have appeared in Slate, Salon, sx archipelagos, PRI’s The World, and other venues. She is also the author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, a young adult novel about the earthquake and its aftermath, which was published by Abrams/Amulet in 2015. She is currently working on a book about Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive.

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Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program–Chelsea M. Daniel and Samantha Ege

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

Last week, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  This week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life. Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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On January 23, 1973, Jean-Claude Duvalier, only 18 months into his life-long appointment, received a call that threatened to profoundly destabilize his nascent presidency. On the other end was Clinton E. Knox, a close political ally and advisor, who also happened to be the US Ambassador to Haiti. Knox, Jean-Claude was informed, along with US consul general Ward Christensen were being held hostage at a residence just outside of Port-au-Prince. To secure the safe return of two high-ranking US officials, the captors demanded the release of political prisoners, a hefty ransom, and a plane to facilitate their escape. The kidnappers “meant business,” reported The Washington Post, Times Herald on Jan 26, 1973, and during the call, Knox warned Jean-Claude of the severity of the situation, that they ”threatened to blow my head off, if they didn’t get what they wanted.”

Just hours before, Knox, boasting of Haiti’s improved political situation, told a Miami Herald reporter that, “everything [was] calm.” Since Francois Duvalier’s death in 1971, the new president had been aggressively courting international aid. In a marked departure from his father’s political rhetoric, Jean-Claude openly declared his intention to lessen authoritarian conditions in Haiti. He called for the organization of new political parties and the reestablishment of a “freer” press. Thanks to Knox, millions in international and humanitarian aid–previously suspended because of Francois’s long history of human rights abuses– began pouring into the country. In truth, Jean-Claude never intended to fully democratize Haitian society, he instead hoped that a few small concessions would help him to secure the benefits of appearing to do so. But soon, his new “liberal policies” allowed for the public expression of widespread discontent and opposition that had long festered just beneath the surface.

Since Francois Duvalier’s 1957 election, Haiti’s government had systematically and strategically cut off avenues of civic participation in political life. During his 14-year rule, Francois co-opted any existing institutions that could oppose his consolidation of power, including the church, the army, and the press. This was a stark contrast to the political campaign season that led to his election, wherein aspiring political figures frequently made impassioned radio speeches in the hopes of courting new supporters. Over the airwaves, presidential hopeful Daniel Fignole sometimes summoned his woulo konmpresè, a popular force of over 10,000 supporters to the street in protest. Duvalier shaped his Noirist ideology in part via public discourse over the airwaves.  However, after taking power, he closed off these avenues of political engagement. By limiting the flow of information, the regime fostered social alienation and mistrust amongst different sectors of the population. 

The vibrant political debates that characterized the 1940s and 1950s Haitian media were replaced with round-the-clock pro-government propaganda. Nearly all independent radio stations and newspapers were shuttered, leaving only pro-Duvalier stations, like La Voix de la Révolution Duvalieriste, and papers like newspapers Le Nouveau Monde and Panorama. When, in 1971, a gravely ill Francois announced the transfer of the presidency to his politically inexperienced 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude, there were no national outlets for citizens to register their resistance. However, many anticipated that the death of Papa Doc would create a political vacuum too large for his son to fill. This possibility inspired new anti-government efforts.

At 4 pm on January 23, as he was leaving his office in Port-au-Prince, Ambassador Knox was accosted and forced into an unmarked sedan. He was driven to his home just outside the city. The kidnappers, brandishing a small arsenal, demanded an audience with the young president. Instead, and in a breach of protocol, Knox contacted the consul general and lured him to the residence, where he too was taken hostage. Two hours later, Jean-Claude Duvalier received the distressing call. 

The young president found himself in a dire situation, given his long-regarded political disinterest. Both critics and supporters of the Duvalier regime believed he would be too weak and ineffectual to hold power. Up until then, Duvalier’s reliance on loyal old guard Duvalierists and his close relationship with Knox had sustained his presidency.  Encouraged by the prospect of millions in international aid, Jean-Claude began distancing himself from the violence of his father’s regime. Jean-Claudisme would tolerate criticism, promote free speech, embrace dissent and welcome repatriating exiles.  As Knox frequently argued, Jean-Claude had “embarked on a course diametrically opposed to the one [Francois Duvalier] pursued.” 

The 1973 kidnapping would be the first public reckoning for the new regime; the first open challenge to Jean-Claude’s political legitimacy. The kidnappers, anti-government leftists, demanded the immediate release of 31 political prisoners, safe passage out of the country, and $100,000 ransom. A final demand would not materialize until the early morning on January 24. After hours of negotiations with Duvalier’s administration, the kidnappers tacked on one last demand; that the details of the kidnappers be shared with Haitian citizens via a national radio broadcast. In defiance of the advice of his father’s most trusted advisers, and to save Knox’s life, Jean-Claude acquiesced. 

At approximately 10am on January 24, French Ambassador Bernard Dorin interrupted existing radio programming with a special announcement: Ambassador Clinton Knox had been kidnapped and held captive by three anti-government rebels. To secure his release the Haitian government had agreed to release 12 political prisoners, pay $70,000 US dollars in ransom, and charter an aircraft to transport the kidnappers and released prisoners to exile in Mexico. 

https://soundcloud.com/radiohaitiarchives/reportage-sur-clinton-knox-24-janvier-1973

By conceding, Jean-Claude acted outside of the existing political framework set in place by his father. The Haitian public had come to expect consistency in political culture; any and all opposition was to be immediately crushed. That morning the airwaves carried the news of the dictatorship’s fragility to listeners far and wide. On the heels of the unprecedented announcement, Radio Haïti-Inter began reporting on the kidnapping developments to audiences around the nation.  When Jean L. Dominique, a former agronomist, went on-air, it was the first time since 1957 that domestic news was transmitted without censorship. Listeners were now given unfettered access. Dominique and co-anchor Marcus Garcia were the first reporters to arrive at the Knox’s residence, while he, Ward, and the kidnappers were still inside. Radio Haiti journalists described the surreal scene in detail, and conducted interviews with newly released political prisoners. When Knox finally emerged, listeners were privy to his fragile state, he appeared intoxicated and was clutching a bottle of rum; a stark contrast to his strongman image. When the kidnappers safely boarded an Air-Haiti plane bound for Mexico City, where they were promised (and granted) asylum, Dominique reported from the runway. For the listening public, the scene was simply remarkable.

The broadcast would undoubtedly be the most politically consequential of the kidnappers’ demands. It would mean that, for the first time of Jean-Claude’s young presidency, and for the first time in decades, news of the dictatorship’s fragility and fallibility would reach the entire Haitian populace.  Almost immediately, one journalist noted a change in the country, noting in  “Haiti: Trouble Ahead in Latin America in February 1973 that, when Jean-Claude conceded to the kidnapper’s demands, “Haitians finally realized that Papa Doc was gone forever” (Special Collection and University Archives, Rutgers University, Robert J. Alexander Papers, [MC974.1 Box 3]).

Citizens awoke to find themselves now living in a Haiti where anti-government resistance could succeed. In Isle of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman argues that, “as listeners understood themselves to be listening along with others,” new possibilities for social and political life were revealed. For Haitian citizens living under the yoke of an authoritarian government, radio listening became a way to engage in politics and reclaim political agency in defiance of government overreach and repression. Widely accessible radio receivers could bridge areas otherwise geographically disconnected from urban, and often political, centers. Moreover, uncensored kidnapping coverage transformed Haiti’s political arena by radically changing popular ideas of what kinds of resistance were possible. 

In the aftermath of the kidnapping, Jean-Claude moved quickly to plug the political vacuum that has emerged in the wake of the kidnapping. He was determined to change popular memory of the event. Haitian newspapers began to praise Duvalier’s political acumen in saving the life of two US officials.  A mass rally was organized two days later to celebrate the President’s achievement. There, Jean-Claude gave his first ever public speech entirely in Haitian Kreyòl. “Little Duvalier,” he said, “would never hesitate to crush two or three vagabonds if he wanted to.” Addressing any would-be imitators, he warned, “I will be waiting for them with a big coco macaque.”

As the government tried to hold onto power, new journalists and broadcasters were increasingly singled out by the administration. In 1980, a press crackdown led to the arrest of over 100 independent print and radio journalists. Despite government repression, radio broadcasting has been credited with the eventual ouster of Jean-Claude in 1986. The Knox Kidnapping was an early moment that signaled the possibility of a political alternative to Duvalierism. Even Knox agreed. Years later, he’d describe the ordeal as “one the most amazing things to happen in [Haiti] [“Envoy Relates Haitian Rebel Death Threats.” The Washington Post, Times Herald, Jan 26, 1973].

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Featured Image: Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas return to Haiti in from exile in 1986 after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, met by 60,000 plus people. Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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Jennifer Garcon is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship. Garcon instructs on the use of digital tools, methods, and literacies via tutorials and one-on-one consultations and provides project management and infrastructural support that helps faculty, students, and staff build innovative and sustainable digital projects. She collaborates closely with Penn and Philadelphia-area partners to develop and expand sustainable models for the care of vulnerable collections of data. Garcon received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Miami, an MA in English and American Literatures from Hunter College, a BA in English Literature and Cultures from Brown University. Her academic research interests include radio broadcasting, populist political rhetoric, and grassroots social movement in the Cold War Caribbean. Since 2016, she’s been a research associate with the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force.

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Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Kawa: Rediscovering Indigeneity in China via Reggae–Junting Huang

SO! Reads: Tsitsi Jaji’s Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity–Celeste Day Moore

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

Liveness, and company: Ian Coss’s finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station follows the programming rhythm of days and nights, from rollicking to quiet and back again. Radio is a predictable presence, an intimate friend who anticipates your needs even before you do. Coss draws from his years of listening to the listeners as he marks radio time and space in Cap Haïtien. Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

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Fabrice Joseph is a mender, set up on a street corner in Cap Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city. He shows me a red plastic toolbox filled with supplies — thread, wires, scraps of fabric—which he can use to fix a jammed zipper or stitch up a torn backpack strap. I stop because he’s cradling a radio set in his hands, tuned to the city’s most popular station: Radio Venus. 

We meet on a quiet day; Fabrice has been sitting on the stoop for five hours already with no work. Another day he’s engrossed in assembling a large umbrella—the kind food vendors use for shade—but the radio is still on, now propped on a ledge just behind his head. He replaces the batteries almost weekly, because the radio is always on. In the morning Radio Venus plays news, Fabrice tells me, followed by music as the day heats up. Then in the afternoon he’ll hear sports or perhaps a religious program, before the station returns to music in the evening. 

This arc Fabrice describes is designed to follow the arc of his day. In this post, I trace that link: between the rhythms of radio programming and the rhythms of daily life, to show how formatting choices create a heightened sense of ‘liveness’ on Haiti’s airwaves, with all content located in a specific moment: the present moment. 

In a technical sense, terrestrial radio broadcasting has always been defined by real time or ‘live’ transmission (an dirèk in Creole), a characteristic that is often invoked in discussions of the medium’s capacity to create shared experiences or even ‘imagined communities.’ And yet where I live in the United States, the passage of time is barely discernible on most commercial stations. Where radio schedules once varied from hour to hour (often reflecting gendered and classed norms of listening), today market research has driven the rise of so-called “format stations” that target specific interest groups and demographics with an equally targeted form of programming: non-stop sports, news, top 40, easy listening, etc. 

When I first visited Haiti in 2015, I was surprised to find a radio format unlike any I had grown up with, and not unlike those broadcast schedules of the 1920s and 1930s. While doing research in Cap Haïtien, I conducted a series of bandscans—systematic reviews of the entire radio dial—in order to identify the different types of programming heard on stations throughout the day there. I found the full range of talk and music-oriented shows you might expect, and yet of the 31 stations I picked up, only a handful carried the same type of programming all day. The vast majority carried every kind of program, including Fabrice’s favorite station, Radio Venus.

The Radio Venus studio sits on top of a three-story building, with a door leading straight out onto an open roof deck where the transmitter tower rises several more stories up in the air. That tower operates at 10 watts, just enough to relay the signal to a nearby mountain, where it’s then rebroadcast at roughly 450 watts, blanketing the country’s whole Northern Department. The person in charge of this whole system, as well as the overall flow of the day’s programs, is known as the opérateur. The station employs four operators—Molliere, Louis, Wilkonson and Simon—who work in shifts to cover the 24-hour schedule. This rotation provides stability as the hosts (or animateur) of different programs come and go—often showing up late, and sometimes not showing up at all. For long stretches of the day there is no host, so the operator just cues up a folder of songs in Windows Media Player, occasionally leaning over to trigger a station ID: a chesty voice that declares, “W’ap koute Radio Tele-Venus”—‘You are listening to Radio Tele-Venus.’

One day, while sitting behind the board of the cramped control room, Simon explains that the goal of the station’s format is to satisfy all of the listeners’ interests and to provide “stability” in their often unstable lives. That last descriptor, “estabilite,” strikes me as somewhat ironic, given that the station’s programming is constantly changing. But for Haitians like Fabrice, who listen all day while they work, the description fits: he never needs to touch the dial, and at the same time he knows exactly what he will hear. Indeed, most of the radio listeners I meet in Cap Haïtien praise the medium’s consistently variable nature; if they wanted to hear the same thing all day they could get a stereo that takes a kat memwa—a memory card—and load it up with their favorite mp3s. Radio should change with the hours of the day; that’s part of what makes it radio. 

Many of the staff at Radio Venus describe the art of matching programming to the mood of the moment, in terms of ‘hotness’ (cho). For example, it’s important to have a lively host on the air between about 10am to noon, usually playing konpa music, so that the radio ‘heats up’ to give listeners more energy for their day. This shift takes place simultaneously across virtually every station on the dial, such that it’s literally audible on the street, from countless battery-powered radio sets. The timeliness of this ‘heating up’ is further emphasized by the host—at Venus, a local favorite named Don Lolo—who constantly reads the exact hour and minute off of a large analog clock on the studio wall. Lolo’s job is to make the music live in the moment; to make it ‘hot.’ By the same token, when I interview the overnight operator, Louis, he tells me that since many listeners keep the radio on all night, it’s important that he doesn’t play any music that’s ‘too hot,’ so as not to disturb their sleep. Everything in its right time.

The most dramatic shift in programming, however, begins on Friday evening. For the entire weekend, the station drops most of its talk-oriented shows and plays constant music—almost all of which is bootlegged recordings of live concerts. The idea is to convey the freewheeling mood of a night out on the town, even for those who won’t be at a bar or concert. To keep up this atmosphere, the station operators can choose from whole folders of “konpa live” tracks dating back decades—most of which run twelve to fifteen minutes long. Again, this programming convention of playing live recordings on weekends is ubiquitous across the dial, and indeed across Haiti. Turn on the radio on a Saturday night and you will be hard pressed to find any music that was recorded in a studio. 

My first weekend at Radio Venus, I step out of the studio at dusk, and find the station’s signal is suddenly all around me—far more present than just a few hours earlier. Around the corner from the station, an electronics store has set up a row of folding chairs in the street, and is blasting Radio Venus for a small audience. At the end of the same block is a barbershop; there too the stereo is tuned to Venus, with one cabinet speaker set in its arched entryway. 

At this hour, both the street and the shop are definitively male spaces—save for some market women packing goods and a mother overseeing her son’s haircut, those listening in public are men. A cell card vendor is perched on top of the stereo speaker itself; a man with two live chickens—their heads poking out of the bottom of plastic shopping bags—stops by and quickly exchanges some money with one of the barbers, who plays some air guitar as the next customer takes his seat. One of the other remaining barbers is perched sideways in his stool, feet in the air and a bottle of Barbancourt rum in one hand. The energy is loose, encouraged by the radio announcer.

Back at the station, the small studio is lit only by a single fluorescent bulb, whose harsh light spills through the glass pane into the neighboring control room. Don Lolo is on the air once again, but his style is different. No more telling the time or giving long monologues. Instead he sings along in a full-throated voice, occasionally adding personal shout-outs. We learn that Gerald is celebrating a birthday today, just as Claire and Alex are marking their anniversary. When his phone then rings, instead of picking it up Lolo silences the call and responds by radio: “Sorry, I can’t talk now!” 

It’s late when Don Lolo wraps up his show and we head out of the studio, leaving Louis alone to cool the music back down for the overnight shift. The evening operator, Simon, offers to walk me home. At this hour, we can stroll down the middle of the street side by side, the city’s elaborate facades cast in silhouette by the occasional streetlight. As we head up the hill towards my place, Simon cocks his head and gestures across the street. I turn just in time to catch the station ID—“W’ap koute Radio Tele Venus”—coming out of a barbershop. The radio is still on.

Tune into a livestream of Radio Tele-Venus via Tune In: https://tunein.com/radio/Radio-Tele-Venus-1043-s181945/

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Featured Image: “An electronics vendor in Cap Haïtien, Haiti” by Ian Coss

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Ian Coss is an audio producer, composer and sound designer whose work spans the worlds of podcasting and performance. He has produced several critically acclaimed series with the Radiotopia network, including Ways of Hearing, The Great God of Depression, and Over the Road. His audio work has been reviewed by the New Yorker and the Guardian; featured on NPR, Al Jazeera and the BBC; and recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Award for ‘excellence in sound.’ Additionally, Ian has premiered live sound works at the Boston Museum of Science and Harvard University, and collaborated on immersive audio tours for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Richmond ICA, and other major art institutions. Ian holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Boston University, where he conducted research on Haitian radio broadcasting and Indonesian shadow-puppetry. He continues this work as musical director for The Brothers Čampur, an international puppetry collaborative that has performed at major festivals in Indonesia, and at universities throughout the eastern United States. More on all these projects at iancoss.com.

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Review of The Hundreds.

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Tara East focuses on how time travel narratives challenge gender norms through experimental representations of bodies and sexuality