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Y2K, Collective Ritual, and Sound in the New Millennium
The recent New Year brought back some slightly embarrassing memories of past ball-droppings, 1999 in particular. That was the year, you’ll remember, when the world as we know it was to end due to all...
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Into the Woods: A Brief History of Wood Paneling on Synthesizers*
Various Species for the Prophet 08, Analogics *a companion piece of this research, on electronic sounds as lively individuals, is forthcoming in the American Quarterly special issue on sound, September...
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Listening to the Border: “’2487’: Giving Voice in Diaspora” and the Sound Art...
"Caution, Immigrants." Image taken from phoenixnewtimes.com. Statistics of death can startle a reader. As tidy yet powerful numeric representations statistics are often used as tools of persuasion,...
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Garageland! Authenticity and Musical Taste
First show with The Carpetbaggers! @The Manor. Today’s post is a bit of a confessional. Reflecting on Andreas Duus Pape’s post a few weeks back, Building Intimate Performance Venues on the Internet, I...
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The Sound of Hippiesomething, or Drum Circles at #OccupyWallStreet
Photo from Zuccotti Park, September 28 2011 by Flickr user David Shankbone Last week’s news was been full of alarming stories of real and threatened violence at various #Occupy sites around America....
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“I didn’t say look; I said listen”: The People’s Microphone, #OWS, and Beyond
Papier-mâché Bullhorn Spotted at Zuccotti Park, Photo by Author On a Tuesday right after Valentine’s Day in 2011 thousands of people marched on the Wisconsin capitol and good-naturedly, but firmly,...
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Sounding Out! Podcast Episode #5: Sound and Spirit on the Highway
Click to view slideshow. This podcast examines the prominent role of audio in the daily spiritual practice of Christian truck drivers. Using the lived examples of these drivers as an entry point, this...
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I Will Always (Sonically) Love You: Whitney Houston on the Radio
"Whitney Houston Central Park, NYC September 1, 2009" by Flickr user asterisk611 under Creative Commons license I knew Whitney Houston’s voice before I knew her face. She was a constant record on deck...
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“I Love to Praise His Name”: Shouting as Feminine Disruption, Public Ecstasy,...
Well, if you don’t believe in shouting, That’s alright with me Some folk don’t believe in shouting, That’s alright with me… Doubt and ignore it, But I belong to the Lord’s crew. David said rejoice in...
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Sounding Boards and Sonic Styles: The Music of the Skatepark
Welcome back to our summer series on “Sound and Sport.” In today’s post, Josh Ottum discusses the sonorous sounds and unique rhythms of the sport of skateboarding. For an instant replay of last...
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SO! Reads: Isaac Weiner’s Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space,...
Calling devotees to prayer, preaching on the subway, broadcasted pre-recorded sermons from a moving car, organizing drum circles in the park, resounding church bells through the city – expressions of...
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Karaoke and Ventriloquism: Echoes and Divergences
This piece is co-authored by Sarah Kessler and Karen Tongson. Scholarship rarely happens in isolation, despite quantitative demands in the humanities for “single-authored” works. Instead, intimacies of...
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LMGM’s “Lost: Choirboy”& El Jefe’s “Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon. . .” (in...
Come, let us sing of great men. Well, just one man, not men—and masculine gender is not essential for our purposes. Come to think of it, his greatness isn’t nearly as important as his fierceness, his...
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Mouthing the Passion: Richard Rolle’s Soundscapes
Each of the essays in this month’s “Medieval Sound” forum focuses on sound as it, according to Steve Goodman’s essay “The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” in The Sound Studies Reader, “comes to the...
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Sounding Out! Podcast #54: The Sound of Magic
Each of the essays in this month’s “Medieval Sound” forum focuses on sound as it, according to Steve Goodman’s essay “The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” in The Sound Studies Reader, “comes to the...
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(Dis)orienting the Bell: Aural Assault from A Game of Thrones to Richard Coer...
series co-editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman Hear YE! Below is the introduction to the latest installment of Medieval Sound, Aural Ecology, by series co-editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher...
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St Erkenwald: The Spectacle of Noise
series co-editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman Here is a distilled introduction to the latest installment of Medieval Sound, Aural Ecology, by series co-editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman....
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The Listening Body in Death
Editors’ note: As a discipline Sound Studies is unique in its scope—under its purview we find the science of acoustics, cultural representation through the auditory, and, to perhaps mis-paraphrase...
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Becoming Sound: Tubitsinakukuru from Mt. Scott to Standing Rock
In the Numu tekwapuha, the Comanche language: Haa ma ruawe, haa nu haitsi. Nu nahnia tsa Dustin Tahmahkera. In this post, I talk about the phrase “becoming sound,” and also gesture to several examples...
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Listening to the Beautiful Game: The Sounds of the 2018 World Cup
I heard them before I saw them. Walking to my apartment in Moscow’s Tverskoy District, I noticed a pulsating mass of sound in the distance. Turning the corner, I found a huge swath of light blue and...
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“How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?”: DJ Irene, Sonic...
How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House? –DJ Irene At the Arena Nightclub in Hollywood, California, the sounds of DJ Irene could be heard on any given Friday in the 1990s. Arena, a 4000-foot...
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Sonic Salvation: A Story of How Listening Can Change Over A Lifetime
By the age of six, I could circumscribe my world in song. I was not particularly precocious — my world was just small. Ultimately, it would be fractured by its own rebellious genesis. Two genres of...
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The Sound of Feminist Snap, or Why I Interrupted the 2018 SEM Business Meeting
I begin this essay with an apology, addressed to the Society for Ethnomusicology President Gregory Barz: I am sorry that I interrupted your opening remarks at least year’s SEM Business meeting. In the...
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Listening in Plain Sight: The Enduring Influence of U.S. Air Guitar
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...
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Mapping the Music in Ukraine’s Resistance to the 2022 Russian Invasion
24.02. Boy playing piano in Kharkiv, still from wleaming‘s video by author Note: To see these tweets and videos embedded on an interactive map, click here. In the late morning of February 24th, 2022,...
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The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래...
“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...
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