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 the Lord,

And that’s the way we Christians do.

If you don’t believe in shouting,

That’s alright with me.

–Dorothy Love Coates & the Gospel Harmonettes, “That’s Alright with Me”

A handy catch-all term, “shouting” is actually a euphemism encompassing a range of ecstatic worship behaviors.  These can include clapping, dancing, pacing, running, rocking, fainting, as well as using the voice in speaking, singing, laughing, weeping, yelling, and moaning.  Certainly, there were men who shouted in the days of my childhood in church; there are men who shout today.  The only shouts I can recall and even imitate to this day, however, are those of the women.

There is, in fact, a longstanding association between women and shouting.  Perhaps because of the pronounced emotionality involved in the practice, the shouting sphere tends to be prefigured as feminine and in this bears great relevance to women.  I am interested in the significances of shouting among black Christian women of struggling populations.  In my view, shouting is not only a religious practice for these women, but is also a binary-breaking performance which confounds—if only fleetingly—the divisions which have so often oppressed, menaced, and harmed them.  I argue that shouting has worked to codify the disruption of male-dominated services by women who have so often faced sharp sanctions by black church patriarchy.  I also contend that shouting places its female practitioners and their observers within a sphere of public ecstasy and visual and auditory pleasure, which makes mischief for notions of what is proper for Christian women and for the entire church community.

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The Shout, the Sound, and the Shriek: Black Feminine Disruption

In a 2011 post for Sounding Out! entitled “Pentecostal Song, Sound, and Authentic Voices,” Ashon Crawley posits the existence of a black church “public zone,” which serves as the conceptual, holy ground upon which “sound, song, and subject [function] as conduits for the exchange of ecstasy and ecstatics.”  I’d like to track Crawley’s public zone into the shouting sphere, the very heart of ecstasy within the black worship experience.

Although culturally codified—even expected and welcomed—within the church community, the shout functions primarily as a disruption.  The faces, bodies, and voices of shouting black women disrupt the flow of the service.  A shout takes time and has the power to alter the program.  Regarding such moments, worshippers—most often women and gay men—often proclaim in retrospect, “Baby, there was no more order!” This disruption of order through the use of the body and the voice has a distinct place within the Christian black feminine tradition of resistance to oppression.

Image by Flickr User Steve Schwartz

In the essay, “The Restorative Power of Sound,” womanist Roxanne Reed has examined the function of gendered sound within black Christianity.  For Reed, the feminine “wordless cry, holler, moan, or wail” achieves “primacy over the written text,” “suggests a historical time with relying on a defined chronology,” and is legitimated by an African “ancestral heritage” which presages black musical forms (2).  This distinctly feminine worship sound claims space from “patriarchal privilege,” which has often extended to black folk preaching, a tradition which excluded most black women for decades after slavery.

The sound of the black feminine in worship is thus a symbol for black women’s triumph over historically masculine arenas of writing, history, and form. The shout and the gendered worship sound can be placed in critical triangulation with Fred Moten’s “shriek,” as theorized in In the Break (2003)  An expression of the distinct suffering of the black female, the shriek is a primal “phono-photo-porno-graphic disruption” of spirit and matter, and other binaries (14).  The shout, the feminine worship sound, and the shriek all take center stage as black female performances which disrupt oppressive categories and assert the black woman’s voice as triumphant.

Shouting as Public Ecstasy, Scopophilia, and Sonophilia

Many observers have noted the shout’s resemblance to sexual ecstasy.  The shout is often expressed through the sounds, movements, and facial expressions commonly associated with sex.  Some shouters close their eyes and moan.  Some hug themselves around the waist or bend over the pew in front of them, rubbing their own shoulders, bellies, or thighs.  Some roll about the floor, hollering or speaking in tongues.  Some whisper His Name, as in closest intimacy to a lover.  Some dance with abandon before the altar or in the aisles before collapsing, spent and panting.  Some quiver quietly in deepest distraction.

Shouters in the throes of their ecstasy are closely observed by all within the church community.  Members of church communities often mark shared remembrances by who shouted, when, and how.  Even young children can be called upon to reproduce the shouts of various church members. The conspicuousness of the shout provides reason to consider it as spectacle containing pleasure for both the shouter and those who gaze upon her.

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Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”  discusses “scopophilia” as a phenomenon occurring in “circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at” (587).  In the moment in which a shout goes forth, those shouters who are aware of being watched—not all are—and their gazers may be said to enter into mutual pleasure from being watched and from watching.  For the observer, the pleasure arising from the sight-based stimulation is often compounded by the narcissism of the ego which seeks to identify with its source.  This may explain why in highly charged church moments, shouts become highly communicable—“thriving in concert,” as Zora Neale Hurston once phrased it.  Looking upon another in worship ecstasy can be understood to reinforce one’s own relation to the Holy and to stir desire to engage that relation through shouting.

There is sufficient cause to assign  what I call a  “sonophilic”aspect to shouting as well, as shouting never fails to take place but within a context of sound.  This sonophilic component should be understood as the means by which the sounds of ecstasy coming from a shouter provide stimulation and identification in the listener, who may in turn become a shouter.  It must be noted, however, that the sonophilia can emanate from sources other than the shouter.  Shouts are often roused by a complex network of sounds.  Within a service, preaching and verbal exhortations, prayers, congregational chants and songs, and instrumental music designed to buoy sermonic delivery or to capitalize on swells of emotion often work in tandem to provide the sound-based pleasure essential to shouting.

Image by Flickr User Steve Schwartz

A Final Shout-Out to Shouting

From West Africa to North America, from slavery to emancipation, from the eighteenth century into the present day, the black ecstatic in the form of shouting has served several important purposes for black women.  Black women’s general and persistent preoccupation with the relationship between the spiritual and the sensual, the cornerstone of black female intellectualism in my view, was first and foremost expressed in the practice of shouting.  The shout can be understood as the primary site upon which black women made the spiritual physical and rendered the sensual holy.

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Furthermore, in eras in which black women were customarily denied the right to preach and were granted but limited authority within church communities, the shout communicated a woman’s ability to engage the Holy.  This proven ability undoubtedly helped to open doors for the thousands of black women who now preach and pastor all over the country. Shouting has also provided much needed relief for the unique pressures of the black female in North America, absorbing and transforming her hurts and frustrations and replacing them, down through the centuries, with the hope and strength vital to her survival.

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Featured Image Credit: Flickr User Steve Schwartz

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Shakira Holt is a thirteen-year classroom veteran and currently teaches high school English in Los Angeles County. She earned a doctorate degree in English from the University of Southern California, and works primarily in the area of black women’s literature and culture. She is deeply concerned about the intersections of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and politics in the public sphere. She is a lazy poet, a latent novelist, an intermittent blogger, a retired songwriter, and a reluctant karaoke singer. A licensed Baptist minister, she is but slowly working her way back to the pulpit. “I Love to Praise His Name” is her first published piece.

Miguel Covarrubias, untitled iIlustration to “Radio I: A $140,000,000 Art,” Fortune (May, 1938).

Editor’s Note: Today, Neil Verma kicks off our summer series “Tune In to the Past,” which explores the life and legacy of radio broadcaster Norman Lewis Corwin, the “poet laureate of radio” who died last summer at the age of 101. Corwin, pictured in the icon to the left with actress Peggy Burt around 1947, passed too quietly into the ether–as, unfortunately, has too much of radio history.   Sounding Out!‘s three-part exploration of his legacy by radio scholars Verma, Shawn VanCour (July), and Alex Russo (August) not only gives his work new life (and critique), but also speaks to the growing vitality of radio studies itself. As I mentioned this past March in my round-up of the 2012 Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference, radio scholarship is on the rise–a Radio Studies Special Interest Group was established at SCMS this year, reaching a critical mass–and scholars are finding new and innovative ways to approach radio’s unique silences.   We are proud over here at SO! to broadcast the future of radio studies by helping you “Tune In to the Past” this summer, so get ready for an array of voices–living and dead, textual and aural–spirited debate, and great sound history, in both senses of the word. So don’t touch that dial. –JSA

Norman Corwin in 1973 (Source: Arrowcatcher, Wikimedia Commons)

“I am a Dead Sea Scroll,” Norman Corwin, in an interview with writer Tom Lewis, 1992.

 Rising to prominence in the 1930’s, radio dramatist Norman Corwin (1910-2011) aired a body of work of unsurpassed variety, reaching audiences upwards of sixty million with plays that range from “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones,” about a boy searching the afterlife for his beloved dog, to One World Flight, for which Corwin visited 17 countries seeking voices of peace. Often compared to such figures as Eugene O’Neill and Walt Whitman, Corwin was known for seventy years as the “Poet Laureate” of radio, an unofficial title invented for him and impossible to confer on another. I interviewed Norman for my book Theater of the Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2012).  These remarks derive in part from those conversations.

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In June of 1947, New Yorker writer Philip Hamburger published a profile of Norman Corwin, then already recognized as a distinguished radio dramatist. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, Corwin had staged daring plays to mark Allied milestones and earned frothy praise from the likes of Carl Sandburg, who called Corwin’s V-E Day show “On a Note of Triumph” one of the “all-time best” American poems.

Such acclaim was not universal. That same broadcast drew scorn from historian Bernard DeVoto, who called it a “mistake from the first line” full of “pretentiousness” and “bargain-counter jauntiness.” Like many others, DeVoto and Sandburg reacted to Corwin’s habit of excess by mimicking it. Hamburger’s profile caught that same bug. Billing itself as “The Odyssey of the Oblong Blur,” Hamburger tells a gauzy story of Corwin’s older brother building him a crystal set out of a box of Quaker Oats, and relates tall tales of Corwin’s artistry, like the time he spent two days trying to simulate the sounds of depth charges. And not only did Hamburger write the profile as a radio play, but he wrote it in the style of Norman Corwin.

What is that style, exactly? Thoughts on that question have been surprisingly minimal. When Corwin died last fall, commentators celebrated his life (see here, here, here and here), but the memorials lacked precisely the sense of scale to which both Sandburg and DeVoto responded. There was no voice to speak of Norman in a “Corwinesque” manner, in part because the man probably outlived more likely eulogists than anyone else in the history of broadcasting. Had he not outlasted them, Corwin would have been mourned by the avuncular elders of midcentury liberalism, like his friends Edward R. Murrow and Carl Sandburg or admirers Robert Altman, Walter Cronkite and Studs Terkel, any one of whom could have written a loving burlesque in Corwin’s voice.

But no one did, and no one can, not now. Who would get the joke, anyway? Collective experience of Corwin’s sound is passing out of living memory. Yet this very elapsing “afterlife” of the radio age, I feel, lends new richness to the question of the Corwinesque, an aesthetic that needs clarification both to give full credit to the man behind it, and, in a larger sense, to show how a theory of sound experience can “happen” at the twilight zone of collective human memory.

So what was “the Corwinesque” around 1947? What is it nowadays? What might it become in the future? In this post I’ll consider both the nature of the “Oblong Blur” and the methods we’ve tried to bring its ongoing odyssey into focus.

Philip Hamburger’s New Yorker profile, with illustration by A. Birnbaum

A High Wireless Act

In its profile, The New Yorker poked fun at how Corwin made unreasonable demands of sound (e.g. “Music: a universal theme, oscillator beneath, denoting pain of the world and bigness thereof, fading”) and let childish literary tactics run amok, as when the audience is called “Sons of a Sun spinning sadly through space.” In his era, Corwin’s penchant for such overwriting was an unavoidable aesthetic issue.

Corwin’s work was widely understood as a challenge to technicians and actors just for the sake of it. In the script for “New York: A Tapestry for Radio,” for example, a date scene contains this befuddling note: “Music: Love on brownstone stoop at three in the morning after an evening at the RKO Proctor Theater and a long walk in the park. It sustains, behind.” In “The Undecided Molecule,” meanwhile, we learn of a particle that refuses to select his destiny before “The Court of Physiochemical Relations.” Here are some of many tongue-twisting lines in verse:

I’d argue that Corwin’s writing is impressive here precisely because it’s so easy to botch in delivery. The style spotlights its own overworked literary calisthenics, saying: look at me trying so hard I might blow it.

In this way, the Corwinesque names a connection between the soaring and the buffoonish, a link that a contemporary called his “frontier spirit.” Thanks to this spirit, even when the prose was purple, the defect came across as that of an innovator. To keep that up, Corwin had to innovate constantly. That’s why his plays took on so many other forms – the letter (“To Tim and Twenty”); the lecture (“Anatomy of Sound”); the pageant (“Unity Fair”).

So one key to the Corwinesque was to walk a high wire without a net, another was to say so. Nothing confirmed both better than a fall. I’d wager many listened for a lousy line or overdone tune as part of the pleasure of it all. Indeed, it may be incorrect to evaluate Corwin’s aesthetic as poetic; think of the Corwinesque as broadcasting rather than writing, and its liabilities come across as dares.

If that is correct, then the “high wire act” of the Corwinesque relies on a kind of listening-for-risk that’s hard for us to do now, because we can’t listen to Corwin’s work new, or live. One deep aspect of the Corwinesque of the 1940’s – the possibility, even anticipation, of artistic failure, up above an enormous audience out there in the dark – seems lost for good.

Coalition and Collation

But in another way, the Corwinesque is only possible to grasp now, at the safe remove of the digital era. Today it’s easy to listen “distantly” to classic radio through formats that allow us to pause, rewind, categorize and remix vast amounts of golden age audio in a way that was impossible in 1947. By doing so it becomes clear that what we call the “Corwinesque” drew on a broad vocabulary of radio dramaturgy, a way of “talking about” time and space that characterized many programs of that time.

Consider Corwin’s famous attempts to glorify the “common man” – farmers, G.I.s, factory workers – by drawing their voices to a sonorous space and national coalition, indeed by making these two imaginary sites mirror and rationalize one another. Perhaps the paramount example is “We Hold These Truths,” which celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the Bill of Rights only days after Pearl Harbor. In that broadcast, we hear Americans of the revolutionary period (widows, blacksmiths, politicians) speak from a series of shallow locations in a quick succession, and a similar group in the present (workers, Okies, businessmen, mothers), as a way of building mystical union through time.

A visual representation of the “kaleidosonic” from the 1939 broadcast “Americans All, Immigrants All”

This style has had many names. Historian Erik Barnouw likened it to painting, calling it a chance to “splash quickly over a large canvas,” while actor Joseph Julian called it a “telescoping montage.” Variety’s radio editor Bob Landry suggested that it resembled cantata. When I interviewed him, Corwin said that it was like writing music; elsewhere he spoke of a kind of “horizontal” drama, or mosaic form.

In my book, I employ another word: “kaleidosonic.” In kaleidosonic radio, we segue from place to place, experiencing shallow scenes as if from a series of fixed apertures, thereby giving time periods expressive existence. That can be contrasted with what I refer to as the “intimate style,” in which the listener is attached to a character who moves through deep scenes, as a way to give space expressive existence. A good example of the latter is Corwin’s American in England series, in which the horizon of wartime is shaped by a proximal relation to a surrogate narrating entity “nearby.” Here’s a representative episode:

Today, listening broadly, it becomes clear that neither of these styles belongs to Norman exclusively. For other uses of the kaleidosonic, consider the works of Stephen Vincent Benét, Orson Welles’ “The War of The Worlds”  or Cavalcade of America. For examples of the “intimate style,” listen to Brewster Morgan’s “A Trip To Czardis,” or any “first-person” style play from The Mercury Theater on the Air. What made Corwin special was how he made these styles complimentary. The opening of “On a Note of Triumph” is a good example:

In six minutes, we go from a kaleidosonic sequence of songs and crowds to an ordinary G.I. overseas asking questions intimately. This connection between the context and the individual, between the nearby and the simultaneous, is Corwin’s way of letting space and time merge together vividly.

It is that capability, I contend, that underlies and secures Corwin’s glorification of the common man, who is really Corwin’s public aestheticized. In 1939, Archibald MacLeish wrote, “The situation of radio is the situation of poetry backwards. If poetry is an art without an audience, radio is an audience without an art.” Corwin intuited what MacLeish didn’t understand: in radio, the audience is the art.

And just as airing a coalition of voices was an epistemological act that reinvented those it depicted in 1945, our use of a new collation of recordings today redraws the parameters of what those sounds might mean, amplifying latencies, superficialities, and entwinings hitherto inaudible.

A Dead Sea Scroll

By 1947, Corwin’s dedication to the “little guy” was out of vogue. It seemed seditious to red-baiters, phony to leftists, and compromised to critics – The Nation’s Lou Frankel wrote of One World: “It is as if the late John Barrymore decided, without warning, to play Hamlet in pantomime.” On this point Hamburger’s profile pivots from hagiography to satire, including a series of goofy verses voiced by a “Chorus of One Hundred Little Guys from Everywhere in the World” and a grouchy monologue by the “Common Man,” complaining that Corwin talked past him, advising “you ought to think about what the words mean before you use them.”

Norman Corwin in 1947 (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

That reminds me of another coda, this one in Corwin’s 1944 play “Untitled.” The play concerns a dead soldier named Hank Peters, who speaks as he lies “fermenting in the wisdom of the earth.” The monologue concludes this way:

Death is a patriotic act, a metaphysical state, but also a restless moral energy bearing down on life, a thing standing in requirement of its vindicating narration. Perhaps this feature of the Corwinesque will ring especially true as classic radio continues to exist in its ongoing pseudo-immortality. Now that Corwin reposes in his own acre of undisputed ground and his voice circulates ghostlike in clouds of data, our question may be what ontological relation we ought to have with that voice, and those of other dead social visionaries, who really do keep on advising us after death, and will go on echoing after we’re gone.

But the Corwinesque isn’t just about how the dead “speak” to the living, long the ruling conceit in the theory of sound recording. It is also about another enigma: how the dead listen to us, an audience eavesdropping, in hiding, taking notes on an old scroll in a lost language.

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Neil Verma is a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he teaches media aesthetics. Verma works on radio and its intersection with other media, and has taught subjects including film studies, sound, art history, literature, critical theory and intellectual history. His book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, is published by the University of Chicago Press.

This week brings us #musicon12, the megaconference of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT). This will be the third joint conference of these societies, after Oakland in 1990 and Toronto in 2000. These roughly decennial gatherings of the three principal scholarly societies of music scholarship provide increased opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversations and amazing live performances. A fact augmented even more by the selection of New Orleans, a city known for its music, for this year’s meeting.

The conference takes place in the Sheraton and Astor Crowne Plaza hotels from this Wednesday, October 31st through Sunday, November 4th. It will be preceded by two events. The first, occurring Monday, October 29th and Tuesday, October 30th, at Tulane University’s Rogers Memorial Chapel, is Ecomusicologies2012, a pre-conference organized by the AMS Ecocriticism Study Group and the SEM Ecomusicology Special Interest Group. The second, all day Wednesday, October 31st, is the Preconference Symposium on Crisis and Creativity, held at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at Tulane University.

The disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory have focused on sound for centuries. They are the disciplines that Michael Bull argues Sound Studies “goes beyond” in the upcoming anthology Sound Studies. While such a description could lead to the categorization of these disciplines as theoretically or methodologically antiquated, #musicon12 is too large and significant for Sound Studies to ignore, with over 600 individual presentations that all deal with sound or music somehow. The first eleven papers, in chronological order, should give some idea of the overall scope:

• Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”
• Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”
• Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”
• Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”
• Kim Carter Muñoz (University of Washington), “‘¡Todos somos huastecos! ‘We are all Huastecan!’: Performance of the Democratization of Son Huasteco at El Festival de la huasteca (The Festival of the Huasteca)”
• Raquel Paraíso (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Festival Son Raíz: Building Community and Signifying Identity and Culture Ownership across Mexican Regions”
• Ian Middleton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Identity, Peace, and Learning at Rural Music Festivals in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast”
• Brenda M. Romero (University of Colorado, Boulder), “‘El Carnaval de Río Sucio No Es Festival’ / ‘The Carnival of Río Sucio is Not a Festival’”
• Michael O’Toole (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing Publics in a ‘Turkish Art Music’ Ensemble in Berlin”
• Suzanne Wint (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing the Social: Becoming a Performer in Kampala’s Classical Music Scene”
• Gregory Weinstein (University of Chicago), “Recording Rehearsing: The Hidden ‘Process of the Classical Studio Session’”

But for the sake of argument, if Sound Studies is something more than simply the application of long-standing disciplinary approaches to sonic works and events, if, as Jonathan Sterne proposed this year in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader, “the difference between sound studies and… other fields is that they don’t require engagement with alternative epistemologies, methods, or approaches” (4), then we are inclined to pay attention to that work that reaches beyond the limits of conventional music scholarship, namely the sort which strives for some sort of critical self-reflection or interdisciplinary ambition.

Lost Bayou Ramblers. Borrowed from phillipleroyer on Flickr.

This is not an easy task given the vast number of papers and performances at such a large conference and the scarcity of information found in brief titles and abstracts. We can assume that every presentation challenges these conventions to some extent, but for the sake of this preview, here are a few items that venture beyond the traditional limits of music scholarship. You can find the full #musicon12 program here.

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Featured Image: Mardi Gras 2005, By Robert Garcia, The City Project

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Bill Bahng Boyer is an adjunct professor of music, writing and rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is also a doctoral candidate in music at New York University, completing a dissertation on public listening in the New York City subway system.

Jump to MONDAY, October 29
Jump to TUESDAY, October 30
Jump to WEDNESDAY, October 31
Jump to THURSDAY, November 1
Jump to FRIDAY, November 2
Jump to SATURDAY, November 3
Jump to SUNDAY, November 4

New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2005, Borrowed From Robert Garcia, The City Project

MONDAY, October 29

Ecomusicologies2012

All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University

5-6pm Soundwalk

Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Environmental Listening and the Tulane Soundscape” (meeting place outside the entrance of the Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University)

7-9pm Paper Jam

Chair: Aaron S. Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

Joe Browning (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) (virtual presentation), “Crane Calls and Shakuhachi Sounds: Interconnections, Disjunctures and New Directions in the Tsuru no Sugomori Pieces”

Travis Stimeling (Millikin University) (virtual presentation), “Music, Television Advertising, and the Green Positioning of the Global Energy Industry in the United States”

Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska (Northwestern University) (virtual presentation), “Theorizing the Musical Landscapes of John Luther Adams”

Andrew Mark (York University) (virtual presentation), “Consciousness, Solidarity, and Musicking: Ecoethnographic Justice”

Leah G. Weinberg (University of Michigan), “Orchestrating Nature: Music, Manipulation, and 1950s America in Disney’s True- Life Adventure Films”

Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo (Middlesex University), “Sounds Heard: the Environmental Ethics & Aesthetics of Hugh Davies’s Music”

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “Negotiating Nature & Music Through Technology: Ecological Reflections in the Works of Maggi Payne & Laurie Spiegel”

The Canal Street Line. Borrowed from Hmeriomx on Flickr.

TUESDAY, October 30

Ecomusicologies2012 (cont.)

All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University

8:30-10:30am Panel: Beyond Metaphor

Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair

Marc Perlman (Brown University), “Instrument Builders As Environmental Activists: A Tale of Two Tonewoods”

Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “Small is Beautiful: Guitar Making, Sustainability and Community Building in Britain and Africa”

Jeff Todd Titon (Brown University), “Why Thoreau?”

Jennifer C. Post (New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, Wellington), “Beyond Birds: (Ethno)musicologists, Environmental Scientists & the Evolution of Soundscape Ecology”

11am-1pm Panel: 20th & 21st-century Composers

Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Chair

Eric Drott (University of Texas at Austin), “The Peasant’s Voice and the Tourist’s Gaze:  Listening to Landscape in Luc Ferrari’sPetite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps”

You Nakai (New York University), “An Electronic Ecology:  The Natures of David Tudor’s Electronic Music”

Jacob A. Cohen (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “Carl Ruggles, Walt Whitman, and the Gendered Place of Men and Mountains”

Joseph Finkel (Arizona State University), “Searching for a Sonic Ecology:  John Luther Adams’s Dark Waves”

2-3:30pm, Panel: Contemporary Issues

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), Chair

Melissa J. de Graaf (University of Miami), “‘The Music of Nature Makes Me Dream and Sleep’: Intersections of Nature, Gender, and Ultramodernism”

Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), “Agency and Aural Rights: Negotiating the Soundscape, 1948 to the Present”

Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Emergent Soundscapes: Uses of Nature and Technology in Two Electroacoustic Compositions”

4-6pm, Panel: Ethnographic Approaches

William Bares (University of North Carolina, Asheville), Chair

Dan Bendrups (Queensland Conservatorium Resarch Centre, Griffith University), “Mapping Outdoor Music Festival Engagement with Ecological and Environmental Issues in Australia”

Robin Ryan (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University), “Eucalyptus as Musical Resource: Some Ecological Considerations”

Michael Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), “Birdsong, Popular Music, &Predicting Rain in Northeastern Brazil”

Charlotte D’Evelyn (University of Hawaii), “Sounds of the Grasslands: An Ecomusicological Crisis of Romanticism, Loss, & Inheritance in Inner Mongolia, China”

6:30-8pm, Panel: Canadian Perspectives

Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Chair

Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding the Environmental Past and Present: Repurposing and Representing Soundscape in Contemporary Canadian Compositions”

Erin Scheffer (University of Toronto), “The Mis-imagined Native: Musically Constructing Nativeness in 1940s Canadian Radio and Film Docudramas”

Jeremy Strachan (University of Toronto), “Sounding Empire: Coloniality and Environment in Canadian Art Music”

8-9pm, Reception & Concert

James Harley (University of Guelph), computer, and Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), amplified flutes, “Birding,” an eco-improvisational performance by ~spin~

Borrowed from mattbyrne on Flickr.

WEDNESDAY, October 31

SEM Pre-conference Symposium, Crisis and Creativity

All events at Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, Tulane University

9:00-10:30am, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans

Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), Chair

Nick Spitzer, Professor of Anthropology (Tulane University), Holly Hobbs, Director of the NOLA Hip-Hop Archive (Tulane University), Bennie Pete, leader of Hot 8 Brass Band

10:45-12:15pm New Realities: Haitian Performing Arts and the Built Environment

Joyce Jackson (Louisiana State University), Chair

Gage Averill, Dean of Arts (University of British Columbia)

Michael Largey, Professor of Ethnomusicology (Michigan State University)

Jean Montes, Director of Orchestral Studies (Loyola University New Orleans)

1:15-2:45pm, Environmental Crises in South Louisiana: Scientific, Sociological, and Ethnomusicological Perspectives

Mark DeWitt (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Chair

Tommy Michot, Research Scientist (UL Lafayette), and member of Les Frères Michot

Robert Gramling, Professor of Sociology (UL Lafayette)

Mark DeWitt, Professor of Music (UL Lafayette)

3:00-5:00pm, Field Trip by Bus to Musician’s Village, New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity (Upper Ninth Ward), House of Dance and Feathers (Lower Ninth Ward)

Milterngerger House. Borrowed from DavidPaulOhmer on Flickr.

THURSDAY, November 1

8:30-10:30am, The Beautiful, The Good, and The Story: Aesthetics and Narrative in Religious Music

Session 1-1 (SEM) A: Astor Ballroom 1

Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), Chair

Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”

Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”

Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”

Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”

12:30-1:30pm, SEM Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting

S: Oakley

3:30-5:00pm, On Bells, Bugs, and Disintegrating Tape: Listening for Metaphysics in Ambient Sound

Session 1-44 AMS/SEM S. Edgewood

Mitchell Morris (University of California, Los Angeles), Chair

Paul Chaikin (University of Southern California), “Clattering Bells as a Field of Experience and Cognition”

James Edwards (University of California, Los Angeles), “Nature and the Metaphysics of Voice in Edo Period Aesthetics”

Joanna Demers (University of Southern California), “The Ethics of Apocalypse”

4:00-5:30pm, Musically Meaningful Soundscapes

Session 1-52 SEM S: Maurepas

Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Chair

Alison Furlong (Ohio State University), “Sound, Space, and Social Practice in the Zionskirche”

Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding and Composing the Harbour: Performing Landscape and Re-contextualizing the Soundscape of Place in the Harbour Symphony (St. John’s, Newfoundland)”

Jessamyn Doan (University of Pennsylvania), “‘Bringin’ Back the Roots’: Rearticulating a Creole Sound in Southern Louisiana”

5:30–6:30pm, SEM First-Time Attendees and New Members

Reception S: Sheraton Grand B

5:30–6:30pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG* and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Joint Business Meeting

S: Oak Alley

7:30–midnight, Zydeco Dance Lesson and Evening at Rock’n’Bowl

Organized by the SEM 2012 Local Arrangements Committee and the SEM Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section

Dance Lesson at Sheraton Grand E (no ticket required), 7:30–8:30 p.m.

Evening at Rock’n’Bowl. Bus Departs Sheraton: 8:45 p.m. Bus Departs Rock’n’Bowl for Sheraton: 12:00 midnight

8:00–11:00 AMS Music and Philosophy SG Session

A: Astor Ballroom III

8:00-11:00pm, Fantasy, Cinema, Sound, and Music

Session 1-58 AMS S: Oak Alley

Mark Brill (University of Texas at San Antonio)

James Deaville (Carleton University)

J. Drew Stephen (University of Texas at San Antonio)

Jamie Lynn Webster (Portland, Ore.)

8:00-11:00pm, Music and Nature: Relations, Awareness, Knowledge

Session 1-64 AMS S: Borgne
Sponsored by the AMS Ecocriticism SG

Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Chair

Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “RELATIONS—A Social and Environmental History of Small Guitar Workshops in England”

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “AWARENESS—‘Hello, the Earth is Speaking’: Four Case Studies of Ecological Composition, Performance, and Listening”

David E. Cohen (Columbia University), “KNOWLEDGE—Nature, Culture, and the First Principle(s) of Music: Two Myths of Theoretical Revelation”

Borrowed from prayitno on Flickr.

FRIDAY, November 2

7:00–8:00am, SEM SIG for Voice Studies

S: Estherwood

7:00–8:30am, SMT Committee on the Status of Women

S: Roux Bistro Private

9:00-noon, The Ecomusicology Listening Room

Session 2-17 AMS/SEM S: Gallier
Co-Sponsored by the SEM Sound Studies Interest Group and the AMS Popular Music Study Group

Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair

Robert Fallon (Carnegie Mellon University), Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Naomi Perley (CUNY), William Bares (Harvard University), Rachel Mundy (Columbia University), Jeremy Woodruff (University of Pittsburgh), Justin D. Burton (Rider University), Michael Austin (University of Texas at Dallas), Michael B. Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), Miki Kaneda (Museum of Modern Art), Zeynep Bulut (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry)

10:30-noon, Beyond Hearing: Soundscapes and Ideoscape in Early Nineteenth-Century America

Session 2-25 AMS/SEM A: Iberville
Deane Root (University of Pittsburgh), Chair

Sarah Gerk (University of Michigan), “Love, Loyalty, and Fear: American Reception of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies”

Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia), “Mr. Jefferson’s Ears”

12:00–2:00pm, AMS/SMT Music and Philosophy SG/IG

S: Sheraton Grand A

12:30–1:30pm, SEM Medical Ethnomusicology SIG

A: Astor Grand A

12:30–1:30pm, SEM Section on the Status of Women

S: Bayside C

2:00-5:00pm, Embodiment and Gesture

Session 2-38 AMS/SMT S: Oak Alley

Arnie Cox (Oberlin College), Chair

Margaret Britton (University of Texas at Austin), “Four Gestural Types in Chopin’s Mazurka in C-sharp Minor, Op. 50, no. 3”

Drew Massey (Binghamton University), “Thomas Adès’s Glossary”

Meghan Goodchild (CIRMMT / McGill University), “Towards a PerceptuallyBased Theory of Orchestral Gestures”

Zachary Wallmark, Marco Iacoboni (University of California, Los Angeles), “Embodied Listening and Musical Empathy: Perspectives from Mirror Neuron Research”

4:00-5:30pm, SEM Charles Seeger Lecture

Session 2-49 SEM S: Sheraton Grand C

Portia Maultsby (Indiana University), “‘Everybody Wanna Sing my Blues . . . Nobody Wanna Live My Blues’: Deconstructing Narratives of Race, Culture and Power in African American Music Scholarship”

Cheryl L. Keyes (University of California, Los Angeles), Introduction

6:00pm, Sound Studies Special Interest Group Soundwalk

Meet in front of the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street

Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), organizer

8:00-11:00pm, Music and Video Games: History, Theory, Ethnography

Session 2-55 AMS S: Gallier

William Cheng (Harvard University), Moderator

Mark Katz (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Respondent

Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Musicological Contributions to Early Video Game Studies”

Roger Moseley (Cornell University), “Digital Analogies”

William Gibbons (Texas Christian University), “Framing Devices for Gaming Devices: Applying Film Music Theory to Video Games”

Elizabeth Medina-Gray (Yale University), “Modularity and Dynamic Play: Video Game Music and Its Avant-garde Antecedents”

Kiri Miller (Brown University), “Dance Central and the Listening Body”

Borrowed from squared2x on Flickr.

SATURDAY, November 3

7:00–8:30am, SMT Music and Disability IG

S: Salon 828

7:00–8:45am, AMS Committee on Women and Gender

S: Salon 825

8:30-10:30am, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, I: Music Tourism in the Aftermath of Rupture in New Orleans, Berlin, Bali

Session 3-2 SEM S: Bayside B
Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), Chair

Elizabeth Macy (University of California, Los Angeles), “Music and Cultural Tourism in Post-Disaster Economies”

Luis-Manuel Garcia (Tulane University), “Consuming Atmospheres and Social Worlds: ‘Techno-Tourismus’ and Post-Tourist Tourism in Berlin’s Electronic Dance Music Scenes”

Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), “Dithyrambalina: A Shantytown Sound Installation in Post-Katrina New Orleans”

SherriLynn Colby-Bottel (University of Virginia), “Authenticity Seekers: Music Post-Tourists and the Shifting Sound-Scapes of New Orleans”

8:30-10:30am, Online Musical Communities

Session 3-7 AMS/SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Marc Gidal (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Chair

Tara Browner (University of California, Los Angeles), “Bach Culture: Performers, Scholars, and Bachfreunde in the Twenty-First Century”

Olga Panteleeva (University of California, Berkeley), “Für Kenner und Liebhaber 2.0: Modes of Expertise in Online File-Sharing Communities”

Tom Artiss (University of Cambridge), “Solitary Socialities: Music Surf-Sharing in Nain, Labrador”

Charles Hiroshi Garrett (University of Michigan), “Joking Matters: Music, Humor, and the Digital Revolution”

9:00-10:30am, Language and the Senses

Session 3-10 AMS/SMT S: Edgewood
Donald Boomgaarden (Loyola University New Orleans), Chair

Charles Dill (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Le Cerf’s Epistemology of Music”

Amy M. Cimini (University of Pennsylvania), “René Descartes’ Unfinished Compendium of Music: Rethinking Music and the Politics of Sensation after the Thirty Years’ War

9:00-10:30am, Music and Gaming

Session 3-12 AMS A: Iberville
Kiri Miller (Brown University), Chair

Christopher Tonelli (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “The Chiptuning of the World”

Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Investigating the Origins of Video Game Music Style, 1977–1983: The Early Cinema Hypothesis”

9:00-noon, Performing Music, Performing Disability

Session 3-19 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Bayside A
Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY), Chair

Michael Bakan (Florida State University), Michael Beckerman (New York University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Blake Howe (Louisiana State University), Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Bruce Quaglia (University of Utah)

9:00-noon, Sound, Language, and Mysticism from Vienna to L.A.

Session 3-22 AMS S:Borgne
Brian Kane (Yale University), Chair

Clara Latham (New York University), “The Impact of Sound and Voice on the Invention of Psychoanalysis”

Sherry Lee (University of Toronto), “‘Still, o schweige’: Music, Language, OpernKrise (Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand )”

Nicholas Attfield (Edinburgh University), “A Medieval Model for the 1920s: Anton Bruckner as Mystic”

J. Daniel Jenkins (University of South Carolina), “I Care If You Listen: Schoenberg’s ‘School of Criticism’ and the Role of the Amateur”

10:30-noon, Twentieth-Century Music and Advertising

Session 3-28 AMS A: Iberville

Jason Hanley (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Chair

Paul Christiansen (University of Southern Maine), “‘It’s Morning Again in America’: How the Tuesday Team Revolutionized the Use of Music in Political Ads”

Jonathan Waxman (New York University), “I Went to the New York Philharmonic and Came Home with a Cadillac: The Alliance Between Business and the Arts in the Early Twentieth Century

12:00–2:00pm, SMT Committee on the Status of Women Brown Bag Open Lunch

S: Salon 828

12:30–1:30pm SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce

S: Bayside C

1:45-3:45pm, Acoustics and Experiences of the Limit

Session 3-39 SEM S: Maurepas

Louise Meintjes (Duke University), Chair

Louise Meintjes (Duke University), “Pushing at the Edge of the Social”

Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania), “Signatures of the Audible”

Ana Maria Ochoa (Columbia University), “South American Acoustics: Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-Linear Musical Histories”

Gary Tomlinson (Yale University), “Singing at the Limit of the Human”

1:45-3:45pm, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, II: Multimedia, Spectacles and Memorials

Session 3-43 SEM S: Grand Chenier
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)

Lynda Paul (Yale University), Chair

Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment (University of Georgia), “Elvis Presley and the Reanimation of Robert E. Lee”

Lynda Paul (Yale University), “Las Vegas and Virtual Tourism: Sonic Shaping of Simulated Worlds”

Michael Heller (Harvard University), “Deployments of Deadness at the Louis Armstrong House Museum”

Nicol Hammond (New York University), “‘The History Is in the Music’? Music, Museums, and the Politics of Presence in Post-Apartheid Cultural Tourism”

8:00-11:00pm, Music and Disability: Works in Progress Seminar

AMS/SMT S: Bayside A
Sponsored by the AMS Disability SG and SMT Disability IG

Michael Bakan (Florida State University), James Deaville (Carleton University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Jeanette Jones (Boston University), Anabel Maler (University of Chicago), Julie Saiki (Stanford University), Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY)

9:00pm, KNOCKABOUT: wandering beats from across urban America.

Handsome Willy’s at 218 South Robertson St. No cover. 21+

5 DJs converge on Handsome Willy’s for KNOCKABOUT, a dance party featuring every genre you’ve ever loved and fly beats that you neva eva heard before.

DJ Yamin (NOLA): Hip-hop, funk, reggae, Afrobeat www.nolamix.com

DJ Super Squirrel (Boston): Dancehall, global mashup www.djsupersquirrel.com

The Attic Bat (L.A.): Hip-hop and dubstep www.derricomusic.com

LMGM (Chicago, Berlin): House and disco www.thelusisgarcia.com

Shilo Bourne (L.A.) UK bass

Roger Lewis. Borrowed from fantailmedia at Fiickr.

SUNDAY, November 4

8:30-10:30am, Music and YouTube: Sound, Media, and Sociality

Session 4-5 SEM A: Astor Grand A
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)

Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), Chair

Fabian Holt (Roskilde University, Denmark), “Social Media Video and the Festivalization of Electronic Dance Music in Europe”

Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), “Worship on the Web: Building Online Religious Community through Christian Devotional Music Videos”

Patricia G. Lange (California College of the Arts), “In Synch with Lip-Synching: A Riff on Teen Sociality”

Trevor S. Harvey (University of Iowa), “Dulcimerica: Mediating a Musical Community through Video Podcasts”

8:30-10:30am, Musical Propertization in the Digital Age:

Session 4-7 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
From “Piracy” to Ontological Politics
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), Chair

Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), “M-Commerce and the (Re)making of the Music Industry in Kenya”

Aditi Deo (University of Oxford), “Folk Music in the Digital Realm: Public Commons or Cultural Property?”

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), “Pirates of the Caribbean: Music Circulation in Late Socialist Cuba”

Henry Stobart (Royal Holloway, University of London), “Shifting Properties: Ownership, Informality, and the Digital Music Video in Bolivia”

9:00-noon, The City is a Medium

Session 4-16 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Edgewood
Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), Chair

Veit Erlmann (University of Texas at Austin), Respondent

Benjamin Tausig (New York University), “The City is Burning: Informal Musical Commerce at Urban Protest Movements”

Tiffany Ng (University of California, Berkeley), “An Instrument of Urban Planning: Bells and the Sonic Remediation of Community Space in the Southeastern United States”

John Melillo (University of Arizona), “Phatic Emphatic: Listening to New York City in Downtown Poetry and Punk”

Peter McMurray (Harvard University), “Heterophony of a Metropolis: Rites of Passage and Contestation Turkish Berlin”

10:45-12:15pm, Feminist Approaches to Music and Sound Technologies: History, Theory, and Practice

Session 4-29 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Sponsored by the Section on the Status of Women (SSW)
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), Chair

Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), “Feminist Approaches to Electronic Music and Sound Historiography”

Charity Marsh (University of Regina), “Reluctant Hip Hop Warriors”: Feminist Approaches to Hop Hop Community Projects”

10:45-12:15pm, Intersections of Ethnomusicology with Other Fields

Session 4-31 SEM S: Bayside B

Theresa Allison (University of California, San Francisco), Chair

Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson (Brigham Young University), “Has Ethnomusicology Met Its Calling? An Ethnomusicologist’s Response to Biomusicology”

Monique McGrath (University of Toronto), “What Does Ethnomusicology Have to Say to Music Therapy?”

Jeremy Day-O’Connell (Knox College), “‘Motherese’ and Universals of Musical Pitch

10:45-12:15pm, Sounds and Space in New Orleans

Session 4-35 SEM S: Maurepas
Marié Abe (Boston University), Chair

Danielle Adomaitis (Florida State University), “Sonic Fixtures and Drifting Buskers: Soundmarks of New Orleans and the Street Musicians Who Construct Them”

Zarah Ersoff (University of California, Los Angeles), “Treme’s Aural Verisimilitude”

Julie Raimondi (Tufts University), “Music, SEO Agency, and the Social Construction of Space in New Orleans

2:00–6:00pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Outing:

Barataria Preserve Hike

When I performed at the 2012 Computers and Writing Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, I looked around during my fairly abstract 10-minute long improvisation  featuring feedback loops, glitches, silences, and circuit-bent instruments, and I noticed the audience’s sometimes visible restlessness, discomfort, and even anxiety.  This is a fairly common occurrence when I perform experimental sound art, particularly in contexts in which audiences expect “music” (you can hear my work at 38:30 in the video below).  However, for an experimental sound artist to take offense to such reactions is, in my estimation, missing the point of the exercise. That sound art disrupts, agitates, and even offends is a powerfully reaffirming reminder that sound art transcends music and sound; it is a method of revelation, an act that surpasses logical communication, instead challenging the very nature of sound and perception.

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As an artist, scholar, and fan, I am drawn toward sound and music that lures me into a new world, an unfamiliar way of being and knowing. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I learn  that the rules of my world no longer apply.  This happened when I heard J Dilla’s Donuts album, and when I heard Madlib’s Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa, when I heard Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. An artist that continually draws me down the rabbit hole is Walter Gross, an experimental sound/beat artist out of Los Angeles. His work changes the way I usually interact with sonic art, both in terms of his sound and in his approach to physical collage and handcrafted cassette packaging,   Gross departs from the comfortable and familiar listening imparted by polished hi-fi 3-minute tracks with definitive beginnings and ends and discernible melodies. Gross instead propels listeners into very unusual (and pleasantly discomforting) soundscapes that demand attention. Almost counter-intuitively,  Gross’s  visual representations of his work intensify that experience. Consider his 2010 work, Dopamine:

Dopamine is likely a challenging piece for audiences, at least in terms of violating the dominant structures of music. The piece opens with disorienting use of panning, deliberately obscuring degraded audio, largely indiscernible movements and patterns, and so on. His video work likewise presents a fitting yet relatively unusual juxtaposition of youth and destruction, celebration and danger. In terms of both sound and sight, Gross’ work disrupts dominant musical sensibilities, challenging the very patterns and structures within which we can express ideas. He violates tradition, shakes off the canonical baggage carried by prevailing paradigms of Art and Music, and plunges audiences into unfamiliar sensory experiences that require metacognition, reflection, and examination of what sonic art is, and more importantly, what sonic art can be. Gross, in other words, seems to transcend the musician moniker and reach something else entirely. In what follows, I’d like to explore a (very brief) history of such artists, and begin to think about how to frame sonic art as immersion in what Marshall McLuhan called anti-environments: the unconscious environment as raised to conscious attention.

Sound as Art

There exists a strong tradition of experimental noise and sound art, particularly in 20^th-century Western avant-garde movements. Futurists were arguably the first to consider noise as music in the European tradition, and were certainly influential in asking artists and audiences to become more aware of the changing social and sonic surroundings . In his 1913 manifesto-of-sorts titled “The Art of Noises,” Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed an orchestral configuration that more aptly represented the range of sounds available to contemporary listeners, namely those sounds that accompanied industrialization and urbanization. The sounds of the Futurist orchestra would include “rumbles, roars, explosions, and crashes.”  Russolo built devices called intonarumori to mechanically achieve and manipulate these sounds. His brother, Antonio Russolo, also enacted this new philosophy of modern found sound and composed Corale and Serenata.

Luigi Russolo and Ugo Piatti with the Intonarumori, 1913

Any inquiry of art as anti-environment would be incomplete without a discussion of the great anti-art movement, Dada. Like the Futurists before them, Dadaists used found sound and technology-as-art to violently disrupt conventions of art, beauty, and authorship within the white avant-garde community. Marcel Duchamp’s famous work, “Fountain,” is likely the most familiar Dadaist artifact to contemporary readers, yet the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaist and Dada-inspired sound pieces such as Erwin Schulhoff’s 1922 work In Futurum (the middle movement of which contains only a rest and the notation “with feeling,” an undoubtable precursor to John Cage’s 4’33”, written 30 years later) created sonic spaces of innovation and strangeness that changed the way audiences listened to both voices and silences. The Russian Cubo-Futurists, especially zaumniks such as Alexei Kruchenykh, made similar ventures into anti-environments. Kruchenykh developed the sound art zaum, which he understood as a transrational language that undercut existing language systems in which the “word [had] been shackled…by its subordination to rational thought” (70). Zaum was a sort of linguistic anti-environment, one rooted in the notion that meaning resided first and foremost in the sound of a word rather than the denotative symbol system that emerged alongside the proliferation of print/visual culture. One could also not underemphasize the work of John Cage, from his prepared piano to his work with organic instruments.

John Cage and His “Prepared Piano,” Image courtesy of Flickr User William Cromar

The list of artists, genres, and movements engaged to some extent in the enterprise of anti-environment architecture could go on and be debated indefinitely: Free Jazz, Turntablism/Nu Jazz, Experimental Hip-Hop,Fluxus, Circuit Bending, Prepared Guitar, ProtoPunk, Punk, Post-Punk, New Wave, No Wave. . . in all of these diverse movements, the sonic artists share the tendency to create strange new worlds via sound; worlds that reveal social and technological environments that most people seem unaware of in the moment. This is why media theorist Marshall McLuhan called the artist “indispensible,” because the artist can tell us something about ourselves that we cannot know via ordinary means of perception. Sonic artists expose audiences to auditory phenomena, structures, juxtapositions, etc. that are to various extents hidden, obscured, or ignored as “noise.” The sonic artist is more than just a clever selector and (re)arranger of sound; s/he is a revelatory agent, exposing what is inaudible.

Art as Anti-environment

Anti-environments, however we might define and classify them, are vital not only to artistic communities themselves, but they are also vital to a society of fish in water. In his 1968 text, War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan asserts (among other things) that humans remain largely unaware of their new environments, likening them to fish in water: “one thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in” (175). In other words, humans seldom possess or practice a sense of awareness regarding their surroundings because there’s nothing against which surroundings may be contrasted. The “water” to McLuhan represented the various environments (physical, psychological, cultural) shaped by technological innovation, but we can—and should—extend the water metaphor to a range of hegemonic frameworks: constructions of gender, race, ability, and so on.

This essay is certainly not an attempt to generate some sort of evaluative rubric by which to judge artistic or sonic expression objectively. Rather, we might use the concept of anti-environments as a way to frame our subjective experiences and encounters with all sound, and begin listening to unfamiliar sounds as psychedelic (from Greek psyche- “mind” + deloun “reveal”) keys to illuminate the patterns and structures in which listeners exist. We must work to understand our environments and our place in them; if we are to engage critically with our culture, we must first understand existing (yet invisible) patterns and structures that surround us. And we are aided in this effort, in great part, by humanity’s great seekers of pattern recognition, the sonic-psychonautical messengers: the sonic artists.

Sound Artist Performing at Circuit Bending Workshop in Dayton, Ohio in 2009, Image Courtesy of Flickr User Vistavision

To return to the sound that inspired this meditation, Walter Gross (among others) is in many ways participating in and propelling the discourse of Leary and McLuhan, Schwitters and Schulhoff, Kruchenykh and Cage,Davis and Sun Ra, Madlib and J Dilla. Gross performs the sonic anti-environment, enacts the revelation of obscured sonic paradigms. For me, Gross can act as a sort of lens through which ordinary sonic patterns and structures become visible. I hear Flying Lotus, Bob Dylan, and The Minutemen differently after Gross. I hear my office, my home, my family’s voices differently after Gross. I hear patterns that weren’t audible before. After Gross, I become aware of how I am continuously trained to expect certain things from the sonic world: compartmentalized units of meaning, clearly stated origins of utterances, linear narratives, repeated/repeatable melodies, and so on.

Likewise, my own sonic art/scholarship approaches the use of sound to reveal the inaudible assumptions present in Western frameworks surrounding sonic production. I will conclude with an illustration of my own work and why sonic anti-environments are so central to my philosophy and method. One of my sonic works, “Toward an Object-Oriented Sonic Phenomenology,” was recently part of an exhibition titled Not For Human Consumption, curated by Julian Weaver of CRISAP in London. I recorded the sounds of a high mast lighting pole using contact microphones. Contact microphones do not “hear” like humans typically hear. Typical (dominant) notions of human hearing (and therefore of sound itself) involve the reception and interpretation of vibrations present in air. Contact microphones instead only interpret the vibrations in solid objects.

By listening through an object–through alien “ears,” so to speak– we can begin to critique the ways that we privilege listening via air, a listening that places humans at the center of the universe. We can consider the ways that sound has very real effects on humans with atypical hearing abilities and nonhuman objects. It is difficult to have such conversations if we never explore sonic anti-environments, if we never break through dominant epistemological models, if we never expose the limits of our own environments.

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Featured Image: Beatrix*JAR in Dayton, Ohio, September 9, 2009, by Flickr User Vista Vision

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Steven Hammer is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture at North Dakota State University in Fargo, ND, USA. His research deals with various aspects of sonic art, from exploring glitch and proto-glitch practices and theories (e.g., circuit bending), to understanding and producing sound from an object-oriented ontology (e.g., contact microphones). He also researches and facilitates trans-Atlantic translation collaborations between American, European, and African universities. He has multimedia publications with Enculturation, Sensory Studies, as well as forthcoming book chapters with Wiley/IEEE press, and IGI Global Publishing, and has performed creative and academic work at several conferences across North America, including the national Computers and Writing Conference and the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. He performs experimental circuit-bent and sampler-based music under the moniker “patchbaydoor,” and has constructed and documented a number of hardware modification projects for his own artistic projects and for other artists in the upper Midwest United States. You can read/hear more atstevenrhammer.com

Imagine this, only virtual. Image borrowed from Genista @Flickr.

PercussiveThoughts is giving me a facial. The voice tells me about the “little scrubbies” in the exfoliant, and I begin to hear their delicate sibilance on my temples. If I’m lucky, a pleasurable, tingling sensation might begin somewhere on the back of my head and travel down my spine, turning my facial into something closer to a massage. The sole caveat is that I’m not really being touched at all.

This is ASMR, “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” a pseudo-medical designation whose native soil is YouTube. The term pulls together a range of physiological and affective states: goosebumps, chills, relaxation, melting, tingles, and so forth. PercussiveThoughts and her fellow vloggers (I call them “Whisperers” here and explain why below) aim to trigger these frissons through a cornucopia of techniques. Sound is paramount; Whisperers scratch rough surfaces with their fingernails and percuss everyday objects with fingertip drum-rolls. And, of course, they whisper, sometimes using lozenges or gum to increase the opportunities for swallowing and lip-smacking.

What’s interesting about these videos is how they manage to traverse the gap between the sonic and the haptic. There is, of course, something familiar about this leap. Like the magician’s hat that produces rabbits and endless handkerchiefs, an audio speaker produces a volume and variety of sound out of proportion with its small, blank visage. In the case of Whispering, however, sound is transduced into touch, and the taut membranes of the listener’s headphones become coterminous with his own skin.

Apart from Steven Novella’s suggestion that ASMR might be a mild form of seizure, it does not yet appear to be a subject of scientific research. So Whisperers have taken on the role of amateur scientists themselves, with YouTube serving as a public petri dish. For this very reason, Novella has also cautioned against the assumption that ASMR is a real physiological phenomenon at all, since feedback loops of suggestion on the Internet might create “the cultural equivalent of pareidolia.”

Whisperers, however, have no doubts. And while the ASMR acronym is a recent development, many Whisperers say their first encounters with the phenomenon occurred sometime before their first exposure to the Internet and often before adulthood: during make-believe tea parties, while watching their classmates draw or braid each other’s hair, and, perhaps most commonly, while watching The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross.

The audience for Whispering is anyone who can have this experience, which apparently isn’t everyone. Contrary to the soporific themes of their videos, Whisperers and their fans identify themselves as having awakened to a special form of pleasure. Some have even made videos recounting their first experiences. The downside of this ability is the anxiety about its social acceptance. Whisperers sometimes opt for anonymity in their videos, revealing their faces only after much encouragement from fans. Rarely do they they let their family and friends in on the secret.

That this familiar, tingly feeling has assumed a pseudo-medical acronym is hardly coincidental. ASMR isn’t just pleasurable, it’s therapeutic. Hundreds of YouTube comments attest to the power of ASMR to help relieve them of insomnia, anxiety, and panic attacks. Nor has this dimension been overlooked by Whisperers themselves, who regularly perform as doctors or therapists in their roleplay videos. This is particularly interesting in light of recent scholarship on human/machine interactions. In Addiction By Design, Natasha Schüll shows how therapy for video-poker addiction can take the same format as the gambling itself, namely, “ongoing technological self-modulation to maintain equilibrium” (250).

Homemade Whisper videos, while habit-forming, are clearly not the sort of intricately-engineered machines that Schüll writes about. Nor do they wreack the same sort of havoc (depletion of one’s life-savings, deterioration of one’s physical health, etc.). And yet, both are arranged in problematic feedback loops of self-medication. The slow-paced, low-volume respite that Whisper videos offer is made all the more necessary by the fact that viewers must go online to watch them. This paradox is amplified by YouTube’s advertisements, which will sound especially abrasive because viewers tend to turn the volume up while listening to Whisper videos. That some of the more popular Whisperers earn money from their videos only complicates things further.

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“No, we don’t get as many men here as women,” PercussiveThoughts says, as though responding to a question from me. Of course, I wouldn’t be so rude as to contradict her – I know better. To judge from the comments below, she gets plenty of male visitors. And her colleague ASMR Velous confided during an interview that around 70 percent of her viewers are men. For this reason, some Whisperers have made gender-neutral or male-oriented videos.

A man getting a facial. Borrowed from FoundryParkInn @Flickr.

Gender is a major, and sometimes contentious, topic of discussion in the Whisper Community. In the YouWhisper web forum, the discussion topic “Gender Preference?,” has the greatest number of views (more than 170,000). In general, female Whisperers are more popular than their male counterparts. The three most popular male Whisperers that I could find–WhisperMister1, MaleSoothe, and TheLyricalWhispers–each have fewer than 5,000 subscribers and their per-video view-counts tend to peak around ten or twenty thousand.

Not long ago, GentleWhispering, one of the better-known names in the Whisper community, set off a series of heated back-and-forths with her ~FeminineGrace & Charmforsleep~ video. In it, she discusses universal traits of femininity while brushing her hair absent-mindedly. Whatever one might think of her opinions, the fact that GentleWhispering’s viewership dwarfs all other Whisperers to date suggests that something in her technique is working. My guess is that it has a great deal to do with her hands.

While giving Russian language lessons on a chalkboard, she points to a word with her middle, ring, and pinkie fingers while keeping the chalk poised delicately between her thumb and index finger. When she is about to touch the fabric of an armchair, her fingers arch back–rather than claw forward–as though to ensure that the contact is as light as possible. And, like so many other Whisperers, she takes any opportunity to tap hard objects with her well-kept fingernails.

The “femininity” of GentleWhispering’s hands is the performance of a soothing, caring touch, and her whispering voice is the transubstantiation of this touch through sound. Sometimes, she even short-circuits the analogy by massaging the microphone directly.

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But even the performance of gendered touching does not quite explain how these sounds and images manage to reach through the speaker and screen. After a second glance at these videos, we might wonder if the preponderance of partial objects has something to do with it.

I’m talking about all of those disembodied hands stroking opposite hands or displaying objects detached from their collections. Often, for the sake of anonymity, the Whisperer’s eyes are kept out of frame, leaving only an expressive mouth, like CalmingEscape’s, with its signature tics and swallows. If even the mouth is too revealing, the camera gazes down at covered breasts, ”objects,” in a Freudian panoply of sexual cathexis (is it a coincidence that some Whisperers even roleplay as the viewer’s doting mother?). One has to wonder what effect is achieved by this strange summation of partials.

In spite of widespread insistence that these videos are not sexual, the comparison with sexual fetish is too obvious not to make. Sticking with Freud for a moment, the hyper-presence of the Whisperer would seem to disavow the separation implicit in internet communication. Her mouth speaks individually into each of the listener’s ears while also hovering on screen. Her hands animate dead objects through rappings and close-ups. In her omnipotence, she can even tell us what to do.

Fetish or not, the word “whisper” is a perfect synecdoche for this fragmentary whole, and that’s why I’ve used it instead of ASMR. A whisper is, by definition, “unvoiced.” The cheeks, mouth, teeth, and tongue accomplish the acoustic filtering that gives words their shapes, but the larynx produces noise rather than tones. Lacking pitch, a whisper might be called only a “part of speech.” And yet it speaks volumes by shifting the register of communication. Whatever is said in a whisper gains the aura of genuineness, honesty, and intimacy.

Of course, in a YouTube video, these qualities are suspect from the moment one clicks the play button. But perhaps this is what makes Whispering work. One hears in these videos, above all, the effort of performance. It is the performance of gender, as discussed above, but more generally the performance of interaction, intimacy, and proximity. What every Whisper video whispers is “Let’s pretend!” And nothing proves this better than the fact
that some popular Whisper videos contain rather unpleasant sounds. Consider TheWhiteRabbitASMR’s dentist appointment video. If one is willing to grit one’s teeth through the long sections of abrasive drilling, it’s because she so adeptly crafts the intimate space of fantasy in which it takes places.

The pleasure of pretending was made clear to me when ASMR Velous recounted her childhood tactic for inducing ASMR. “I would constantly trick people into pretending to do things. I had this little play kitchen set, and I would cook up imaginary food for people and make them pretend-eat it really slowly and make those eating sounds like [chewing sounds], and I would just sit there and be all tingly. And I just loved it….I made up this game with my friends, where we would basically mime a profession and the other person would have to guess the profession you were miming. That was another way for me to trick my friends into pretending to do stuff.”

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PercussiveThoughts is wrapping things up. “That completes your facial… So you can sit up. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I’m really glad you enjoyed it.”

I did enjoy it! But thank goodness it’s not really over; I can just hit the reload button. No matter how many times I do, I know that my pores won’t be any cleaner when I look in the mirror. But that’s not the point. Rather, Whisper fans take pleasure in the intimacy and complicity of pretending. That complicity applies even to the skin of the listener, a surface as vibrant as the skin of the speaker.

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Joshua Hudelson is a Ph.D. student in the Music department at NYU.  He received his MA in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College, where he conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the Electronic Voice Phenomenon community.  He is currently writing about the Noiseless Typewriter.

My family comes from a tiny village called Nodar in  northern Portugal, part of the European Union-funded project “Tramontana” which focuses on preserving the immaterial heritage of mountain regions of southern Europe. In Nodar, centuries of isolation and self-sufficiency have created a unique blend of cultural expressions, ways of living, and inhabited landscapes. Like much of the Portuguese countryside, Nodar is undergoing a process of abandonment, which leaves rural communities with a weakened sense of identity. The agrarian paradigm, which has been central to the history and social fabric of rural communities, is arriving to an almost hopeless vanishing point, and the guardians of that memory are also disappearing. With this as formative part of my background, and considering my artistic interest in community-oriented projects, I felt almost a duty to direct much of my work to Nodar,  a place that means so much to me and where I thought I could make a difference. In 2004 my brother Luis and I founded Binaural/Nodar, an arts collective based in the village and operating in the surrounding region of the Gralheira mountain range.

Since March 2006, the Nodar Rural Art Lab has invited both local and international artists who work in the areas of sound, video, and intermedia arts to address issues such as collective memory, identity, gender, age, life, death, geography, topography, music, sound heritage, landscape, vegetation, consumption and leisure dynamics, myths, traditions, crafts, agriculture, and shepherding.  During their stay, the resident artists give public presentations in the region and are encouraged to establish interactions with the place and its inhabitants, geographic spaces, and social memory. Many of the artworks held in Nodar cross different artistic practices, often blending borders.

Nodar, Portugal. Photo by Carina Martins. All rights reserved by Binaural/Nodar

The decision to initiate an artist residency center in Nodar was motivated by my desire to deepen the investigation of exploratory artistic practices in close interaction with a specific rural context and its social and cultural possibilities.  Throughout the year, the Nodar Rural Art Lab programs various residency modules in order to stimulate a collaborative environment between artists from different artistic fields and geographic origins. During the course of the residencies, several parallel activities are organized, such as conferences, lectures and educational activities, namely youth-oriented. At the end of each residency module, there is a public presentation organized in the village in which the art projects are presented and discussed by the artists and the organization.

Public presentation of an art project in Nodar. Photo by Carina Martins. All rights reserved by Binaural/Nodar

The sonic dimension has a critical role in the model we have developed in Nodar, especially because it operates as a powerful metaphor for the intimate and personal discovery of a place. Artists have documented the area’s soundscapes and oral heritage in Nodar since 2006. There are three central lines of artistic interaction that converge here: Sound, Space and People:

SOUND (Interaction with the acoustic environment): Some sound artists, who work with the acoustic dimension in an experimental way, are part of the team that runs the Nodar Rural Art Lab. The Lab has always been active in the international theoretical and artistic domains of the so-called soundscapes, and it has hosted some of the most respected sound artists of today, who–using idiosyncratic techniques for sound capturing, editing and manipulation–have created works based on particular aspects of the local acoustic context.

One of our approaches is what we call “sound interventions,” where we use field recordings and performance in order to “activate the space” and establish a dialogical approach between what is activated and what just “is,” which can incorporate body, gesture, sound, object, space and voice in this process. An example of this approach was the “Revenant : Paiva” project, conceived in 2009 by Patrick McGinley, Marjia-Liisa Plats, Luís Costa and Tiago Carvalho, in which a series of  performative actions were staged in a section of the river Paiva that crosses Nodar.  Using materials found in-situ as instruments, in addition to the artists’ own voices, to generate sounds that interacted with the acoustic environment itself, all activity was purely acoustic, with no amplification. The resulting work was presented live with the artists and audience spread out across the space with no preferential “point of listening”, which created subtle overlaps between the artists’ work and the space.

Working on “Revenant : Paiva.” Photo by Carina Martins. All rights reserved by Binaural/Nodar

SPACE: Interaction with the geographic space. The landscape surrounding Nodar is beautiful and diverse; there are mountains, rivers, caves, slate stone architecture, terraced fields, and so much more. Moreover, we are witnessing an irreversible process of transformation of rural space. These two elements form fertile ground for the creation of works within nature, which either capture the dreamlike and timeless aspects of the landscape or question possible future uses for the same landscape.

Of particular interest to us is the use of geography as a means for projecting sound in which specific variables of the territory, such as topography and meteorology, intersect with instrumental or subjective aspects of artistic creation, namely the position occupied in the space and the choice of sound recording and reproduction tools and techniques. A good example of this approach was Lisa Premke’s project “Aural Lookout,” developed in 2012, in which she built a canvas lookout on the top of a hill that allowed the visitors to be sheltered from the environment while listening to the nature sounds acoustically amplified, as if being inside a large drum.

Working on “Aural Lookout.” Photo by Carina Martins. All rights reserved by Binaural/Nodar

PEOPLE: Interaction with local inhabitants. Since the beginning of our activities, we have been encouraging artists to interact, question and to some extent “provoke” local populations. As a result of these communication processes, various art projects have been developed reflecting and expressing aspects of the region’s collective memory and new habits and experiences.

Working on the subject of the anthropological voice may involve direct conversation with the local communities based on topics proposed by the artists and related to everyday life and local memory, as well as it may focus on linguistic aspects such as accents, musicality of the voice, etc. Maile Colbert’s “Over the Eyes,” created in 2007, was a very successful example of this sort of “conversational” project, where she organized a knitting circle with the village women, recorded the conversations with them, their songs and stories and incorporated them into the sound design of a multimedia installation, along with field recordings of the area, and text on physiological, biological, and psychological aspects to memory creation and destruction in humans. The projection screen was composed of raw wool and the knitted cloths made during the circle, which created an interesting dialogue with the immaterial nature of the audiovisual element of the piece.

Maile Colbert’s “Over the Eyes.” Photo by Carina Martins. All rights reserved by Binaural/Nodar

We have always emphasized a type of sound art that enhances the context within which a specific sound work is produced, escaping a purely acoustic, or “sound-in-itself” approach. We believe that this emphasis on subjectivity and context is necessary, because sound–and the practice of field recording in particular—sometimes carries a burden of “objectivity” because it stems from the documentation of reality.  The subjectivity inherent to the sound recollection –for instance, the choice of the point of listening and of the technological means of sound capturing–is often not sufficient to alleviate this burden.

When we host sound artists in Nodar, we always try to convey the idea that the region’s landscape is fundamentally an “inhabited landscape.” Trying to avoid the human presence in order to get “wilder and more natural” recordings is purely illusory.  The landscape is inhabited in several simultaneous ways: by the marks of historical occupation of the territory, by the existence of vital spaces for each inhabitant–often lying far beyond the boundaries of the villages–by the very presence of the artists and by the audiences of the art works’ final presentations.

In summary, there are several methodological, instrumental and aesthetic approaches that Binaural/Nodar is working to further in the area of sound art. These approaches are anything but sealed; intersections, complementarities, unions and differences exist, which make each work of art unique.

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Featured Image: ”Oor van Noach” by Flickr user ines saraiva under Creative Commons 2.0 License.

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Rui Costa is a sound artist from Lisbon, Portugal. He is a founding member and artistic director of Binaural/Nodar, an arts organization founded in 2004 and dedicated to the promotion of context-specific and participatory art projects in rural communities of the Gralheira mountain range, northern Portugal. Rui has been performing and exhibiting his work since 1998 in festivals, galleries and museums across Portugal, Spain, Italy and the United States and has been collaborating regularly with the Italian vocal performer Manuela Barile and the American intermedia artist Maile Colbert. Rui Costa is also a regular speaker in conferences and gives workshops dedicated to sound art. For more from Binaural/Nodar, please check out the organization’s soundcloud, vimeo, and flickr.

In this podcast Sounding Out! interviews Ithaca, New York theremin master Eric Ross. Eric talks here about his background in avant-garde classical music but also waxes philosophical about performance, embodiment, emotion, technology, and play. Please listen in as Eric shares his experience as a pioneer in wrangling the interfaces of electronic music and as an explorer of the theremin’s wonderful contradictions.

Check out Eric on the internet here.

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Interview with Theremin Guru Eric Ross.

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Eric Ross (born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, USA) received his B.A. and M.A. from the State University of New York at Oneonta. He premiered his Concerto for Orchestra at Lincoln Center in New York, and released his first solo album,Songs for Synthesized Soprano, in 1982. He has written symphonies, chamber pieces and many works for solo instruments. He’s performed concerts of his original music at the Newport, Berlin, Montreux, and North Sea Jazz Festivals, the Copenhagen New Music Festival, the Kennedy Center, and the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival among others worldwide.

Eric performs on piano, guitars, synthesizers, and the theremin. For over twenty years, he has led his own ensemble that has featured jazz greats John Abercrombie, Larry Coryell, Andrew Cyrille, Oliver Lake, Leroy Jenkins, Byard Lancaster, new music virtuosos Robert Dick, Lydia Kavina, Youseff Yancy and many others. He has also played with Blues Legends Champion Jack Dupree, Lonnie Brooks, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee and appeared with BB King on Danish RTV.

With his wife, Mary Ross, Eric presents multi-media concerts of video, film, computer art, dance and music. He began playing the theremin in 1975, and has performed on radio, film and television. He has written an Overture for 14 Theremins and performed on the 1997 World Premiere of Percy Grainger’s Free Music No.1 in New York City. In 2006, he was guest artist on the No.1 Best Selling CD in Japan, Aqi Fzono’s Cosmology.

Welcome to week three of  our February Forum on “Sonic Borders,”  a collaboration with the IASPM-US blog in connection with this year’s IASPM-US conference on Liminality and Borderlands, held in Austin, Texas from February 28 to March 3, 2013.  The “Sonic Borders” forum is a Virtual Roundtable cross-blog entity that will feature six Sounding Out! writers posting on Mondays through February 25, and four writers from IASPM-US, posting on Wednesdays starting February 6th and ending February 27th.  For an encore of weeks one and two of the forum, click here. And now, get up and get ready for Marcus Boon, because there’s no parking on the dance floor at Sounding Out!–JSA

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What borders remain when it comes to thinking about sound today? The field of sound studies has exploded in so many far-flung directions in the last few years.  However, I argue that what is still somewhat off limits in the field is a consideration of the ontological status of sound: in other words, what it means to understand our own being in the world as a sonic phenomenon. Out of attempts to approach this sonic ontology, comes the realization that there are prohibitions, perhaps universal ones, on thinking about sound in this way, and from that emerges what I call the politics of vibration.

For those, such as myself, who have grown up as a part of sonic subcultures, it is not difficult to ponder sonic ontologies, for the simple reason that many of the most intense and powerful experiences we have had have occurred on dance floors or at clubs, as DJs, musicians, clubbers and/or listeners.  I still remember the moment of first hearing Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” blasting through the speakers at a Pop Group gig at the Electric Ballroom in London in the late 1970s: tumbling polyrhythms, polyphony, polysexuality, polyeverything.  The feeling was: “wow, the universe contains this!  And it contains other people who know what it is!”  And contrary to the warnings of Slavoj Zizek concerning the “autistic jouissance” to be found at the limits of language, here we all were: high; the histories of Afrodiasporic displacement and solidarity echoing off the walls; our own implication in those histories illuminated; flickering between utopia and shame.

To quote Eric Satie: “When I was young they told me: You’ll see when you’re fifty. I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing.”  Me too.  But I’ve heard a lot and I still experience that same power of sound in more or less the same way.  If anything, sound’s power is more intense and surprising, each time it appears.  Partly because I have learned how to be a social being through sound—how to love and be loved—enabling me to be more open to its impact than I was as an awkward youth.  It makes me sad the way in Canada and elsewhere in el Norte people seem to lessen their involvement in the more intense aspects of sound cultures as they hit 30 or 40.  It makes me sad that my four-year-old son rarely gets to hear a real sound system.  I look for music at carnivals, weddings, community centers, on the beach. . .anywhere that those age barriers are ignored.  Even as a DJ, I increasingly look for new or different kinds of publicness than that of club or dancehall.

Marcus Boon DJ-ing, image by JSA

Still, I do wonder.  Was the movement into sonic subcultures that my generation (and those that followed) made–especially in the UK where music (and intoxicants, and immigration) were one of the few escape routes from the brutalities of Thatcherism–a mistake, precisely because we accepted as ontological, a structure that in fact was smoothly integrated into the operations of late capitalism?  From the Factory and Paradise Garage to Berghain or Ministry of Sound. . . how will history look on the era of the mega-club?

Although one could argue that the Internet put an end to the idea of subculture, since it breaks down the locality and secrecy around which particular subcultural communities grow, in fact what seems to be happening is an acceleration in the generation and dissolution of subcultural formations.  Hip-hop has adapted very quickly to the internet.  The cassettes or CD-Rs sold out of DJ Screw’s record store in Houston, Texas, for example, morph into the world of online mixtapes, Youtube clips and Twitter battles; the gray market availability of samples sounds a lacuna of time, appearing for a day on a hosting site rather than flying below the radar in some particular geographical location.  At the same time, sonic subcultures are expanding around the world.  If Jacques Attali was right that sound is prophetic, then #idlenomore was announced by Ottawa Native dubstep crew A Tribe Called Red; Tahrir Square by Chaabi and North African hip-hop.

In his book 1989, Joshua Clover describes popular music in the period of neo-liberal globalization as the sound of ideological containment.  It’s true that popular music is full of ontological claims about sound, of music that celebrates setting us free. . .but which fails to actually do so. A quote from Ray Brassier just came up on my Twitter feed:

If true, this would suggest that the intensity of moments of sonic jouissance does not necessarily mean anything in terms of ontology or the truth about what’s Real.  It could be entirely delusional.

All of which might be true. We might come to realize that, to put it in Heideggerian terms, we’ve been thrown into this, and that maybe there’s not much difference between being thrown and being played.  But somehow I think people on dancefloors already know this.  The dramas of seduction, commitment and loss are at the core of disco, and many other kinds of popular music too.  To quote the disco classic “Lost in Music” by Sister Sledge (later covered by post-punks The Fall):

We’re lost in music; caught in a trap.
No turning back. We’re lost in music.
We’re lost in music. Feel so alive.
I quit my nine-to-five. We’re lost in music.

Other examples are not lacking.

Perhaps sound and music border on a vibrational ontology,  rather than being truly the core of one. This is why, as Michael Taussig, Jayna Brown, and others have suggested, they can be concerned with healing.  Perhaps any practice that is meaningful — and sonic subcultures are certainly a matter of practice, as Julian Henriques indicates in his book Sonic Bodies — must necessarily work at the boundary of a space that it can never entirely inhabit as a practice, but which it can push one towards, and also receive one from.  The anticipation, fear, desire before one goes out, for example, but also the blinding daylight, the sensation of cool air on exposed skin when one leaves a dancehall or a party.

Lasers in a dance club, image by flickr user gabriel.jorby

Sound studies has not truly begin to explore these moments of exposure to and abjection from the vibrational core of sound.   No doubt, Steve Goodman performed heroic work in Sonic Warfare—which sets out a proposal for a vibrational ontology in the midst of the commodification and militarization of the sonic —as have various explorations of the phenomenology of sound, such as those in Salome Voegelin‘s Listening to Noise and Silence.  Yet in both cases, a full consideration of sonic ontology is in the end foreclosed.  In Goodman’s case by Sonic Warfare’s emphasis on the militaristic applications of sound and vibration that are appropriated by sonic art and subcultures, which gives the violence of sound and vibration something like ontological status, while the aesthetic and cultural “uses” of the same have only a secondary, somewhat parasitic status.  Conversely, in Voegelin’s work, an emphasis on the phenomenological rendering of the moment or event of sonic relationship forecloses a broader investigation of sonic ontology, because it “brackets” (to use Husserl‘s term) considerations beyond that of the subject-object relationship. In both cases, the sonic thing in itself, or indeed an ontology of vibration, risks being lost.

The recent turn to the speculative and to realism in philosophy has yet to make an impact in sound studies, despite the fact that the object of sound presents a provocative and very intimate entry point to that problematic.  One of the more intriguing and improbable hypotheses emerging from the speculative realist movement is that of Quentin Meillassoux, who, in After Finitude, makes an argument that speculative knowledge of the real, unmediated by correlation with the Kantian subject, is possible through mathematics.  It is roughly Alain Badiou‘s thesis in Being and Event too.  As much as music is clearly about the contingency of sonic experience, there are strong arguments, going back to Pythagoras and beyond, about the relation of music to mathematics.  Natural harmonics, rhythm: the elements of music express mathematical relationships.  I am not interested in reducing music to a kind of vulgar scientism.  But what if when we listen to music, we are exposed to a mathematical ontology and at the same time, the contingency of an unprecedented event?  What if music is speculatively real?  The word “speculative” here would refer not to philosophical propositions, but to the uncanny movement across subject/object individual/collective borders that the sonic matrix offers when “we” listen to “it.” Music not as the source of a  speculative discourse on the real, but a speculative practice in which order and contingency meet.

A cymatic image, made by sound vibrations on a visible medium by flickr user evan grant

Genres, styles form around places of cohesion, of transport, of passage.  Not an instrumental mathematics (though it can be that too), but a speculative one that seeks out locations of collective affect, of resonance between micro and macro spheres.  It matters little whether a specific knowledge of mathematics is invoked here, since many traditional musics find their way to structures that, according to scholars such Alain Danielou, already express mathematical relationships.  And in this way, music and musicians can be said to participate in a sonic ontology.

Reluctantly perhaps. Ready or not. The question remains: how many institutional, historical, disciplinary, intellectual, social and political barriers remain in order that a cultural artifact like “One Nation Under a Groove” can be considered to have ontological significance?  That is what I mean by the politics of vibration, and in terms of borders, it’s an important set of borders for researchers in sound studies to consider.

Tyler, the Creator crowdsurfing, image by flicker user choe.brandon

Much of my current work focuses on tropes of abjection in recent hip-hop and RnB music, notably that of Odd Future members Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean, artists like Azealia Banks, and a new generation of queer rap MCs emerging out of New York City such as Zebra Katz, Le1f and Cakes Da Killa.  All of their work is bracingly obscene, funny, violent. . .a tumbling deck of cards of performances of gender, race, sexuality, class and more.  Of course, cursing to a beat is nothing particularly new, but the way in which these artists multiply and collapse identities to an ever more minimal, humming beat perhaps is.

Katz’s remarkable “Ima Read” and its equally remarkable video is a case in point.  Although Katz occasionally claims dryly that the song is “pro education,” the “reading” in question mostly refers to the drag queen balls of the Harlem ballroom/voguing scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, where to read meant to verbally trash, i.e. abject, someone at a ball. The song is rapped by male and female voices, crisply denouncing a “bitch” who they are going to “take to college.”  The violence of the song is ironic, as much a marker of queer community and Eros as of sexual difference, of racial and trans-racial solidarity as much as racialized violence. It is performed over a minimal beat with a humming, in-your-face bass drum that is the only recognizable tonal element.

Why make the leap to talking about ontology in discussing this admittedly awesome Youtube clip?  Both Judith Butler’s famous elaboration of the performativity of gender, one of the bases of queer theory, and Katz and friends play with taboos concerning gender, sexuality and race in contemporary hip-hop emerge from that moment of the ballroom scene.

But what if Butler’s emphasis on performance actually covered up or abjected the ontological nature of experiments at the balls?  Perhaps we need to rethink why the ultimate ball anthem is Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real.”  What is sonic ‘realness’?   In restoring the sonic dimension to the ballroom scene, and learning, from Zebra Katz, to face that constitutive abjection that Kristeva amongst others has pointed us towards, we can begin to feel for ourselves what a vibrational ontology is.

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My thanks to Catherine Christer Hennix, Steven Shaviro, Kevin Rogers and Ken McLeod for conversations that helped me in thinking this through, and to Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman for luminous remix skills.

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Featured Image by Flickr User depinniped

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Marcus Boon is associate professor of English at York University in Toronto, and was a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities in 2011-12. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard UP, 2002) and In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP, 2010). He writes about contemporary music for The Wire. He is currently co-editing a book on Buddhism and critical theory, and a new edition of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s The Third Mind. He is also working on a book entitled The Politics of Vibration.

Welcome to week four of  our February Forum on “Sonic Borders,”  a collaboration with the IASPM-US blog in connection with this year’s IASPM-US conference on Liminality and Borderlands, held in Austin, Texas from February 28 to March 3, 2013.  The “Sonic Borders” forum is a Virtual Roundtable cross-blog entity that will feature six Sounding Out! writers posting on Mondays through February 25, and four writers from IASPM-US, posting on Wednesdays starting February 6th and ending February 27th.  For an encore of weeks one through three of the forum, click here. And now, Tavia Nyong’o reviews Courtesy the Artist’s The Meeting, courtesy of Sounding Out! –JSA

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Last October 2012, in tandem with the New York launch of the retrospective art show Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980,  curated by Kellie Jones and running through March 11, 2013, MoMA PS 1 invited the sounds and images of Black Power into their courtyard Performance Dome for a Sunday afternoon collaborative arts project called The Meeting curated by Courtesy the Artists. Courtesy the Artists is the collaboration of Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade:  two-thirds of the core members of the L.A.-based performance art collective My Barbarian (the third is Jade Gordon). For The Meeting, recently transplanted New Yorkers Gaines and Seagade opted to curate a gathering of local artists, dancers and musicians they wanted to get to know better, such as LaTasha Diggs, niv Acosta, and Samita Sinha.

Curation as collaboration was the ethos behind The Meeting in PS1; Gaines and Segade were much more than masters of ceremony, but performed alongside the artists and musicians they invited. At times The Meeting felt more like a jam session than anything else, following the improvisatory and ensemblic ethos of experimental jazz. Performance piece as musician’s jam was indeed a fitting form, given that the afternoon was built around Seize the Time, a 1969 album of agit-prop cabaret recorded by activist, musician, and erstwhile Black Panther leader, Elaine Brown.

Each participant in The Meeting was invited to respond, in their chosen art form to a song from Brown’s album or another aspect of her legacy that moved them. And move them it did. If music held the event together — from Charles Gaines on the piano and drums to Matana Roberts on a haunting saxophone solo to Geo Wyeth closing down the evening with an astonishing version of  “Seize the Time” intermixed with “Age of Aquarius” from the musical Hair — poetry, polemic, video, and dance sent it spinning off into a dozen scintillating tangents.

What those intersecting and diverging responses to Brown’s album shared was a concern with how the past resonates in the present, how a historical call might not always be muted over time, but sometimes amplified by its repetition across time. Given the predominance of the visual in contemporary culture — nowhere more glaring, perhaps, than in institutions devoted to visual art — what do we make of the role of the aural as a medium through which to register the reverberations of a past? The Meeting was held in a temporary structure, literally vestibular to the permanent edifice of the museum. Is the ear a similar vestibule to the institutions of culture, and, if it is, then wherein might the power of that vestibular flesh, as Hortense Spillers once named it, lie?

NYC MoMa Ps1′s Vestibular Performance Dome, image by http://momaps1.tumblr.com/

On Seize the Time, the mercurial Brown transposed the black revolutionary urgency of the 1960s into a musical idiom that sounded remarkable even in its day. It is slightly bemusing to settle into the jazzy opening of the title track  “Seize the Time” with the knowledge that Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly were just around the corner. Certainly, despite their shared sonic defiance of American racism, Brown’s didactic sprechegesang would never be mistaken for Nina Simone’s soulful alto. Closer to the sonic mark would be singer-songwriters like Carole King, Janis Ian and Joni Mitchell, artists who broke the mold for women in pop in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Consider the rhetorical and musical twists and turns of the first verse of “The End of Silence,” a song that manages equal parts women’s liberation and black nationalism without ever teetering into blaxploitation supervixen territory:

Have you ever stood
In the darkness of night
Screaming silently you’re a man?
Have you ever hoped
That the time would come
When your voice could be heard
In the noonday sun?
Have you waited so long
Till your unheard song
Has stripped away your very soul?
Then believe it my friend
That the silence can end
We’ll just have to get guns and be men.

If The Meeting was a response to the call of that final line, it was one in which the shift from a single voice with backing band to a range of voices and positions was always audible. Some might call this postmodern fragmentation: dance choreographed to a repeating sample of Brown singing “freedom back,” a version of the album edited down to just the sequential instances of her singing the word “man,” played to projected images of every gun in the Panther arsenal she lists in her book. But these interventions arguably only expand our audition of the original album’s possibilities. More than 30 years on, The Meeting took advantage of Seize The Time’s musico-political incongruity to prise open new lines of affiliation between the past and our revanchist present.  The question continuously hung in the air: How do we occupy our radical black and feminist legacies, especially given the fact that we cannot simply repeat those struggles in identical terms? How do we get freedom back?

The Meeting courtesy of http://blackcontemporaryart.tumblr.com/

The declamatory cadences of black rhetoric were as central to the way The Meeting sounded as was its music. LaTasha Diggs’s barnburning performances stopped the show to inform us that revolutionary pussy was out of stock. With Charles Gaines on drums and Matana Roberts on sax, Malik Gaines scatted excerpts from President Obama’s “race speech” while excerpts from speeches Elaine Brown had given to the Panthers were read. Since the context of Obama’s speech had been his own attempt to surrogate the justified anger of the Black Power generation with a message of reconciliation, re-mixing it in this context meant it no longer had the privilege of temporal succession over Brown, but black feminist rhetoric and the improvisatory sax could invaginate his rhetoric with an eternal recurrence of radical insurgence.

It is important to note the predominantly queer and trans performance modalities through which the Meeting posed–if not fully answered–its questions regarding freedom in a contemporary context. Brown’s refrain “we’ll just have to get guns and be men” took on a new connotation when juxtaposed against the queer and trans bodies and voices in performance.

Here history revealed itself as palimpsest: images and icons were superimposed one upon the other to create dense, freighted symbols of masculinity and femininity. In a refrain originally meant to rally radical black women towards the community leadership roles tendentiously claimed by men, the gun was much more than a ‘phallic symbol.’ As Kara Keeling recounts in The Witch’s Flight (an important book containing a shrewd analysis of Seize the Time):

The appearance of the [Black Panther Party] allowed for the recognition of the black man in the Black. But this need not be understood as precluding black “females” from appearing in blacks with guns, nor does it necessarily indicate an inherent connection between “men” and “males.” What is perhaps most innovative about the BPP’s cinematic appearance is that it threw into doubt the validity of the common sense that linked “man” with “male” with “masculine” (85).

For Keeling, the innovative disruption of white supremacist racist sense — congealed in stereotypical images of black men and black women — set the stage, formed the backing track, for the historical emergence of queer and transmasculinities.

niv Acosta, image courtesy of the author

Transgender dancer and choreographer niv Acosta rhythmically ran his body against the cushioned seating of the performance dome, to the rhythmic sampling of “freedom back.” The phrase was curiously ambiguous: what actual historical freedom could Brown have possibly exhorted the panthers to claim? What imagined freedom do we think we can reclaim via our remixing of Black Power? The power of Acosta’s performance was to embody that question as a lived and livable improvisation.

Geo Wyeth performs, image courtesy of @momaps1

The degree to which a musical legacy such as Brown’s can or should be appropriated beyond a black context was also pointedly staged that afternoon, perhaps most self-consciously by Alex Segade’s rendition of “The Meeting” — which Brown once called the Party’s anthem — in Spanish. Segade’s version captured the melodrama and romantic longing, staging the historical interconnections between black and brown power in California as a hall of mirrors and fleeting glances.

Geo Wyeth brought the house down with a funky final number that had the audience on the edge of their seats, perhaps awaiting the promised nudity a sign at the entrance warned the performance would contain. Wyeth’s onstage costume changes were anything but a striptease, however, as he instead fused the militancy of Seize the Time  with the sexual revolution of Hair in an incompossible auditory portrait of the legacy of “the Sixties.” His performance left the audience with the emphatic reminder that it is less his generation’s challenge to prove adequate to the past than it is to retrieve from history’s shroud the pulsating star of their own desires.

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[The Meeting included Simone Leigh, Samita Sinha, Matana Roberts, Charles Gaines, Malik Gaines, Adam Pendleton, niv Acosta, LaTasha Diggs, Xaviera Simmons, Jarrod Kentrell, Alex Segade, and Geo Wyeth].

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Featured Image of Jarrod Kentrell performing to Elaine Brown’s “Very Black Man” at The Meeting, Courtesy of the author

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Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, where he writes, researches and teaches critical black studies, queer studies, cultural theory, and cultural history. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. Nyong’o has published articles on punk, disco, viral media, the African diaspora, film, and performance art in venues such as Radical History Review, Criticism, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Women Studies Quarterly, The Nation, and n+1. He is co-editor of the journal Social Text.

In September of 2012, the team behind the SoundBox Project hosted an event online called #Tweetasound. Supported by the Sounding Out! blog and with help from many audiophiles on Twitter, the event was staged to encourage people to experiment with making social media more noisy. This podcast reflects on the experience of encountering sound in digital environments while also sampling an array of content produced during the event.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Recapping SoundBox Project #Tweetasound

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA ITUNES

Featuring tweets by:

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SoundBox is comprised of three doctoral students at Duke University, where their project is funded by the Franklin Humanities Institute and the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. Whitney Trettien (English), Mary Caton Lingold (English), and Darren Mueller (Music), are all interested in enhancing the practice of using sound in digital scholarship. http://sites.fhi.duke.edu/soundbox/

Welcome to the final week of our February Forum on “Sonic Borders,”  a collaboration with the IASPM-US blog in connection with this year’s IASPM-US conference on Liminality and Borderlands, held in Austin, Texas from February 28 to March 3, 2013.  The “Sonic Borders” forum is a Virtual Roundtable cross-blog entity that will feature six Sounding Out! writers posting on Mondays through February 25, and four writers from IASPM-US, posting on Wednesdays starting February 6th and ending February 27th.  For an encore of weeks one through four of the forum, click here. And now, while we regret to inform you that Art Jones’s dispatch from Pakistan must be re-booked at a later date, the show must go on . . .and I am thrilled that writer and Ph.D. student Airek Beauchamp is stepping in as our closing act. Make no mistake, he brings the pain!  Once again, Sounding Out! gives you something you can feel. –JSA, Editor-in-Chief

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At dinner a few days later in the Village Jarrod tells me that he cries whenever anyone says that they really ‘get’ his work. Because his work is so horrifying. It hurts him to know that he has inflicted it upon someone, someone able to understand it.–A.W. Strouse, in reference to the recent performance of Jarrod Kentrell at Ps1‘s “The Meeting”

I first heard Diamanda Galás’s The Plague Mass (1991) around 1994, when I would have been about 20 years old. Equal parts mass and babble, The Plague Mass is an elegiac tribute to Galás’s brother and other victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a sonic rage against the silence surrounding the disease that redefines “the elegy” in the process. I suppose that I should make a confession here and say that contracting HIV was one of my biggest fears at the time. I was fresh out of the closet and ready to experiment, yet the media coverage of the crisis had pretty much told me that, as a gay man, an active sex life was a death sentence, a message I had been receiving since I was in fourth grade. There was something in Galás’s record to which I automatically, deeply connected.  Although this brand of desire was new to me, there was also something deeply familiar about it–ancient even–and this feeling was produced by the horror of her work, not in spite of it.

Cover of The Plague Mass (1991)

Recorded live in 1990 at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, The Plague Mass was  conceived as a performance piece, enabling Galás to use sound to move in a messy, unstructured, and often terrifying way across multi-dimensional space.  Her sonic trajectories seemed to take my global, abstract fears and make them intimate and concrete. In “Diamanda Galás: Defining the Space In-between,” Julia Meier describes Galás’s soundscape as composed of “chants, shrieks, gurgles, hisses often at extreme volumes, frequently distorted electronically and accompanied by a torrent of words” which defy description (2). In the space created by this cacophony, Galás mourns her brother, responding to the silence surrounding AIDS by making use of what composer and sound theorist Yvon Bonenfant refers to as “queer timbres” in “Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres,” the unique, dynamic sounds of desire and self in the voice that also operate as a kind of touch, a reaching out to other desired and desiring bodies.  In homage to Antonin Artaud’s theory of the theater of cruelty–in which audiences are exposed through multisensory domains to truths they often do not wish to see–Galás uses queer timbres to form an outsized means of aural communication in The Plague Mass that fills more affective space than standard musical productions or theater productions.  The shrieks and howls suggest Galas as depicted on the album’s cover: flayed, raw, and radically open to the passage of every vibration. By erasing semantic and syntactical codes, these sounds deeply engage the entire body in the process of making sound.

Artaud

Queering the traditional theater, Artaud argued for new intersensuality that would occupy space in a three-dimensional manner.  In The Theater and Its Double, Artaud describes how the “intensities of colors, lights, or sounds, which utilize vibration, tremors, repetition, whether of a musical rhythm or a spoken phrase, special tones or a general diffusion of light, can obtain their full effect only by dissonances. But instead of limiting these dissonances to a single sense, we shall cause them to overlap from one sense to the other” (125).  Texturing sound, or working with dissonance and disruption to create a more forceful product,  offered Artaud a unique play between the senses, allowing it a more direct and apparent physical impact upon the bodies of both performers and the audience.

The plague and how it inhabits and destroys bodies is a central metaphor for sound and language in the work of both Artaud and Galás. Artaud focused much of his theory on the plague as an example not only of an affective space but also as a transformative event in human history and in individual lives. Artaud’s writing on the plague, however, also garnered him harsh criticism. By suggesting a theater in which language became subordinate to the shriek, the grunt or other non-semantic orality, he decried all of traditional French theater and its lofty legacy. Nonetheless, he was invited to speak about his essay “The Theater and the Plague” at the Sorbonne.  Deciding to actually incorporate his ideas about ‘liquefying boundaries,” he began speaking in a standard oratorical mode but slowly devolved into a theatrical performance of the plague, eventually ending in shrieks of physical pain. In Watchfiends & Rack Screams, Clayton Eshleman describes how, by the end of his speech, the only people left in the lecture hall were a minor contingent of his close friends, including Anais Nin, who recounted the tale (12).  The shrieks, the howls are all a further way to engage the whole body in the process of making sound, while also erasing semantic and syntactical code. In Gilles Deleuze’s estimation of Artaud’s work in The Logic of Sense, it reached the depths of language: “The word no longer expresses an attribute of the state of affairs; its fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture and a new state of affairs… In this passion, a pure language-affect is substituted for the effect of language” (89).

Jaap Blonk performs Artaud’s “To Have Done with the Judgement of God”

Reflecting and refracting Artaud, Galás uses the space of The Plague Mass to re-consider and re-theorize the ailing body. In her work the body represents not just Galás herself, but also the bodies of all the afflicted, the bodies issuing negation of suffering, and finally, the collective body of the spectacle of the AIDS crisis.  Like Artaud, Galás sees the plague of AIDS as transformative, but without the safe buffer provided by the critical space of history.  This plague is instead an immediate issue made all the more volatile due to the refusal to help the victims by the conservative Reagan administration as well as the rigidity of the Catholic Church’s encoded dogma that characterizes homosexuality as sinful depravity and refuses to acknowledge the need for AIDS education and condom distribution.  Galás evidences this in the opening track “There Are No More Tickets to the Funeral” which incorporates traditional Christian hymns, liturgical representations of condemnation, and the voices of the afflicted.

These appropriated sounds circulate in constant tension, queering the ominous, authoritative patriarchal drones by contrasting them to the timbres of desire and pain embodied by the shrieks.  In “Confessional (Give Me Sodomy or Give Me Death),” the narrator’s voice bleeds into the frantic voice of the defiant dying, blending in with the conjured voices of angels of death that hover over the bed. This commentary places the listener in a very immediate and uncomfortable multidimensional space encompassing several terrifying aspects of death.  Here Galás exemplefies Bonenfant’s queer timbres through the tactile effect of layered sound that is felt with the skin, in the bones, as well as with the ears, communicating a palpable experience that lies beyond the barely-nuanced music it is seductively easy to grow accustomed to.

It is Galás’s use of sound’s affective properties that makes The Plague Mass most effective as queered communication.  In “This is the Law of the Plague” she incorporates elements of glossolalia, colloquially known in religious communities as “speaking in tongues,” a speech act that embodies voice by implying a physical loss of control of the body as well as the casting off of concrete linguistic structure.  Galás’s use of glossolalia deliberately blurs the border between spiritual possession and the madness inherent to AIDS as the virus passed through the blood/brain barrier of its human host.

Aided by electronics, Galás’s vocals begin as the chant of orator. Punctuated by a throbbing, sparse single drum-beat, her sickened, keening crawl of words enumerates in detail what it is that defines a person as unclean.  The language is precisely enunciated, each word sharply edged and cornered—a practice that would no doubt double Artaud over in pain, given his struggle with schizophrenia that left him vulnerable to crisp sounds.  Slowly, Galás’s voice rises to the shriek of a pious, avenging angel, a shrill, wail shimmering with vibrato communicating the sound of a raptured body, rent in chaotic ecstasy. Eventually her ululations are submerged in a bath of primordial babble, a place where language moves in every direction through a body somehow more permeable, a sonic space that Deleuze would describe as topographic, that is, possessing heights and depths. Enacting and inviting the babble of the mad and the afflicted maintains a red line on the tolerance of the listener’s psyche before returning, without ceremony, to the sparse and cold incantations of the church.  Here queer(ed) timbres push the audience to limits well past the reaches of patriarchal or accepted sound; Galas plays along the edge of tolerance before dropping the audience abruptly back into the decidedly colder and less humane sonic tropes of an unforgiving religion.

Galás’s sonic practices encourage in me a listening that reaches out into space to connect with these sounds, whose physicality communicates fears and apprehensions that are old enough to feel genetically encoded in my psyche.  Bonenfant describes this reaching as “queer listening,” an extrinsic process based on desire in which “we listen ‘out’ for (reaching towards) voices that we think will gratify us” (77).  Bonenfant queers the body in the process of sound; it becomes abstracted, absorbed into a process and functioning on many layers that include—but also subsume—the subjective Cartesian body of agency we are comfortable with. The body becomes bodies, and it becomes present in spaces that go beyond the immediate space it occupies in space/time.  Galas traverses time and space in The Plague Mass, from the ancient litanies of hymns and spirituals to the anguish of those afflicted with AIDS, and layers voice on voice until they are inextricable, a huge din telling more than just a story, or The Story but the stories of many.

Image by Flickr User 1v0

In a personal e-mail exchange, Bonenfant clarified his relation to both Artaud and Galás.  When asked if he was influenced by Artaud he explained:

Not directly, but certainly indirectly, and his ideas affect extended voice practice generally. I think the idea of the ‘theatre of cruelty’ is often deeply misunderstood and it was a product of its time. I understand Artaud to have been crying out for an anti-bourgeois theatre that actually stirred people up. But stirring people up is only part of the story. What stirs some, attracts others. Now, my argument is more that: these voices we might call ‘queer’ stir SOME people up but actually they ATTRACT others – others who might be seeking queered bodies to contact.

Bonenfant went on to explain that artists such as Galás can thus make contact with people who desire the kind of disruption or ‘stirring’ that they provide. He went on to relate a story that Galás shared in an interview, in which she described a performance in which she looked out at the audience and noticed a very young boy listening to her perform. For the rest of the concert, Galás said she felt guilty for the damage she was undoubtedly inflicting on the young boy’s ears and psyche. However, after the concert the boy approached her and thanked her profusely. It turns out that he had suffered from a terminal and painful illness and felt unable to express the physical and emotional distress that he lived with. Here, though, was an artist onstage articulating it, broadcasting it to him and others, for him and others.  This is what Bonenfant refers to as “an affective, somatic bond” created through shared sonic experience, and this is what Galas constructs.  By standard definitions The Plague Mass is almost unlistenable, but yet it has connected audiences remote in space and time (a nod here to Karen Tongson’s “remote intimacy”).  A sonic reaching out attracting listeners similarly reaching, its indelicate music draws the suffering near, providing a form of collective comfort by exploring and embodying the suffering, grief, and rage located beyond the permeable membrane of conscious thought and feeling.

Diamanda Galas performing in the 1980s, Image Courtesy of Flickr User Carl Guderian

It is this kind of connection through a tonal richness that is uncoded but yet full of information  that is radically important.  Galás’s groans, growls, and chants create an intersubjective circuit of communication that moves active listening outside of the body and draws visceral connections in a three-dimensional psychic space. This is what Galás immediately stirred in me back in 1994, and what I have been determined to recover and communicate since that first listening cut me to the quick. Queer listening does not just entail an affirmation of the soundtracks of queer lives–a kind of perpetual disco, 12” remix project–but rather it also demands a critical–and visceral–vulnerability to the jarring, violent world arranged against queer agency.  Galas’s work  hijacks the elegy and queers it, extending it to us as an offering against the true horror: the official silence in the face of so much death.

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Featured Image of Diamanda Galás courtesy of Flickr user digital_freak

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A Taurus who enjoys the ocean, Airek Beauchamp is currently at SUNY Binghamton pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing. He also studies composition pedagogy and queer theory, although he is becoming more and more seduced by sound studies.  He can rock a disco all night or just stay in and maybe catch up on some 30 Rock. Some call him fancy, some call him a bitch, but really he is both. He is a multiplicity of multiplicities, all in one mortal shell.

Members and collaborators of ARLA (Paula Cronan, Juliana Snapper, and Elana Mann) participating in a General Assembly at Occupy LA City Hall, November 11, 2011

Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening–Pauline Oliveros

“CAN YOU HEAR ME?!” “I CAN HEAR YOU!!” “IT’S A VAN GOGH PARADE!!” . . .were some of the enthusiastic replies when artist Elana Mann, musician Juliana Snapper, and other members of ARLA (Audile Receptives Los Angeles) arrived on the scene at Occupy LA with giant hand-made ears.  Mann co-founded ARLA in the Spring of 2011 with Snapper, filmmaker Vera Brunner-Sung, and choreographer Kristen Smiarowski.  After studying scores and techniques on listening developed by composer Pauline Oliveros, ARLA developed a workshop geared toward Occupy LA that included a listening parade in which they held up the giant ears and protest signs with ears on them. Snapper recalls, “The simple physical presence of people carrying large paper-mache ears was met with a kind of hungry recognition…recognition of what it meant that we were holding the symbols (giant ears).” They led workshops, listening sessions, and discussion groups.  They performed Oliveros’ sonic meditation “Teach Yourself to Fly” and a composition written by Mann and Snapper entitled “People’s Microphony.”  And a project was born.  Through personal interviews and audio-visual examples, I document, contextualize, and analyze its work.

Mp3=The People’s Microphony Camerata performing “Teach Yourself to Fly” Pauline Oliveros

I am happy that Elana Mann chose to use my Sonic Meditations for the People’s Microphony project. These pieces are meant for anyone that wants to perform them regardless of musical training.” –Pauline Oliveros

For Mann, active listening is “a process of tuning in simultaneously inward and outward. Active listening allows for an awareness of and an opening up to sounds around me and also a digestion of what is happening inside of me in relation to these sounds.”  Much of the recent focus on this practice comes from the music and sound art worlds, as well as acoustic ecology, a field formed from the overlapping area between science and art that concentrates on the importance of experiencing and investigating our sonic surroundings with detailed care and respect to understand its importance on our world and our place within it.  Mann’s work addresses a unique angle at the intersection of these fields: listening’s empathetic effect on those whom you are listening to, a consideration arising from a project she worked on between 2007-2010 with Iraq war veteran Captain Dylan Alexander Mack, called “Can’t Afford the Freeway.”

Alex created some recordings for me and I kept listening to them over and over again­ trying to figure them out. I eventually produced more interviews with him and realized that he needed his story to be heard and I needed to try and understand his story. So I created a project in which I attempted to listen as best I could.  Listening to his recordings made me feel close to him, but I also recognized that no matter how many times I heard his words they were still foreign to me. Still the very act of me struggling to listen was important for both of us, and I think this is true of many interpersonal/political and social situations. You can never experience what it is like to be someone else, but active listening opens up a space of empathy and connection.  I also think we can see how a lack of active listening is affecting the political landscape in the United States so negatively, by producing a highly polarized and vitriolic environment.

And what about at Occupy LA?

At Occupy LA I was hopeful that there would be a place for listening to voices that had not been heard before and sometimes that happened. Other times people used the space for projecting, not receiving. I think that there needs to be strong voices making themselves heard, but I don’t want to lose the other part of that equation, which is those voices being quiet and listening to others, and themselves.

ARLA Ear Strengthening Workshop, Occupy LA site, November 11, 2011, Photo by Carol Cheh

Mann, thinking and researching about social, aesthetic, and political points of listening and voicing, felt there was something to be considered about the “radical receptivity and the core message of the OWS movement” and its global amplification of voices struggling to be heard.  In the Spring of 2012, she formed The People’s Microphony Camerata with Snapper, a radical experimental choir based in Los Angeles exploring the process of the People’s Microphone. The exact history of the “People’s Microphone,” or “People’s Mic” is unclear, but its use in the Occupy Movement has already become iconic.  Ted Sammons discusses the implications of the People’s Mic for communication in his  October 2011 post, “‘I didn’t say look; I said listen’: The People’s Microphone, #OWS, and Beyond.”  The human microphone is a way to deliver one person’s message to a large group of people in situations where amplification tools, such as bullhorns, are either not allowed or unavailable, or if the acoustics of a space distort amplification.  The speaker calls, “mic check!” to alert their intentions.  Those around them call back, “mic check!”, until the gathering understands something will be said.  The speaker breaks their statement into short sentences, pausing to allow those around them, or the “first wave,” to repeat them in unison.  They then pause for those further away, or the “second wave,” to repeat again…and so on until those in the back of the gathering have heard the statement.

Members of People’s Microphony Camerata rehearsing in Los Angeles, April 15, 2012, Photo by Jean-Paul Leonard

The group’s trademark intensity sometimes carried over to the audience.  Mann discovered such transference often had to do with prior associations with a location or context.  Mann recalled a particular performance at the Occupy movement called “Chalkupy” that was formed in response to a protest running simultaneously with the LA Art Walk, in which activists had handed out chalk and told stories of police repression while chalk drawings were created on the walkways.  The police shut down the art walk and a violent struggle ensued.  The Occupy LA movement called for people globally to take to the street with chalk in protest, and the day was called “Chalkupy”.  The audience of protestors was mixed and tense, and when the PMC began their performance of a highly emotive score called “Sob-Laugh” by Daniel Goode, people were either drawn to or repelled by the performance.

The PMC performing “Sob Laugh” at the “Chalkupy” protest in downtown Los Angeles, Image by Daniel Goode

I think there was some fear about the vulnerable revelation of emotions in the space of the protest. Many of the Occupy LA protests were so risky that everyone had to be extremely tough to exist in that activist space.  I respect that. Still I think there are other things that can happen in a space of protest that bring out different feelings. Some activists wanted us to be more musically conventional, “why can’t you just sing some folk songs like normal protest choirs,” we were asked. But we really were not into that kind of thing. . .

In most protest situations, the audiences welcomed their activities.  Many shared that it opened up a new space where people could meet each other as humans rather than adversaries or collaborators.  Mann edited and published a monochromatic grassroots songbook with the various scores the PMC received for performance, opening up the circle for anyone and everyone to perform and feel that closeness.

Sometimes it was hard to translate a piece that worked during a group rehearsal to something for an audience­performer situation. . .The PMC never fully developed how to deal with audience participation, but this is something I have been developing on my own in working with students on PMC materials. The scores from the People’s Microphony Songbook and the techniques Juliana and I developed when we first formed the PMC create an immediate closeness within a group, which is remarkable.

From the “People’s Microphony Songbook”: Many voices that were once silenced are now resonating through large crowds, not only of activists, but ordinary people all over the world, assisted by internet networks, and a simple technology called the People’s Microphone.  The People’s Mic expressed the interrelated desires of collective and individual voices to speak and be heard, to hear one’s words spoken back through different mouths, and to digest someone else’s words through one’s own body.  Beyond projecting an individual’s voice further then it can resonate on its own, the People’s Mic has implications for all of the bodies in its vicinity.  It energizes listeners in ways the microphone or megaphone cannot by making listening active, vocal, and embodied. The project, like the Occupy movement, holds all the complexity, beauty, and drive of being human, whether you consider it “working” or not.  When I asked Mann about how changes within and towards the Occupy Movement affected the choir, and whether they were winding down or taking a new form, she answered:

I think more than anything else, our group faced a lot of the same challenges that the Occupy Movement faced ­ challenges in horizontality, in the push and pull between interior and exterior exploration, in the sometimes painful vulnerability of investigating the intimate personal and political space with others. I think the project is still developing. The choir still communicates, and some members are currently collaborating with composer Daniel Corral, but the PMC does not meet and rehearse like we used to­ I think it will continue to wax and wane.  In the meantime, I am still working on ideas of active listening. I am currently creating a project called “Listening as (a) movement” within an under-served neighborhood in Pasadena, CA, exploring ideas of radical listening within a specific neighborhood.

In an age of constant bombardment of stimuli, our heads scream with thoughts, opinions, arguments, and expressions.  With our current technology, our input and output can be a constant rush of snap reactions and impulses, which has a profound effect, of course, on our day-to-day lives, on our culture(s), on our politics.  But these circles cannot be affectively complete without the other side.  We need someone to hear us,  and,  more then that, we need someone to listen to us. And we, in turn, need to listen to them.

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Maile Colbert is a multi-media artist with a concentration on sound and video who relocated from Los Angeles, US to Lisbon, Portugal. She is a regular writer for Sounding Out!

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

 “Sensing Voice”–Nina Sun Eidsheim

“Within a Grain of Sand: Our Sonic Environment and Some of Its Shapers”–Maile Colbert 

“Listening to #Occupy in the Classroom”–Travers Scott

Image by Flickr User Pere Ubu

In teaching the many interrelated and complicated aspects of the Civil Rights movement, Black Power, and the Black Arts Movement, the challenge for me is to help students understand the “facts” of this period, and to simultaneously destabilize the teleological historical narrative these “facts” seem to suggest.  In a pedagogical context, sound helps fill in the gaps that fall outside of the knowledge produced–and contained within–certain archival accounts of black cultural and political history. While crucial, having students listen to the gaps, can be daunting, especially in our current historical moment, as the decades-long push against identity politics has been solidified by the recent (re)election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama.  This point demands more elaboration than I can provide here, but the critical pedagogical issue it raises within the province of black studies, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to consider black political culture outside of the sedimented lines of American pluralism and black radical thought.  

I use sound as a pedagogical tool to help outline a middle ground–what Frantz Fanon refers to in The Wretched of the Earth as “zone of hidden fluctuation” (166)–based upon articulations of resistance and identity that refuse to be frozen in time.  Building on Paul Gilroy’s conceptualization of anti-anti-essentialism in The Black Atlantic, an idea of black consciousness that is flexible and moves between the insufficient terms of “essentialist” and “anti-essentialist,” I use specific pedagogical examples to suggest that teaching about race and sound is a rich, evolving, and productively interactive continuum.   The auditory sense opens up new terrains of knowledge and dynamically expands the possibilities for students to think through the intricate and multifaceted formations of black consciousness during the volatile years of the 1960s and the resonance of those years in our present.

The recorded presence of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, represents an important aural site for engaging in reflexive pedagogy, because King’s tonality–the resonance of his voice–creates a certain familiarity and is pivotal to the construction of the American myth of the radical transformation of the civil rights movement and the idea of post-civil rights racial equality.  For many students, King’s sound signals the dream of, and the pathway towards, a unified America.  Conscious of how this idea of King reflects a linear understanding of civil rights as simply a desire for inclusion, I direct students’ attention to the sound of King’s last recorded speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968.  Given the evening before his assassination, this speech resounds with King’s deepening critical perspective on black struggle through its haunting concluding notes. I point out to my classes that King’s final years (1965-1968) were marked by his increasing focus on ideas of black resistance outside of the Civil Rights mainstream, including his  critique of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and his radical rethinking of the possibilities for black economic and political self-determination.

Martin Luther King in 1968, Image courtesy of UIC Digital Collections

Centered on the economic injustice and dehumanization of Memphis’s striking black sanitation workers, King’s speech details the need for the Memphis black community do more than simply boycott municipal entities, but rather articulate their resistance by boycotting prominent national brands such as Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola.  Against this background, I play segments (particularly the final minutes) of King’s speech, entitled, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

The acoustic dimensions of King’s final speech resonate with a social and political complexity that troubles the sonic memories many students have of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.  The much more intimate and less overtly majestic soundscape of Memphis’ Mason Temple underlines King’s shift from national icon back to local, community activist.  The frequent audience shifts–applause, extemporaneous interjections, and silence–create a reverberating sonic energy that accumulates throughout the speech.  Rather than relying strictly on a call-and-response interpretation of the interactive exchanges between King’s voice and the audience’s response, I have students consider the non-linear ebbs and flows in King’s sound in this latest of moments (as Fred Moten would say, the totality of King’s tonality). For example, as King’s audience considers the weight of his analyses and what it means to articulate black resistance as “a dangerous unselfishness” that “puts pressure where it really hurts,” I identify moments of uncertainty, hesitation, and contemplative reflection that mark a non-linear interactive sonority between King and his audience.

Listening to King’s final thoughts offers a disturbing and disruptive emphasis on the stakes of breaking with entrenched modes of activist thinking. He concludes the speech with a series of prophetic thoughts on mortality as a cost of making a stand against “our sick white brothers.”  Set within the historical and ideological context I have sketched above, the delivery distinguishes the sound of King’s words.  As we listen I draw attention to King’s expression of a lack of fear in anything, any man, as King seems to convey an eerie foreknowledge of his murder and his irreverence in its face.

“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” –Listen to the concluding two minutes

The apocalyptic sound of King’s concluding notes to this political sermon leaves much to contemplate.  From the mention of the potential threat posed to his life by “our sick white brothers,” through the speech’s last line, there is a tonal, timbral shift in his voice and demeanor. Through sound and posture, and the reaction of the audience to those factors, King’s affect seems to convey something more momentous occurring beneath the event’s surface dynamics.  King projects a confrontational edge through the sound of fearlessness in the face of mortality.  Did he know he was going to be killed shortly after giving this speech?  It’s a question that the peculiar tonality of his concluding lines raises for students.  If so, what does it mean to use the sermon as a site of prophetic, aural documentation of the fact that a force of transformation exists beyond the flesh and blood of leadership, a force that assassination can’t kill?  In the speech’s final synesthetic moment, I have the students listen and watch the shift that occurs in King’s demeanor as he closes, and the way that this shift culminates in an almost ecstatic moment as he delivers the final line: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” His defiant turning away from the microphone is crucial as it amplifies the meaning of the voice, letting those watching know that, much like an emcee, King has just “served” white power with a delivery that will outlast the sniper’s bullet the following evening.

Nina Simone, Image courtesy of Flickr User GlingG

I want to briefly point to two other examples that show additional ways in which sound complicates ideas of racial identity and expression during the 1960s.  When I teach Nina Simone’s composition, “Mississippi Goddamn,” (recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1964), I ask students to consider the relationship between the distinctive sound of her voice and the ironic and critical elements of her lyrical meaning as this interaction creates a complex idea of radical black consciousness.  Composed in the aftermath of the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Simone offers a musical, and more broadly sonic meditation on white supremacy.

Most students find the timbre of Simone’s voice, its grain (as Roland Barthes would say) and depth, immediately striking.  Her unique sonority and its context, greatly influence attempts by students to understand her reference to the song as simply a tune: “The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddamn” she says, and “This is a show tune, but the show for it hasn’t been written yet.”  Clearly it isn’t simply a tune, and the caustic quality of lines such as, “Oh but this country is full of lies/ You’re all gonna die and die like flies,” creates a critical depth through the sound of Simone’s commitment to a black radical perspective.  What does it mean, for instance, that Simone projects such sarcasm and biting critique to a predominately white audience at Carnegie Hall?  How might we hear the specific grain of her voice in this setting?  How does Simone’s projection of critical black sonic resistance, emerge at the conjuncture of anti-black racism and the beginning of legislative efforts under the Johnson administration to rectify racial inequality through civil rights bills?  What can be taken from the simultaneity and contrast that Simone projects her sound within?  I pose such questions to my students as a way of considering what it means to be committed to critical thought and social transformation that falls outside of the dominant lines of American national consciousness, and how the sound of such commitment, heard in the pitch and tenor of Simone’s voice, matters as a different kind of historical documentation.

In considering how the sound of music can offer an intervention within the formation of black political consciousness in the Black Arts Movement, I often use the 1966 recording of Amiri Baraka’s signal poem, “Black Art,” as it set to the experimental musical sounds of Sonny Murray’s ensemble (Murray-drums, Albert Ayler-tenor saxophone, Don Cherry-trumpet, Henry Grimes, Lewis Worrell-bass).  Having first read the poem, students then are able to hear it set to– and against–the unconventional instrumentation of Murray’s ensemble.

The musicians create an unconventional sonic context for Baraka’s reading that de-emphasizes and re-situates the apparent dimensions of black rage that seem to arise from verse that can “shoot guns,” through an almost carnivalesque, comedic, and off-kilter sound that troubles the linear expectations one might have of instrumentation amplifying the words on the page.  The dissonance between page and sound allows for useful pedagogical opening, in that it underlines the non-conformist, avant-garde aspects of the movement, and the fine line that artists such as Baraka were imagining between the intensity of black radical consciousness and the ability to articulate that standpoint outside of the expected forms of black cultural nationalism.

Image Courtesy of UIC Digital Collections

As these examples have shown, I incorporate sound into my pedagogical framings of black cultural and political identity as an opening through which students may expand their understandings of black consciousness and black political culture well beyond stagnant ideas of racial authenticity, while still preserving an understanding of the transformative and often radical possibilities that have been projected through black expression during the period.  It is the open space of sound that invests the project of black radical thought with the uncanny spontaneity of experimentation.  Having students understand ideas of expansiveness, asymmetry, and non-linearity as central to black cultural expression and critique–even as artists refuse to sacrifice an expressed political commitment to black resistance–begins to suggest ways for students to contemplate the intersection of identity politics with the unexpected, fantastic elements of expression that lie outside of more recent flattened diagnoses of black nationalism.  Teaching at the intersections of race and sound opens up new terrains of knowledge, dynamically expanding students’ abilities to think through the intricate and multifaceted formations of black consciousness during the volatile years of the 1960s and the resonance of those years in our present.

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Carter Mathes is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University.  He has completed a book manuscript entitled, Imagine the Sound: Experimental Form in Post-Civil Rights African American Literature, that focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 1970s.  He is co-editing a volume of essays on Black Arts Movement writer and critic Larry Neal; and also has essays in print or forthcoming on Toni Cade Bambara, Peter Tosh, and James Baldwin. At Rutgers, he regularly teaches classes focusing on African American literature, Twentieth-century literature, music and literature, and experimental writing.

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

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

They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis–Tara Betts

Freedom Back: Sounding Black Feminist History, Courtesy the Artists–Tavia Nyong’o

Listen. I’m hearing Shakespeare. Taking four of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, King Lear), I hear Shakespeare in and around another anachronistic soundscape – the blues. The space of this sonic experience will be YOGIGA Expression Gallery, a performance space in Hongdae, a popular art and club scene in Seoul, Korea, on January 26, 2013, in their 불가사리 : 실험/즉흥 발표회, or Starfish: Experimental/Improvisational Performances. The performers will include: Carys Matic on percussion, 황서영 (Hwang Seo Young), reading, and myself on the alto sax. Melding the blues and Shakespeare, this project involves my writing short, page-length poems in contemporary English that contain a line from a Shakespeare play, as well as the play’s main ideas. Part of my task is bedding the Shakespeare passage in an English that is lyrical, but untimely, in part so as to re-produce the strangeness of the Bard. These lines are then laid across a bit of percussion built out of the playing of Shakespeare’s books – literally. The rhythmic foundation is thus established upon a thing that didn’t exist properly in Shakespeare’s time, yet is so central to Shakespeare today. And finally, I use an alto saxophone and blues scales to improvize a bit of blues along with the percussion and the reading. In short, I’m queering Shakespeare by placing him in a blues bed, punctuated by the pounding of books, and dressed up in a Korean, female voice.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul

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Brooke A. Carlson is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His areas of concentration include Early Modern Drama, English Renaissance, World Literature, Composition, Gender/Race, and Sound. He writes on early modern notions of subjectivity, class, and capitalism, and has published most recently on Jonson and Milton.

Happy new year, dear Sounding Out! readers! Early January brings about New Year’s resolutions, specials on bins for holiday ornaments, Three Kings’ Day, and our yearly MLA sound studies panel round-up. This year, MLA 2014 attendees will get another blast of cold temperatures because this year’s convention is in Chicago—not much of a difference weather-wise from Boston but just as exciting! If you’re undecided about what panels to check out or if you’re not sure about where to start with the MLA Program, you’re in the right place: I combed the MLA Program page by page and condensed it just for our sound studies aficionados. If you’re sitting this MLA out or if you’re just curious about what the following panels are all about, it’s easy to follow the conference from home if you have access to Twitter. MLA is one of the most active academic conferences on social media: there’s the lively twitter hashtag #MLA14, the individual hashtags for each session (#s–followed by the session number), and an attentive twitter account (@MLAConvention), so even if you’re not in Chi-town you can still see what’s going on at your favorite panels this week.

Whereas last year some of the sound-oriented panels had a particular digital angle, this year there are several panels look at the intersection of sound and literary studies. The titles may not suggest sound, but the presentations do. For example, panel #s384 Literary Crossroads: African American Literature and Christianity includes presentations on representations of gospel and spirituality in different African American books. Another panel of interest is #s414, Literature and Media in the Nineteenth-Century United States arranged by the Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature. (This panel resonates nicely with Sounding Out!’s Sound in the Nineteenth Century forum which just ended last Monday.) The focus on literature may come from the fact that the MLA brings many literary scholars together, but it is encouraging that the study of sound is also overlapping with the study of literature.

“Street Musicians, Chicago” by Flickr user Diana Schnuth, CC-BY-NC-2.0

Despite that the convention brings literature scholars from across the United States together, some of the more intriguing sound-oriented panels are not focused on literature at all. In fact, several panels address sound from the angle of music. Panel #s131, The Musics of Chicago brings together High Fidelity and Lupe Fiasco, and panel #s162 on the HBO series Girls includes Chloe H. Johnson’s paper “Dancing on My Own: Popular Music and Issues of Identity in Girls.“ Although the fields of literary studies and cultural studies are sometimes in tension with each other, some MLA presenters are approaching popular culture particularly from an aural angle.

Music is not the only presence of sound in the MLA Program. Several panels bring up sound in conjunction with pedagogy. Some of our readers may remember the forum Sounding Out! hosted last year on sound and pedagogy—a forum of which I was a part. I’m glad to see other language, composition, and literature teachers are thinking about sound too. Panel #s114, Dialects of English Worldwide: Issues in English Language Studies includes several papers that think about spoken English nowadays. For those who are interested in how the sound of students’ speech are intersected by structural racism and public policy will find lots to think about with this panel. If you’re looking for concrete suggestions on using sound as a pedagogical approach, panel #s213 has some answers. Twenty-First-Century Pedagogies, arranged by the Discussion Group on the Two-Year College includes a presentation on sound essays by Kathryn O’Donoghue from the Graduate Center at City Univ. of New York.

Where will Team SO! be at MLA 2014? Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman can be found at the DH Commons pre-conference workshop on Thursday, January 9, 2014; she will be presenting Friday, January 10 at 8:30 am on her research on Lead belly and Richard Wright as part of panel #s221, Singing Out in the American Literary Experience. Regular writer Regina Bradley will be presenting Friday at 5:15 pm on panel #s403 Words, Works, and New Archives: Studying African American Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Guest blogger Scott Poulson-Bryant will be at panel #s447, The Seventies in Black and White: A Soundtrack on Saturday at 8:30 am. I will be presenting on Friday morning at panel #s218, a roundtable on the graduate seminar paper and will be leading panel #s788, Back Up Your Work: Conceptualizing Writing Support for Graduate Students on Sunday at 1:45 pm. You can catch us on Twitter: @lianamsilvaford and @soundingoutblog where we’ll be live-tweeting panels and keeping followers up to date on convention chatter. Who knows, maybe there’ll be an impromptu SO! tweet-up? Stay tuned to our social media feeds!

Before I go, a shameless plug: As of this month I am the new editor of the newsletter Women in Higher Education, so if you want to meet up and talk about the newsletter please let me know!

Did I miss something? Maybe I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up? Please let me know either via email, via tweet, or post on the Sounding Out! Facebook page.

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Liana Silva-Ford is co-founder and Managing Editor of Sounding Out!.

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Featured image: “Mississippi North” by Flickr user John W. Iwanski, CC-BY-NC-2.0

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Jump to THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2014
Jump to FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2014
Jump to SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2014
Jump to SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2014

“Television Sam (I’m Your Main Man)” by Flickr user the justified sinner, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2014

8:30 am-11:30 am 
3. Get Started in the Digital Humanities with Help from DHCommons

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING: Ryan Cordell, Northeastern Univ.; Josh Honn, Northwestern Univ.; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.

The workshop welcomes language and literature scholars who wish to learn about, pursue, or join digital humanities (DH) projects but do not have the institutional infrastructure to support them. Representatives of DH projects and initiatives will share their expertise on project design, outline available resources and opportunities, and lead small-group training sessions on DH technologies and skills. Preregistration required.

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

31. Radical Curators, Vulnerable Genres: Lost Histories of Collecting, Editing, Bibliography

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott

PRESIDING: Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

SPEAKERS:

Jessica J. Beard, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz;

Alex Black, Cornell Univ.;

Jane Greenway Carr, New York Univ.;

Ellen Gruber Garvey, New Jersey City Univ.

Laura Helton, Univ. of Virginia

Courtney Thorsson, Univ. of Oregon

33. Sir Walter Scott and Music

Sheffield, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations

PRESIDING: Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

1. “Cutting Out the Castle Quicksand: Scott’s Bride, Donizetti’s Lucia, and the ‘Personally Furious’ Ayn Rand,” Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.

2. “‘Drifting through the Intellectual Atmosphere’ from Scott’s Old Morality to Liszt’s Hexameron,” Catherine Ludlow, Western Illinois Univ.

3. “Walter Scott, British Identity, and International Grand Opera: Isidore de Lara’s Amy Robsart(1893),” Tommaso Sabbatini, Univ. of Chicago

For abstracts, visit lyricasociety.org.

1:45-3:00 pm

75. Voice and Silence

Mississippi, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on French Medieval Language and Literature

PRESIDING: Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Boston Coll.

1. “Gut Feelings,” Jason D. Jacobs, Roger Williams Univ.

2. “Tomboy Silence,” Wan-Chuan Kao, Washington and Lee Univ.

3. “Giving Voice to the Word of God; or, Bernard of Clairvaux Sings the Song of Songs,” Kris Trujillo, Univ. of California, Berkeley

3:30-4:45

114. Dialects of English Worldwide: Issues in English Language Studies

Illinois, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Present-Day English Language 

PRESIDING: Elizabeth Bell Canon, Emory Univ.

1. “‘Speak the Language of Your Flag’: American Policy Responses to Nonanglophone Immigrants,” Dennis E. Baron, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

2. “The Sounds of Silence: Standard and Nonstandard Englishes in Contemporary Ethnic American Writing,” Melissa Dennihy, Queensborough Community Coll., City Univ. of New York

3. “Star Spanglish Banter: Harnessing Students’ Linguistic Expertise,” Jill Hallett, Northeastern Illinois Univ.

4. “Emerging Attitudes toward New Media within the Discourses of Poetics and Literature,” April Pierce, Univ. of Oxford

5:15-6:30

131. The Musics of Chicago

Chicago H, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING: Shawn Higgins, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

1. “Sweet Home Chicago? (Dis)Locating the American ‘Race Record’ in High Fidelity,” Jürgen E. Grandt, Univ. of North Georgia

2. “Experiment and Exodus in the Music of Chicago,” Toshiyuki Ohwada, Keio Univ.

3. “Fly Girls or Blackface? The Racial and Gender Politics of Lupe Fiasco,” Jorge Santos, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

141. Enduring Noise: Sound and Sexual Difference

Illinois, Chicago Marriott

PRESIDING: Rizvana Bradley, Emory Univ.

1. “Listening to Gertrude Stein’s Repeating: Sonorous Temporality in The Making of Americans,” Erin McNellis, Univ. of California, Irvine

2. “Queer Extensities: Pauline Oliveros and Disco,” Amalle Dublon, Duke Univ.

3. “Metal, Reproduction, and the Politics of Doom,” Aliza Shvarts, New York Univ.

RESPONDING: Rizvana Bradley

7:00-8:15 pm

162. Girls and the F Word: Twenty-First-Century Representations of Women’s Lives

Los Angeles–Miami, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Tahneer Oksman, Marymount Manhattan Coll.

1. “‘My Shoes Match My Dress . . . Kind Of!’: The Politics of Dressing and Nakedness in Girls,” Laura Scroggs, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities

2. “She’s Just Not That into You: Girls, Dating, and Damage,” Jennifer Mitchell, Weber State Univ.

3. “Dancing on My Own: Popular Music and Issues of Identity in Girls,” Chloe H. Johnson, York Univ., Keele

RESPONDING: Nancy K. Miller, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

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“Untitled” by Flickr user d76, CC-BY-NC-2.0

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2014

8:30 am-9:45 am

207. Diversifying the Victorian Verse Archives

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Meredith Martin, Princeton Univ.

1. “Recovering Tennyson’s ‘Melody in Poetry’: Salon Recitations and Musical Settings,” Phyllis Weliver, Saint Louis Univ.

2. “Morris Metrics: The Work of Meter in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Yopie Prins, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

3. “Digital Archives and the Music of Victorian Poetry,” Joanna Swafford, Univ. of Virginia

For abstracts, visit https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/diversifying-the-victorian-verse-archives/

213. Twenty-First-Century Pedagogies

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on the Two-Year College 

PRESIDING: Stacey Lee Donohue, Central Oregon Community Coll.

1. “Not on Wikipedia: Making the Local Visible,” Laurel Harris, Queensborough Community Coll., City Univ. of New York

2. “Survival Spanish Online: Designing a Community College Course That Bridges Culture and Authentic Connections,” Cecilia McGinniss Kennedy, Clark State Community Coll., OH

3. “Sound Essays: A Cure for the Common Core,” Kathryn O’Donoghue, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

4. “Leveling Up! Gamifying the Literature Classroom,” Jessica Lewis-Turner, Temple Univ., Philadelphia

For abstracts, visit commons.mla.org/groups/the-two-year-college/announcements/ after 15 Dec.

217. Cuba on Stage

Arkansas, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Production 

PRESIDING: Vicky Unruh, Univ. of Kansas

1. “José Triana, Virgilio Piñera, and the Racial Erotics of Cuban Tragedy,” Armando Garcia, Univ. of Pittsburgh

2. “Estorino’s Gray Ghosts,” David Lisenby, Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York

3. “Musical Trangressions on the Cuban Stage: Rap, Rock, and Reggaeton,” Elena Valdez, Swarthmore Coll.

4. “Locating the Malecón,” Bretton White, Colby Coll.

221. Singing Out in the American Literary Experience

Old Town, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Folklore and Literature 

PRESIDING: Mark Allan Jackson, Middle Tennessee State Univ.

1. “Re-sounding Folk Voice, Remaking the Ballad: Alan Lomax, Margaret Walker, and the New Criticism,” Derek Furr, Bard Coll.

2. “‘A Voice to Match All That’: Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and Lynching’s Sound Track,” Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York

3. “Stunting Gualinto: The Limits of Corrido Heroism in Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez,” Melanie Hernandez, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

For abstracts, write to majackso@mtsu.edu.

10:15-11:30

261. Applying Linguistics to the Learning of Middle Eastern Languages

Huron, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on General Linguistics 

PRESIDING: Terrence Potter, Georgetown Univ.

1. “How Strategic Can They Be? Differences between Student and Instructor Attitudes toward Language Learning Strategies,” Gregory Ebner, United States Military Acad.

2. “Needs-Analysis Informed Task Design in Arabic Foreign Language Programs in the United States: Insights from Learner Perceptions and Production,” Maimoonah Al Khalil, King Saud Univ., Riyadh

3. “Linguistic Advantages and Constraints in the Classroom: Judeo-Spanish as an L2,” Bryan Kirschen, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

For abstracts, write to tmp28@georgetown.edu.

263. John Clare: The Voices of Nature

Chicago C, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the John Clare Society of North America 

PRESIDING: Rochelle Johnson, Coll. of Idaho

1. “Speaking for the Trees: Margaret Cavendish, John Clare, and Voicing Nature,” Bridget Mary Keegan, Creighton Univ.

2. “Clare’s Air: Sound in Motion,” Paul Chirico, Univ. of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Coll.

3. “John Clare: The Unusual and Challenging Natural Historian,” Eric H. Robinson, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

269A. Chicago Latina/o Writing: A Creative Conversation

Sheraton I, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Office of the Executive Director 

PRESIDING: Ariana Ruiz, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

SPEAKERS: Rey Andújar, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe

Brenda Cárdenas, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Paul Martínez Pompa, Triton Coll.

Achy Obejas, Chicago, IL

270. Women’s Education in Third World Countries

Parlor G, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture and Society 

PRESIDING : Shirin E. Edwin, Sam Houston State Univ.

1. “Narrative Approaches to Transmitting Regional Oral and Instrumental Literary Traditions in the Works of Aminata Sow Fall,” Julie Ann Huntington, Marymount Manhattan Coll.

2. “Gender, Class, and Education: Intersections in South Asian Literature,” Maryse Jayasuriya, Univ. of Texas, El Paso

3. “Women’s Schooling in Clarice Lispector’s Narrative: A Brazilian Education,” Alejandro E. Latinez, Sam Houston State Univ.

279. Dadaphone: Indeterminacy in Words and Music

Huron, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations and the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism 

PRESIDING : Jeff Dailey, Five Towns Coll.

1. “Black Dada,” Kathy Lou Schultz, Univ. of Memphis

2. “Aleatory Adaptation and Indeterminate Interpretation: Radiohead’s In Rainbows as Faustian Rock Opera,” Meg Tarquinio Roche, Northeastern Univ.

3. “Game Changer: Cage’s Word-Music Combination in ‘Renunion’ and ‘Solo 23,’” Sydney Boyd, Rice Univ.

4. “Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music and Its Debt to Dada,” Laura Prichard, Univ. of Massachusetts, Lowell

For abstracts, visit lyricasociety.org.

5:15 pm-6:30 pm

384. Literary Crossroads: African American Literature and Christianity

Addison, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Conference on Christianity and Literature and the Division on Literature and Religion 

PRESIDING: Katherine Clay Bassard, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.

1. “God’s Trombones, the Social Gospel, and the Harlem Renaissance,” Jonathan Fedors, Univ. of Pennsylvania

2. “When the Gospel Sings the Blues in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Claudia Rosemary May, Univ. of California, Berkeley

3. “Faith Moves: Belief and the Body in Bill T. Jones’s Chapel/Chapter and Toni Morrison’sParadise,” Leslie Elizabeth Wingard, Coll. of Wooster

For abstracts, write to kcbassar@vcu.edu.

403. Words, Works, and New Archives: Studying African American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the College Language Association 

PRESIDING : Warren Carson, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg

1. “The Field and Function of African American Literary Scholarship: A Memorial and a Challenge,” Dana A. Williams, Howard Univ.

2. “The Black Book: Creating an Interactive Research Environment,” Kenton Rambsy, Univ. of Kansas

3. “Keepin’ It Interactive: Hip-Hop in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” Regina Bradley, Kennesaw State Univ.; Jeremy Dean, Rap Genius, Inc.

414. Literature and Media in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature 

PRESIDING : Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

SPEAKERS: Jonathan Elmer, Indiana Univ., Bloomington

Teresa Alice Goddu, Vanderbilt Univ.

Naomi Greyser, Univ. of Iowa

Brian Hochman, Georgetown Univ.

Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette

Lauren A. Neefe, Stony Brook Univ., State Univ. of New York

For project statements, panelist biographies, and description of roundtable format, visit19thcamlitdiv.wordpress.com after 1 Dec.

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“Cubs Stomp” by Flickr user John W. Iwanski, CC-BY-NC-2.0

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2014

8:30 am-9:45 am

441. Socialist Senses

Ohio, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Slavic Literatures and Cultures 

PRESIDING : Nancy Condee, Univ. of Pittsburgh

1. “The Materiality of Sound: Esfir Shub’s Haptic Cinema,” Lilya Kaganovsky, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

2. “From the Cinema of Attractions to the Cinema of Affect in Early Socialist Realism,” R. J. D. Bird, Univ. of Chicago

3. “Ineluctable Modality of the Visible: Gorky’s Return and the Onset of Clarity,” Petre M. Petrov, Princeton Univ.

For abstracts, visit mlaslavic.blogspot.com/ after 30 Dec.

447. The Seventies in Black and White: A Soundtrack

Purdue-Wisconsin, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Jack Hamilton, Harvard Univ.

1. “Mutts of the Planet: Joni Mitchell Channels Charles Mingus,” David Yaffe, Syracuse Univ.

2. “Righteous Minstrels: Race, Writing, and the Clash,” Jack Hamilton

3. “Broken Masculinities: Black Sound, White Men, and New York City,” Scott Poulson-Bryant, Harvard Univ.

10:15 am-11:30 am

474. African American Voices from the Civil War

Michigan–Michigan State, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Timothy Sweet, West Virginia Univ., Morgantown

1. “The Color of Quaintness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Song, and American Union,”Jeremy Wells, Indiana Univ. Southeast

2. “‘If We Ever Expect to Be a Pepple’: The Literary Culture of African American Soldiers,” Christopher A. Hager, Trinity Coll., CT

3. “‘And Terrors Broke from Hill to Hill’: The Civil War Poems of George Moses Horton,” Faith Barrett, Duquesne Univ.

4. “The Negro in the American Rebellion: William Wells Brown and the Design of African American History,” John Ernest, Univ. of Delaware, Newark

485. Digital Practice: Social Networks across Borders

Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century German Literature 

PRESIDING : Stefanie Harris, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

1. “Kafka and the Kafkaesques: Close Reading Online Fan Fiction,” Bonnie Ruberg, Univ. of California, Berkeley

2. “Network Politics, Wireless Protocols, and Public Space,” Erik Born, Univ. of California, Berkeley

3. “Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media: Bandista,” Ela Gezen, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Responding: Yasemin Yildiz, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

For abstracts, visit german.berkeley.edu/transit.

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

508. Performing Blackness in the Nineteenth Century

Chicago A–B, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature 

PRESIDING : Harvey Young, Northwestern Univ.

1. “Being Touched: Sojourner Truth’s ‘Spiritual Theatre’ and the Genealogy of Radical Black Activism,” Jayna Brown, Univ. of California, Riverside

2. “Frederick Douglass and the ‘Claims’ of Democratic Individuality in Antebellum Political Theory,” Douglas Jones, Princeton Univ.

3. “’Dey Make Me Say Dat All De Time: Performance Art, Objecthood, and Joice Heth’s Sonic of Dissent,” Uri McMillan, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

509. Becoming Chroniclers: Latin American Women Writers and the Press, 1920–73

Parlor F, Sheraton Chicago 

PRESIDING : Vicky Unruh, Univ. of Kansas

1. “The Opportunities of Technology: Cube Bonifant’s Radiophonic Chronicles in El universal ilustrado,” Viviane A. Mahieux, Univ. of California, Irvine

2. “Key Moments in the Subversion of a Genre: Alfonsina Storni and Clarice Lispector Redefine Womanhood,” Mariela Méndez, Univ. of Richmond

3. “Issues of Gender and Genre: Isabel Allende and Clarice Lispector Writing Chronicles, 1968–73,” Claudia Mariana Darrigrandi, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

1:45 pm-3:00pm

572. Illness and Disability Memoir as Embodied Knowledge

Los Angeles–Miami, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession 

PRESIDING : Rachel Adams, Columbia Univ.

1. “Recoding Silence: Teresa de Cartagena, Medieval Sign Lexicons, and Deaf Life Writing,” Jonathan H. Hsy, George Washington Univ.

2. “‘Twisted and Deformed’: Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Crip-Feminist Autobiography,” Cynthia Barounis, Washington Univ. in St. Louis

3. “‘My Worry Now Accumulates’: Sensorial and Emotional Contagion in Autistic Life Writing,” Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell Coll.

For papers or abstracts, write to rea15@columbia.edu after 1 Jan.

3:30 pm-4:45 pm

586. Early Modern Media Ecologies

Great America, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING: Jen Boyle, Coastal Carolina Univ.

1. “Needlework Networks: Paper, Prints, and Female Authorship,” Whitney Trettien, Duke Univ.

2. “Sidney Circularities: Music and Script in the Contrafactum Lyric,” Scott A. Trudell, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

3. “Stage, Stall, Street, Sheet: Multimedia Shakespeare,” Adam G. Hooks, Univ. of Iowa

For abstracts, visit www.scotttrudell.com.

591. Multilingualism in Native American and Aboriginal Texts

Kane, Chicago Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on American Indian Literatures 

PRESIDING : Beth H. Piatote, Univ. of California, Berkeley

1. “Reading Resistance and Resisting Readings in a Bilingual Text,” Laura J. Beard, Univ. of Alberta

2. “Narrative and Orthography in Cree Oral Histories,” Stephanie J. Fitzgerald, Univ. of Kansas

3. “Ongwe Onwe Languages in the Fourth Epoch of Iroquois History,” Penelope M. Kelsey, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder

4. “Poetics of ka ‘āina and na ‘ōiwi: Language(s) of Land, Earth, and the Hawaiian People in Haunani-Kay Trask’s Night Is a Sharkskin Drum,” Nicole Tabor, Moravian Coll.

5:15 pm-6:30 pm

624. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in Medieval and Early Modern England: Form and History

Old Town, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Ian Cornelius, Yale Univ.

1. “Singing and Speaking Boethius in Anglo-Saxon England,” Anne Schindel, Yale Univ.

2. “Sensible Prose and the Sense of Meter: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Boethius and After,” Eleanor Johnson, Columbia Univ.

3. “Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and an Expansive Theology in the Late Sixteenth Century: Queen Elizabeth’s Translation in Context,” Linda Suzanne Shenk, Iowa State Univ.

For abstracts, write to ian.cornelius@yale.edu.

625. Verbal and Visual Satire in the Nineteenth Century

Chicago F, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Joseph Litvak, Tufts Univ.

1. “Organizing Anarchy: Class, Intellectual Property, and Graphic Satire,” Jason Kolkey, Loyola Univ., Chicago

2. “The Reemergence of Radical Satire in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Frank A. Palmeri, Univ. of Miami

3. “Turn-of-the-Century Satirical Plots of Fenian and Anarchist Terrorism,” Jennifer Malia, Norfolk State Univ

645. Current Issues in Romance Linguistics

Parlor F, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Comparative Romance Linguistics 

PRESIDING : Andrea Perez Mukdsi, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York

1. “Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the Oral and Written Tradition,” Martin Hummel, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

2. “Pronouns and the Author-Reader Relationship in Academic Portuguese,” Karina Veronica Molsing, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Cristina Perna, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul

3. “The Semantic Feature [+INFLUENCE] and the Spanish Subjunctive,” M. Emma Ticio Quesada, Syracuse Univ.

4. “Palatalization in Chilean Spanish and Proto-romance,” Carolina Gonzalez, Florida State Univ.

For abstracts, write to perezmukdsi@gmail.com.

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“Mayb Your New Year Be Merry and Bright…” by Flickr user Jason Mrachina, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2014

12:00 pm-1:15 pm

742. Socialist Culture in the Age of Disco: East European Popular Pleasures

Parlor F, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 

PRESIDING: Jessie M. Labov, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

1. “Imperial Disco: Czeslaw Milosz and Science Fiction,” Mikolaj Golubiewski, Free Univ.

2. “The ‘Movement of Writing Workers’ and State Stability in the 1970s German Democratic Republic,” William Waltz, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

3. “Flaming Socialist Creatures: Hippies as Auteurs in Soviet Latvia,” Mark Svede, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

For abstracts, visit mlaslavic.blogspot.com/.

744. Mass versus Coterie: The Audiobook

Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Prose Fiction 

PRESIDING : Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

1. “‘Fully Fleshed Out and Filled with Emotion’: Accent, Region, and Identification in the Reception of The Help,” Sydney Bufkin, Univ. of Texas, Austin

2. “Joyce, LibriVox, and the Recording Coterie,” Brandon Walsh, Univ. of Virginia

3. “Alien Stereo: China Mieville’s Embassytown,” Christopher Pizzino, Univ. of Georgia

1:45 pm-3:00 pm

788. Back Up Your Work: Conceptualizing Writing Support for Graduate Students

Grace, Chicago Marriott 

PRESIDING : Liana Silva-Ford, Houston, TX

SPEAKERS:

Tara Betts, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York;

Lee Ann Glowzenski, Duquesne Univ.;

Annemarie Pérez, Loyola Marymount Univ.

Abigail Scheg, Elizabeth City State Univ.

792. Old Materials, New Materialisms

Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Methods of Literary Research

1. “Objects, Authors, and Other Matter(s) in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive,” Suzanne M. Bost, Loyola Univ., Chicago

2. “Writing Histories of Listening: Acoustemology as Literary Practice,” Ely Rosenblum, Univ. of Cambridge

3. “Even the Stones Cry Out: Archival Research and the Inhuman Turn,” Andrew Ferguson, Univ. of Virginia

4. “A Life of Its Own: A Vital Materialist Look at the Medieval Manuscript as an Agentic Assemblage,” Angela Bennett Segler, New York Univ.

“my kind of razzmatazz” by Flickr user David D’Agostino, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0

En Espanol siguiente.

Post by Nancy Morales.  Translation by Martha Unzueta-Perez, m.unzueta.perez@gmail.com

My recent experiences—both inside and outside the academy—as a U.S. citizen with an “ivy league education” make it crystal clear to me that I am a brown mujer who will always be criminalized by the state regardless of how many “privileges” I acquire or believe to have obtained through my “hard work.”  I cannot continue my path toward self-determination without acknowledging that the privileges I acquire will not guarantee my protection, let alone my liberation.  In other words, people of color are perpetually vulnerable regardless of their education, wealth, and/or social status. In “Speaking in Tongues: A letter to Third World Women Writers” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldúa explored this notion in her letter to third world women writers, where she expressed that we have never had any privileges and we never will (165).  Anzaldúa makes this statement not to foreclose our dreams but rather to enable our liberation; in essence, we have nothing to lose by imagining other ways of being. If we were to perform as the imagined ideal U.S. citizen under the hetero-normative standards (racial, gender, and sexuality, including sonic markers of citizenship), it would always be at the expense of displacing each other. Privilege is too often misunderstood as a form of protection from displacement and a claim of worthiness as human beings.

Amplifying and extending the resonance of Anzaldúa’s powerful declaration, my scholarship is personally healing because I seek to understand the very modes of knowledge production: how meaningful research is undertaken and actualized, particularly by and for immigrant communities, by exploring how these groups help us imagine new and yet unknown territories wherein our differences are valid. Los Jornaleros del Norte, Radio Ambulante and other immigrant rights folks provide examples of imagining other ways of being, including the production of sonic markers of citizenship that are not state-sanctioned. In other words, they are doing the work of knowing themselves better in order to respect and understand each other. Often, some of the most crucial knowledge production happens through the materiality of sounds and the material impacts of listening practices, both dominant and resistant.

Rallying the Crowd with a Bullhorn, Arizona SB 1070 Protest, May 2010, Image by Flickr User Xomiele

Citizenship is (mis)understood as a privilege that guarantees protection by the nation-state. The current nation-state’s dominant discourse of national security creates draconian federal, state, and local legislation that belie immigrants’ differences. Rising anti-immigrant rhetoric attempts to homogenize both Latinas/os and immigrants as criminals. In other words, such discourse is used to justify the nation-state as the reference point for recognizing a legitimate community. The Department of Homeland Security’s agenda deems who may be tolerable and who is deportable, even if you are a U.S. citizen. Distinguishing, for example, between exceptional students who “deserve to be here” and those who do not, creates a hierarchy of immigrants. Consequently, public discourse over the worthiness of recognition and belonging creates limitations that categorize immigrants in restrictive ways. Similarly, attacks on bilingual education and ethnic studies attempt to displace Latinos as foreign and “alien” within US territories.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman’s “The Noise of SB 1070: or Do I Sound Illegal to You?” provides sonic examples of discrimination to reveal how citizenship is further constructed through sound. The dominant listening ear, as Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman coins, reveals:

how racialized norms about sound exist and circulate through popular culture. As a result dominant groups use sound with impunity to forge “reasonable suspicion” about the citizenship status of anyone who sounds different from them and who creates, consumes, and appreciates sounds differently from them (5).

More importantly we learn that sonic markers of citizenship are just as unreliable as biological/physical ones i.e. racial profiling. One may have an accent or speak Spanish but that doesn’t prove or disprove their citizenship status. However, what we understand more prominently is the various ways brown bodies are displaced through structural racism such as sonic markers of citizenship.

Image by Wikipedia

In order to more fully understand the legacy of the U.S. conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean—of which contemporary anti-terrorist and anti-immigrant rhetorics are an extension—we must recognize how colonizers use language as a weapon that can shame, humiliate and further colonize people of color. bell hooks testifies to this notion in “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” from Tongue-tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education: “standard English is not speech of exile. This is the language of conquest and domination in U.S.” (255).  We often begin to think that we can acquire privileges of upward mobility, class, citizenship or race as our source of protection, particularly through linguistic “passing” (Anzaldúa,“Linguistic Terrorism” Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 217). However, as Anzaldúa explains in “How to Tame a Wild-Tongue” from Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself” (81).  Deborah Vargas’s 2012 book Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press) also explores these issues and comes at an important moment to continue to learn how the power to push the boundaries of heteronormative standards can be understood in Chican@-Laitn@ culture. By dis-placing the dominance of standard English and acknowledging the multiplicity of languages they speak and seek to listen to, Chican@s-Latin@s can begin to acknowledge their wealth of knowledge as meaningful instead of meaningless.

NDLON Banner, Image by Flickr User NDLON

Meaningful Sounds: Dignity and Respect

It is important, then, to recognize the critical work that immigrant rights communities create that push the boundaries of the dominant listening ear, particularly through the inclusion of the vocal materialities of people of color. Such immigrant rights groups mobilize the sounds of immigrant voices not as a neoliberal way of “proving their worthiness” but, like Sebastien de la Cruz, the San Antonio-area ten-year-old who sang the national anthem at game three of the 2013 NBA finals in his mariachi outfit, they use sound to create and amplify fair representations that vocally resist the dominant binaries of foreign/citizen, illegal/legal.

Los Jornaleros offer the people their talent and their love with their music of resistance and struggle

Los Jornaleros del Norte is a musical group that formed out of the struggles of day laborers. They are part of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) where they realize their cultures and languages as forms of resistance. They sing songs in Spanish at protests, rallies, on the radio and in all other public spaces.

In this clip, Los Jornaleros interject their voices to denounce deportations, wage theft and to energize (im)migrant families’ wishes and desires. Through liver performances and Internet circulation, this group amplifies the actual voices of people directly affected by immigration enforcement policies and refuse to be silenced by the dominant American listening ear.

In addition, organizations such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and Education for Fair Consideration (E4FC) use various organizing tools to amplify the voices of immigrant communities. Alongside and in solidarity with E4FC, a network of artists, writers, and filmmakers, including Favianna Rodriguez, actively fight for just immigration reform using sound. These artists are crucial to the defense and protection of immigrant rights and for changing dominant discourses about immigrants as unworthy. For example, La Santa Cecilia, an L.A. band committed to social justice issues, collaborated with NDLON to produce a song in Spanish wherein the music video showcases people affected by un-sound immigration policies.

“ICE/El Hielo”—a multilingual play on the acronym of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—combines visual imagery of immigrants with a multiciplicity of langages, musical styles and vocal tones to help us understand the trauma and pain that immigrant communities endure on a daily level due to the dominant discourse of national security that homogenizes Latina/os and (im)migrant communities as less than human. [Note: The song can also be heard on Sounding Out!’s annual free downloadable mix for 2013. Click here—JSA]

Practices like La Santa Cecilia’s encourage Latinas/os and immigrants—who are often spoken about instead of directly spoken to— to participate in public spaces, including digital spaces. Digital spaces, I believe, can become potential safe spaces that allow Latina/os and immigrant communities to produce their own sounds and to therefore make an alternative claim to belonging that is not predicated upon speaking “Standard” English and/or being “real” American citizens. Through digital outreach, E4FC encourages undocumented youth to share their immigrant stories sonically connect immigration issues on a global scale.

While musical interventions are effective, I use the remainder of this post to address the more nuanced ways in which Latina/o and (im)migrant communities add the sound of their voices to global discourses through storytelling, music, and language(s) in beautiful (though sometimes painful), telling ways. Immigrant communities produce and circulate sounds meaningful to them to contextualize and reveal their differences within Latina/o communities. In other words, they push the boundaries of citizenship through methods of self-organizing that sounds dignity and respect for each other. I argue that sharing their perspectives and stories—here and elsewhere on the Internet—captures more than just a sound bite. 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.

Voz Mob Logo, Image by Flickr User RisetoMovement

For instance, Voces Móviles (VozMob), a collaboration between the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California/ Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) uses SMS technology to document immigrant workers’ voices online.

VozMob enables day laborers and other immigrant communities to use their cell phones as a tool to share their perspectives and become narrators of their own stories via text, images and video.  Users upload their content directly to the VozMob webpage where you can read, see, and/or listen their daily experiences. In this video clip Luis Valentán shares his perspective as a day laborer about immigrant rights.

[Insert Valentán video here]

Rejecting the label of a “Dreamer,” Valentán sounds differences within immigrant communities by encouraging others to recognize that they are “Doers.”  He also pushes the boundaries of an immigrant rights framework that values and respects people who strive for a better life in the face of limited opportunities.

Radio Ambulante also creates a digital space for the voices of people from Latin America and the U.S. It is the first Spanish-language radio program that tells stories where culture and belonging have no borders. The programmers broadcast various thematic episodes highlighting stories that explore differences by using speakers’ primary language(s). This approach, as heard in the November 2013 episode “la palabra prohibida,” enables diverse listeners to hear people who share, and more importantly, complicate notions about cultures, origins, and perceptions of belonging.

In  “la palabra prohibida,” the broadcasters make no attempt to profile the episode’s participants as fitting the “good” or “bad” dichotomy of the immigrant narrative. Instead, Radio Ambulante creates a sonic medium that juxtaposes voices to make human complexity material for its listeners.

Click to play Radio Ambulante,  “la palabra prohibida” episode

It is crucial to continue to understand the power of our voices, housed in their expression and their sound. (Im)migrant communities have a wealth of knowledge in their lived experiences, and they tell it well through these digital and public spaces, showing us how knowledge is produced not only through words and sounds, but in the powerful relationship between them.  By further amplifying immigrant voices in new sites, both “traditional” and digital, I continue the important work they have begun, helping us to realize where and when the power of our sounds resonates as a catalyst to mobilize people beyond perceived borders, where we all have the right to migrate and the right to just be.

—

Featured Image by Flickr User Claudia A. De La Garza, 5-6-06

—

Nancy Morales is a faculty lecturer for the Latina/o Studies minor in the Center for the Study for Culture, Race and Ethnicity (CSCRE) at Ithaca College. Morales has research interests in U.S third world feminist theory, immigration policy, labor relations, critical ethnic studies, cultural and sound studies. She focuses on how Latina/o workers and immigrant workers have been excluded from the ranks of the working-class because of their racial, cultural, gender and immigration-status differences. She received a B.A. in Social Psychology from UC Santa Cruz and a Master’s from Cornell’s Institute for Public Affairs with a minor in Latina/o Studies. Morales has done research for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) in order to further explore how race and gender become necessary for understanding workers’ struggles within the Immigration, Labor, and Civil Rights Movements.

—

Óyeme Voz”: Comunidades Latinas y Inmigrantes de EE. UU. Resuenan Ciudadanía y Pertenecer 

Post by Nancy Morales.  Translation by Martha Unzueta-Perez, m.unzueta.perez@gmail.com

Mis experiencias recientes—tanto dentro como fuera de la academia—como una ciudadana de Estados Unidos con una educación “Ivy League” lo hace muy claro que soy una mujer de color que siempre va ser criminalizada por el estado sin importar cuantos “privilegios” adquiero o creer haber obtenido a través de mi “trabajo duro.”  Yo no puedo continuar mi camino hacia la autodeterminación sin reconocer que los privilegios que adquiero no me garantizaran mi protección y mucho menos mi liberación.  En otras palabras, las personas de color son perpetuamente vulnerables sin importar su educación, riquezas y/o estatus social.   En “Speaking in Tongues: A letter to Third World Women Writers” en  This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldúa explora esta noción en su carta a escritoras del tercer mundo, donde expreso que nunca hemos tenido ningún privilegio y nunca lo tendremos (165).  Anzaldúa hace esta declaración no para anular nuestros sueños sino más bien para hacer posible nuestra liberación; en esencia, no tenemos nada que perder al imaginar otras formas de ser.  Si fuéramos a actuar como el imaginado ciudadano ideal de Estados Unidos bajo las normas hetero-normativas (racial, genero y sexualidad, incluyendo señales sónicas de la ciudadanía), siempre seria al costo de desplazarnos el uno al otro.   El privilegio a menudo es mal entendido como una forma de protección de desplazamiento y una reclamación de merecimiento como seres humanos.

Amplificar y extender la resonancia de la poderosa declaración de Anzaldúa, mi trabajo académico me ayuda personalmente a sanar porque yo busco a entender los modos de producción de conocimiento: cómo la investigación significativa es emprendida y actualizada, particularmente por y para las comunidades de inmigrantes, al explorar cómo estos grupos nos ayudan a imaginar nuevos y aún desconocidos territorios donde nuestras diferencias son validas.  Los Jornaleros del Norte, Radio Ambulante y otras personas de los derechos de inmigrantes proporcionan ejemplos de imaginarse otras formas de ser, incluyendo la producción de señales sónicas de la ciudadanía que no son sancionados por el estado.  En otras palabras, están haciendo el trabajo de conocerse mejor para respetarse y entenderse.  Frecuentemente, alguna de la producción de conocimiento más importante ocurre a través de la materialidad de los sonidos y los impactos materiales de las prácticas de escuchar tanto dominante y resistente.

Rallying the Crowd with a Bullhorn, Arizona SB 1070 Protest, May 2010, Image by Flickr User Xomiele

La ciudadanía es (mal) entendida como un privilegio que garantiza la protección por la nación-estado.  El discurso dominante actual de la nación-estado de la seguridad nacional crea una legislación draconiana federal, estatal y local que desmienten las diferencias de los inmigrantes. La creciente retórica anti-inmigrante intenta homogeneizar tanto los latinos e  inmigrantes como criminales.  En otras palabras, tal discurso es utilizado para justificar la nación-estado como un punto de referencia para reconocer una comunidad legitima. La agenda del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional considera quien puede ser tolerable y quien puede ser deportado, aún si usted es un ciudadano estadounidense. Distinguir, por ejemplo, entre los estudiantes excepcionales que “merecen estar aquí” y aquellos que no, crea una jerarquía de los inmigrantes. Consecuentemente, el discurso publico sobre el merecimiento de reconocer y pertenecer que categorizan a los inmigrantes en maneras restrictivas. Similarmente, los ataques contra la educación bilingüe y los estudios étnicos  intentan desplazar a los latinos como extranjeros y “alien” en los territorios estadounidenses.

El artículo “The Noise of SB 1070: or Do I Sound Illegal to You?” de Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman proporciona ejemplos sónicos de discriminación para revelar como la ciudadanía se construye aún más a través del sonido. El oído dominante, como Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman revela:

Como las normas racializadas sobre el sonido existen y circulan a través de la cultura popular. Como resultado grupos dominantes utilizan el sonido con impunidad parar forjar una “sospecha razonable” sobre el estatus de la ciudadanía de cualquier persona que se escucha diferente a ellos y que crea, consume y aprecia los sonidos de manera diferente a ellos (5).

Más importante nosotros aprendemos que las señales sónicas de ciudadanía son tan poco fiables como los biológicas/físicas, es decir discriminación racial. Uno puede tener un acento o hablar español pero eso no demuestra su estatus de ciudadanía. Sin embargo, lo que nosotros entendemos de manera más prominente es las diferentes formas en que la gente de piel morena es desplazada a través del racismo estructural tal como señales sónicas de la ciudadanía.

Image by Wikipedia

Para entender más completamente el legado de la conquista de EE.UU. de America Latina y el Caribe—de cual la retórica contemporánea anti-terrorista y anti-inmigrante son una extensión—nosotros debemos reconocer cómo los colonizadores utilizaron el lenguaje como un arma que pude avergonzar, humillar y colonizar aun más a la gente de color. bell hooks atestigua a esta noción en “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” del Tongue-tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education: el ingles estándar no es el habla de exilio. Este es el lenguaje de conquista y dominación en los EE.UU.” (255).  A menudo empezamos a pensar que podemos adquirir privilegios de movilidad hacia arriba, clase, ciudadanía o raza como nuestra fuente de protección, en particular “pasando” lingüísticamente (Anzaldúa, “Linguistic Terrorism” Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 217). Sin embargo, cómo Anzaldúa explica en “How to Tame a Wild-Tongue” de Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “Hasta que yo pueda tener orgullo en mi lenguaje, no puedo tener orgullo en mi mismo.  Hasta que yo pueda aceptar como legitimo el español chicano tejano, tex-mex y todos los otros idiomas que hablo, No puedo aceptar la legitimidad de mí mismo” (81).  Deborah Vargas’s 2012 libro Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press) también explora estas cuestiones y llega a un momento importante para continuar a aprender como el poder de empujar los limites de las normas hetero-normativas  pueden ser entendidas en la cultura chincan@s-latin@s. Al descolocar el dominio del ingles estándar y reconocer la multiplicidad de los lenguajes que hablan y buscan escuchar,  chican@s-latin@s pueden comenzar a reconocer su riqueza de conocimiento como significativo en vez sin sentido.

NDLON Banner, Image by Flickr User NDLON

Sonidos Significativos: Dignidad y Respeto

Es importante, luego, reconocer el trabajo crítico que las comunidades de derechos de inmigrantes crean que empuje los límites del oído dominante, particularmente a través de la inclusión de las materialidades vocales de la gente de color.  Tales grupos de derechos de inmigrantes movilizan los sonidos de las voces de los inmigrantes no como una forma neoliberal de  “demostrar su merecimiento” pero, como Sebastien de la Cruz, el niño de diez años de edad de San Antonio que canto el himno nacional para el tercer juego de la final 2013 del NBA en su traje de mariachi, ellos utilizaron el sonido para crear y amplificar una justa presentación que vocalmente resiste binarios dominantes de extranjero/ciudadano, ilegal/legal.

Los Jornaleros ofrecen a la gente su talento y su amor con su música de resistencia y lucha

Los Jornaleros del Norte es un grupo musical que fue formado de las luchas de los jornaleros. Ellos son parte del National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) donde ellos realizan sus culturas y lenguajes como formas de resistencia. Ellos cantan canciones en español en las protestas, en mítines, en el radio y en todos otros espacios públicos.

En este clip, Los Jornaleros interponen sus voces para denunciar las deportaciones, el robo de salarios y energizar los deseos de las familias in(migrantes). A través de actuaciones animadas y la circulación de Internet, este grupo amplifica las voces actuales de la gente directamente afectada por las políticas de inmigración y se niegan a ser silenciados por el oído dominante Americano.

Además, organizaciones como el National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) y Education for Fair Consideration (E4FC) utilizan varias herramientas de organización para amplificar las voces de las comunidades de inmigrantes.  Junto y en solidaridad con E4FC, una red de artistas, escritores y cineastas, incluyendo Favianna Rodríguez, luchan activamente para una reforma de inmigración justa utilizando el sonido. Estos artistas son cruciales para la defensa y protección de los derechos de inmigrantes y por cambiar los discursos dominantes sobre inmigrantes que son vistos sin dignidad. Por ejemplo, La Santa Cecilia, una banda local en Los Ángeles comprometida a la cuestiones de justicia social, colaboro con la organización NDLON para producir una canción en español en el que el video musical muestra las personas afectadas por las políticas poco acertadas.

“ICE/El Hielo”—una obra de teatro multilingüe sobre las siglas de la Oficina de Inmigración y Aduana d EE.UU. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)—combina una imagen visual de inmigrantes con una multiplicidad de lenguajes, estilos musicales  y tonos vocales  para ayudarnos a entender el trama y dolor que las comunidades de  inmigrantes perduran a diario debido al discurso dominante de la seguridad nacional que homogeniza a las comunidades latinas y (in)migrantes como menos que humanos. [Editor’s Note: La canción también puede escucharse y descargarse en el mix anual gratuito de Sounding Out! para el 2013. Haga clic aqui—JSA]

Prácticas como la de La Santa Cecilia animan a los latinos e inmigrantes—que a menudo se habla de ellos en vez de directamente hablar con ellos— a participar en espacios públicos, incluyendo espacios digitales.  Los espacios digitales, yo creo, pueden convertirse en potenciales espacios seguros que permite a las comunidades latinas e inmigrantes a producir su propio sonido y por lo tanto hacer una reclamación alternativa a pertenecer  que no se predica al hablar en ingles “estándar” y/o ser un ciudadano americano “real.” A través del alcance digital, el E4FC anima a la juventud indocumentada a compartir sus historias de inmigrantes sónicamente para conectar los temas de inmigración a un nivel global.

Mientras intervenciones musicales son efectivas, yo utilizo el resto de este articulo para hablar sobre las formas más matizadas en la cual las comunidades latinas e de (in)migrantes agregan el sonido de sus voces a discursos globales a cuentos, música y lenguaje(s) en maneras bellas (y a veces dolorosas) de contar.  Las comunidades inmigrantes producen y circulan sonido significante a ellos para contextualizar sus diferencias entre las comunidades latinas. En otras palabras, ellos empujan los límites de la ciudadanía a través de métodos de auto-organización que se escucha con dignidad y respeto para uno al otro. Yo sostengo que compartir sus perspectivas y historias—aquí y en otros lugares en el Internet—captura más que una picadura de sonido. El sonido de “voces cotidianas” movilizadas contra—y comentando sobre—los intentos de la nación-estado para marcar las comunidades inmigrantes como vulnerables causa una impactante y profunda agencia material.

Voz Mob Logo, Image by Flickr User RisetoMovement

Por ejemplo, Voces Móviles (VozMob), una colaboración entre La Escuela de Annenberg en Universidad del Sur  de California (University of Southern California’s Annenberg School) y el Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (Institute of Popular Education of Southern California – IDEPSCA) utiliza la tecnología SMS para documentar la voces de los trabajadores inmigrantes en la Internet.

VozMob permite a los jornaleros y otras comunidades inmigrantes a utilizar sus teléfonos celulares como una herramienta para compartir sus perspectivas y convertirse en narradores de sus propias historias vía texto, imágenes y video.  Usuarios suben su contenido directamente a la pagina Web VozMob webpage donde uno puede leer, ver y/o escuchar sus experiencias diarias. En este videoclip Luis Valentán comparte su perspectiva como un jornalero sobre los derechos de inmigrantes.

[Insert Valentán video here]

Al rechazar la descripción de “Soñador,” Valentán sonora las diferencias entre las comunidades inmigrantes al animar a otros a reconocer que son “Hacedores.”  El también empuje los limites de un marco de derechos de inmigrantes que valora y respeta a las personas que luchan por una vida mejor que enfrentan oportunidades limitadas.

Radio Ambulante también crea un espacio digital para las voces de la gente de América Latina y de EE.UU.  Es el primer programa de radio en español que cuenta las historias donde la cultura y pertenecer no tienen fronteras. Los programadores transmiten varios episodios temáticos destacando historias que exploran diferencias mediante el uso del lenguaje primario. Este enfoque, como se escucho en el episodio de noviembre 2013 “la palabra prohibida,” permite a oyentes diversos a que escuchen a personas que comparten y, más importante, complican las nociones sobre culturas, orígenes y percepciones de querer pertenecer.

Radio Ambulante,  “la palabra prohibida“ 

En “la palabra prohibida,” los locutores no hacen ningún intento a perfilar a los participantes del episodio como una en la dicotomía “buena” o “mala” de la narrativa de inmigrantes. En cambio, Radio Ambulante crea un medio sónico que yuxtapone las voces para hacer material de complejidad humano para sus oyentes.

Es crucial continuar a comprender el poder de nuestras voces, que se encuentran en su expresión y su sonido. Las comunidades (in)migrantes tienen una riqueza de conocimiento en sus experiencias vividas y lo dicen bien a través de estos espacios públicos y digitales, enseñándonos como el conocimiento se produce no solo a través de palabras y sonidos sino en la poderosa relación entre ellos.  Al amplificar aún más las voces inmigrantes en nuevos sitios, tanto “tradicional” y digital, yo continuo la importante labor que han iniciado, ayudándonos a realizar donde y cuando el poder de nuestros sonidos resuenan como un catalizador para movilizar a la gente mas allá de las fronteras percibidas, donde todos tenemos el derecho a migrar y el derecho de ser.

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Nancy Morales es profesora en la especialización de estudios latinos en el Centro para el Estudio de Cultura, Raza y Etnicidad (Center for the Study for Culture, Race and Ethnicity – CSCRE) en el Colegio Ithaca (Ithaca College). Morales tiene intereses de investigación en la teoría feminista del tercer mundo de EE.UU., política de inmigración, relaciones labores, estudios étnicos críticos, estudios culturales y de sonido.  Ella se centra en cómo los trabajadores latinos y trabajadores inmigrantes han sido excluidos del los rangos de la clase obrera por sus diferencias raciales, culturales, del genero y el estatus inmigrante. Ella recibió su licenciatura en psicología social de la Universidad de California Santa Cruz y su maestría del Instituto de Negocios Públicos de la Universidad de Cornell (Cornell University) con una especialización en estudios latinos.  Morales ha realizado investigaciones para la Red de Organización Nacional de Jornaleros (National Day Laborer Organizing Network – NDLON) y para la Alianza Nacional de Trabajadores Domésticos (National Domestic Workers Alliance -NDWA) para poder explorar más a fondo cómo la raza y el género son necesarios para comprender la lucha de los trabajadores dentro de la inmigración, labor y el movimiento de derechos civiles.

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[Editor's Note 01/24/14 10:00 am: this post has been corrected. In response to a critique from DJ Rupture, the author has apologized for an initial misquoting of an article by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, and edited the phrase in question. Please see Comments section for discussion]

Time to ring the bell: this year, Sounding Out! is opening a brand-new stream of content to run on Thursdays. Every few weeks, we’ll be bringing in a new Guest Editor to curate a series of posts on a particular theme that opens up new ground in areas of thought and practice where sound meets media. Most of our writers and editors will be new to the site, and many will be joining us from the ranks of the Sound Studies and Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Groups at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, as well as from the Sound Studies Caucus from the American Studies Association. I’m overjoyed to come on board as SCMS/ASA Editor to help curate this material, working with my good friends here at SO!

For our first Guest series, let me welcome Justin Burton, Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, where he teaches in the Popular Music and Culture program. Justin also serves on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch. We’re honored to have Justin help us launch this new stream.

His series? He calls it The Wobble Continuum. Let’s follow him down into the low frequencies to learn more …

Neil Verma

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Things have gotten wobbly. The cross-rhythms of low-frequency oscillations (LFO) pulsate through dance and pop music, bubbling up and dropping low across the radio dial. At its most extreme, the wobble both rends and sutures, tearing at the rhythmic and melodic fabric of a song at the same time that it holds it together on a structural level. In this three-part series, Mike D’Errico, Christina Giacona, and Justin D Burton listen to the wobble from a number of vantage points, from the user plugged into the Virtual Studio Technology (VST) of a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to the sounds of the songs themselves to the listeners awash in bass tremolos. In remixing these components—musician, music, audience—we trace the unlikely material activities of sounds and sounders.

In our first post, Mike will consider the ways a producer working with a VST is not simply inputting commands but is collaborating with an entire culture of maximalism, teasing out an ethics of brostep production outside the usual urge for transcendence. In the second post, Christina will listen to the song “Braves” by a Tribe Called Red (ATCR), which, through its play with racist signifiers, remixes performer and audience, placing ATCR and its listeners in an uncanny relationship. In the final post, Justin will work with Karen Barad’s theory of posthuman performativity to consider how the kind of hypermasculinist and racist signifiers discussed in Mike’s and Christina’s pieces embed themselves in listening bodies that become sounding bodies. In each instance, we wade into the wobble listening for the flow of activity among the entanglement of producer, sound, and listener while also keeping our ears peeled for the cross-rhythms of (hyper)masculinist and racist materials that course through and around the musical phenomena.

So hold on tight. It’s about to drop.

Justin Burton

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As an electronic dance music DJ and producer, an avid video gamer, a cage fighting connoisseur, and a die-hard Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fan, I’m no stranger to fist pumps, headshots, and what has become a general cultural sensibility of “hardness” associated with “bro” culture. But what broader affect lies behind this culture? Speaking specifically to recent trends in popular music, Simon Reynolds describes a “digital maximalism,” in which cultural practice involves “a hell of a lot of inputs, in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs, in terms of density, scale, structural convolution, and sheer majesty” (“Maximal Nation”). We could broaden this concept of maximalism, both (1) to describe a wider variety of contemporary media (from film to video games and mobile media), and (2) to theorize it as a tool for transducing affect between various media, and among various industries within global capitalism. The goal of this essay is to tease out the ways in which maximalist techniques of one kind of digital media production—dubstep—become codified as broader social and political practices. Indeed, the proliferation of maximalism suggests that hypermediation and hypermasculinity have already become dominant aesthetic forms of digital entertainment.

“DJ Pauly D” by Flickr user Eva Rinaldi, CC-BY-SA-2.0

More than any other electronic dance music (EDM) genre, dubstep—and the various hypermasculine cultures in which it has bound itself—has wholeheartedly embraced “digital maximalism” as its core aesthetic form. In recent years, the musical style has emerged as both the dominant idiom within EDM culture, as well as the soundtrack to various hypermasculine forms of entertainment, from sports such as football and professional wrestling to action movies and first-person shooter video games. As a result of the music’s widespread popularity within the specific cultural space of a post-Jersey Shore “bro” culture, the term “brostep” has emerged as an accepted title for the ultra-macho, adrenaline-pumping performances of masculinity that have defined contemporary forms of digital entertainment. This essay posits digital audio production practices in “brostep” as hypermediated forms of masculinity that exist as part of a broader cultural and aesthetic web of media convergence in the digital age.

CONVERGENCE CULTURES

Media theorist Henry Jenkins defines “convergence culture” as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (Convergence Culture, 2). The most prominent use of “brostep” as a transmedial form comes from video game and movie trailers. From the fast-paced, neo-cyborg and alien action thrillers such as Transformers (2007-present), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), and G.I. Joe (2012), to dystopian first-person shooter video games such as Borderlands (2012), Far Cry 3 (2012), and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2012), modulated oscillator wobbles and bass portamento drops consistently serve as sonic amplifiers of the male action hero at the edge.

Assault rifle barrages are echoed by quick rhythmic bass and percussion chops, while the visceral contact of pistol whips and lobbed grenades marks ruptures in time and space as slow motion frame rates mirror bass “drops” in sonic texture and rhythmic pacing. “Hardness” is the overriding affect here; compressed, gated kick and snare drum samples combine with coagulated, “overproduced” basslines made up of multiple oscillators vibrating at broad frequency ranges, colonizing the soundscape by filling every chasm of the frequency spectrum. The music—and the media forms with which it has become entwined—has served as the affective catalyst and effective backdrop for the emergence of an unabashedly assertive, physically domineering, and adrenaline-addicted “bro” culture.

Film theorist Lorrie Palmer argues for a relational link among gender, technology, and modes of production through hypermasculinity in these types of films and video games. Some definitive features of this convergence of hypermediation and hypermasculinity include an emphasis on “excess and spectacle, the centrality of surface over substance… ADHD cinema… transitory kinetic sensations that decenter spatial legibility… an impact aesthetic, [and] an ear-splitting, frenetic style” (“Cranked Masculinity,” 7). Both Robin James and Steven Shaviro have defined the overall aesthetic of these practices as “post-cinematic”: a regime “centered on computer games” and emphasizing “the logic of control and gamespace, which is the dominant logic of entertainment programming today.” On a sonic level, “brostep” aligns itself with many of these cinematic descriptions. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd describes the style of Borgore, one particular dubstep DJ and producer, as “misogy blow-job beats.” Other commenters have made more obvious semiotic connections between filmic imagery and the music, as Nitsuh Abebe describes brostep basslines as conjuring “obviously cool images like being inside the gleaming metal torso of a planet-sized robot while it punches an even bigger robot.”

“Ultra Music Festival 2013″ by Wikimedia user Vinch, CC-BY-SA-3.0

MASCULINITY AND DIGITAL AUDIO PRODUCTION

While the sound has developed gradually over at least the past decade, the ubiquity of the distinctive mid-range “brostep” wobble bass can fundamentally be attributed to a single instrument. Massive, a software synthesizer developed by the Berlin and Los Angeles-based Native Instruments, combines the precise timbral shaping capabilities of modular synthesizers with the real-time automation capabilities of digital waveform editors. As a VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plug-in, the device exemplifies the inherently transmedial nature of many digital tools, bridging studio techniques between digital audio workstations and analog synthesis, and acting as just one of many control signals within the multi-windowed world of digital audio production. In this way, Massive may be characterized as an intersonic control network in which sounds are controlled and modulated by other sounds through constantly shifting software algorithms. Through analysis of the intersubjective control network of a program such as Massive we are able to hear the convergence of hypermediation and hypermasculinity as aesthetic forms.

“Massive:Electronica” by Flickr user matt.searles, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0

Media theorist Mara Mills details the notion of technical “scripts” embedded both within technological devices as well as user experiences. According to Mills, scripts are best defined as “the representation of users embedded within technology… Designers do not simply ‘project’ users into [technological devices]; these devices are inscribed with the competencies, tolerances, desires, and psychoacoustics of users” (“Do Signals Have Politics?” 338). In short, electroacoustic objects have politics, and in the case of Massive, the politics of the script are quite conventional and historically familiar. The rhythmic and timbral control network of the software aligns itself with what Tara Rodgers describes as a long history of violent masculinist control logics in electronic music, from DJs “battling” to producers “triggering” a sample with a “controller” or “executing” a programming “command” or typing a “bang” to send a signal” (“Towards a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music,” 476).

In Massive, the primary control mechanism is the LFO (low frequency oscillator), an infrasonic electronic signal whose primary purpose is to modulate various parameters of a synthesizer tone. Dubstep artists most frequently apply the LFO to a low-pass filter, generating a control algorithm in which an LFO filters and masks specific frequencies at a periodic rate (thus creating a “wobbling” frequency effect), which, in turn, modulates the cutoff frequency of up to three oscillating frequencies at a time (maximizing the “wobble”). When this process is applied to multiple oscillators simultaneously—each operating at disparate levels of the frequency spectrum—the effect is akin to a spectral and spatial form of what Julian Henriques calls “sonic dominance.” Massive allows the user to record “automations” on the rhythm, tempo, and quantization level of the bass wobble, effectively turning the physical gestures initially required to create and modulate synthesizer sounds—such as knob-turning and fader-sliding—into digitally-inscribed algorithms.

SONIC WARFARE AND THE ETHICS OF VIRTUALITY

By positing the logic of digital audio production within a broader network of control mechanisms in digital culture, I am not simply presenting a hermeneutic metaphor. Convergence media has not only shaped the content of various multimedia but has redefined digital form, allowing us to witness a clear—and potentially dangerous—virtual politics of viral capitalism. The emergence of a Military Entertainment Complex (MEC) is the most recent instance of this virtual politics of convergence, as it encompasses broad phenomena including the use of music as torture, the design of video games for military training (and increasing collaboration between military personnel and video game designers in general), and drone warfare. The defining characteristic of this political and virtual space is a desire to simultaneously redefine the limits of the physical body and overcome those very limitations. The MEC, as well as broader digital convergence cultures, has molded this desire into a coherent hegemonic aesthetic form.

Following videogame theorist Jane McGonigal, virtual environments push the individual to “work at the very limits of their ability” in a state of infinite self-transition (Reality is Broken, 24). Yet, automation and modular control networks in the virtual environments of digital audio production continue to encourage the historical masculinist trope of “mastery,” thus further solidifying the connection between music and military technologies sounded in the examples above. In detailing hypermediation and hypermasculinity as dominant aesthetic forms of digital entertainment, it is not my goal to simply reiterate the Adornian nightmare of “rhythm as coercion,” or the more recent Congressional fears over the potential for video games and other media to cause violence. The fact that music and video games in the MEC are simultaneously being used to reinscribe the systemic violence of the Military Industrial Complex, as well as to create virtual and actual communities (DJ culture and the proliferation of online music and gaming communities), pinpoints precisely its hegemonic capabilities.

“Gear porn” by Flickr user Matthew Trentacoste, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

In the face of the perennial “mastery” trope, I propose that we must develop a relational ethics of virtuality. While it seems to offer the virtue of a limitless infinity for the autonomous (often male) individual, technological interfaces form the skin of the ethical subject, establishing the boundaries of a body both corporeal and virtual. In the context of digital audio production, then, the producer is not struggling against the technical limitations of the material interface, but rather emerging from the multiple relationships forming at the interface between one’s actual and virtual self and embracing a contingent and liminal identity; to quote philosopher Adriana Cavarero, “a fragile and unmasterable self” (Relating Narratives, 84).

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Featured Image:  Skrillex – Hovefestivalen 2012 by Flickr User NRK P3

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Mike D’Errico is a PhD student in the UCLA Department of Musicology and a researcher at the Center for Digital Humanities. His research interests and performance activities include hip-hop, electronic dance music, and sound design for software applications. He is currently working on a dissertation that deals with digital audio production across media, from electronic dance music to video games and mobile media. Mike is the web editor and social media manager for the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, as well as two UCLA music journals, Echo: a music-centered journal and Ethnomusicology Review.

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This post is dedicated to the memory of Amiri Baraka, who passed away on January 9, 2014 in Newark, New Jersey.

I began writing this post while my wife, Sarah, was at a conference on writing curriculum for high school literature. Over the phone one night she asked how to help students better understand the language of Shakespeare, and at a loss for suggestions (not only because I don’t study early modern drama), I recalled my own adolescent struggles with Macbeth, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. I recalled well-intentioned teachers who gave me recordings, telling me that they would help me get an “ear” for Shakespeare’s language—yet all I remember, maybe all I learned, while listening to the Caedmon recording of Macbeth on vinyl, was that, to my mid-1990s ear, Shakespeare (anachronistically) sounded like Star Wars (which appeared 15 years after the 1960 Caedmon album).

My high school confusion has not completely faded when it comes to the sound of recorded poetic language, even more so when the notion of the poet’s voice is thrown into the mix. As opposed to verse recited by actors (the Caedmon Macbeth featured Anthony Quayle), or the sound of the syllables when we read a poem silently to ourselves, I find it tough to parse the idea of the sound of the poem in terms of the poet’s voice because “voice” is a slippery category—a constructed one, contingent upon the given historical moment of inscription and reception. It is tough because this idea of the sound of the poem, located in the voice of the poet, gets complicated with sonic technologies where voice is subject to the shifting conditions of fidelity.

“Record Player” by DeviantArt user SomeAreLove, CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0

The act of listening to recorded poetry thus poses particular analytic challenges, which become more complex when the politics of identity are brought to bear on these questions of voice and poetry. As a site for identity production, the recorded poetry performance projects a mediated voice that is a potential self. The “sound” of this poetic subjectivity is different from recording to recording, even of the same poem. In an effort to work through these complexities, this post takes up three different recordings of Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus,” which offer variations in delivery and performance that each depend upon the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the soundscape that each recording is embedded within.

“Black Dada Nihilismus” is an excellent opportunity to consider the overlapping challenges of voice, performance and the politics of identity in recorded poetry. Published in the early 1960s, this poem was written before Baraka’s shift in politics, which was precipitated by the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, yet the poem anticipates the intersection of aesthetics and politics during the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s into the 70s. This shift can be tracked in the sonic details of the first two recordings, made in 1964 and 1965. In the third version, a 1993 remix by DJ Spooky, we can hear how this shift reverberates beyond its historical moment.

In a statement of poetics included in Donald Allen’s classic 1959 anthology The New American Poetry, Baraka (then Leroi Jones) asked: “HOW YOU SOUND??” How a poet’s poem sounded mattered most for him: “you have to start and finish there … your own voice … how you sound” (425). Primarily referencing the poem on the page, he wasn’t whistling in the dark: often thought of as a vocal performance of language, poetry has a long history with sound. One thread of this history is the Homeric tradition of an “oral poetics,” a tradition where, as Albert Lord notes in The Singer of Tales, socialized performances of poetry were simultaneously modes of composition. The feel of language in the body remained inseparable from the poetry that relayed the heroic tales of the ancient world. In The Sounds of Poetry, Robert Pinsky offers a similar account of sound and voice, suggesting that the “sound” of language, the sensuous play of speech, is the material for poetic composition. Or as Charles Bernstein has it in Close Listening, “poetry needs to be sounded” because it is a way to understand it better (7).

“Le Roi Jones” by Flickr user UIC Digital Collections, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Poetry is often said to be difficult—but how would a poet’s “sounding” of a poem help a listener better understand it, as Bernstein suggests? How is the recorded voice resonating in air different from inert marks on a page? What is the status of that difference? Why or how would the sound recording signify differently than the poem on the silent page? In short, is listening easier than reading? My answer to the final question is a resounding “no.” For me, the challenge is how to consider the recorded poetry performance in both formal and aural terms so as to remain tuned in to the aesthetic and the poetic as well as the social and historical dimensions of a particular poet’s work. This is not easily done.

“Black Dada Nihilismus” was first published in The Dead Lecturer (1964) and later included in Transbluesency (1995). Written in two parts, it asserts a black aesthetic by critiquing the dominance of (white) light in Western art and suggesting a connection between this light, ethnic violence, and religious ideology. This is how the poem opens:

                                        .Against what light
is false what breath
sucked, for deadness.

                                        Murder, the cleansed
purpose, frail, against
God, if they bring him

                                        Bleeding, I would not
forgive, or even call him
black dada nihilismus.

The protestant love, wide windows,
color blocked to Modrian, and the
ugly silent deaths of jews […]

(Transbluesency 97)

Through critique the poem develops the connections between aesthetics and racial dominance and violence. These connections take on different inflections in each recorded version of the poem, and with each inflection another aspect of them is amplified.

The first version is a bootleg of a reading at the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference that was held in Pacific Grove, California, in early August, 1964.

Asilomar Conference Grounds, site of 1964 Negro Writers Conference

In addition to the preamble, where Baraka explains some of the poem’s key terms such as Dada, which he describes as a movement in France (rather than Germany or Switzerland), another sonic detail that marks this as “live” is at the 2:59 minute mark when we hear the flap of a turning page, reminding us that Baraka is treating the poem as a script in these recordings. In this version, the opening lines are sharply delivered, the voice fully pausing at the linebreaks and acutely pronouncing the hard vowels (e.g. “sucked”). Against the continuous background hush of the original reel-to-reel recording, Baraka punches his words into the air, as if trying to find a rhythm between these harder vowels and the softer ones that often denote the poem’s object of critique (e.g. “light”).

The next version is off the A side of New York Art Quartet and Imamu Amiri Baraka (ESP Disk 1965), where the poem’s rhythm is immediately established by the musical accompaniment.

Between the first recording and this one a shift began in Baraka’s development as a poet. The assassination of Malcolm X pushed him to think even more about race, politics, and art. In this version the opening lines, delivered with punch and pause in the bootleg, take on a different register when juxtaposed with the smooth coolness of the quartet. Overall, though, the poem is delivered more militantly here. In the first version the opening lines are delivered forcefully, but ultimately this forcefulness subsides over the course of the reading. The opposite is the case in this studio version that slowly builds to the apex of the poem, the point of most force, this stanza:

Black scream
and chant, scream,
and dull, un
earthly
hollering.

(Transbluesency 99)

In the bootleg, the turn of the page—between “earthly” and “hollering”—interrupts this stanza, and Baraka hesitates and slowly finds his way toward the poem’s close, while in the studio version, the musical accompaniment reaches a fevered pitch here, making it feel as if it is at the edge of the scream that it names. This prepares us for the closing litany of names of black figures of “black dada nihilismus,” which goes like this:

For tambo, willie best, dubois, patrice, mantan, the
bronze buckaroos.

For Jack Johnson, asbestos, tonto, buckwheat,
billie holiday.

(Ibid.)

In the final version, which is DJ Spooky’s remix of the second one, included on the CD Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip (TVT Records 1996), this litany feels more like the outro (that is meant as) against Spooky’s beats and moody reverb.

An aspect of the poem amplified in the remix is the stanzas leading up to the apex stanza of the “black scream.” In a series of tercets that open the second section, the speaker addresses the experience of racial oppression and a growing need to strike back:

The razor. Our flail against them, why
you carry knives? Or brutaled lumps of

heart? Why you stay, where they can
reach? Why you sit, or stand, or walk
in this place, a window on a dark

warehouse […]

(Transbluesency 98)

The “why” is significantly amplified in the remix, forcing us to hear the ironic indictment of the oppressive “light,” not as audible in the other two tracks, explicit in Baraka’s tercets.

“IMG_0433″ by Flickr user Beyond Baroque, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0

The original recordings of these versions of “Black Dada Nihilismus” are each in a different format: vinyl LP, tape-to-tape reel, and CD. I have been working with digitized versions, so the way I am hearing these recordings—through a smooth digitized MP3 file or Youtube clip—is not the same as the crackle of a needle running an LP’s groove or a nearly noiseless laser tracing a CD. These variations in format mean that the different ways these versions individual signify—their respective “sounds”—are flattened out by compression. Despite this loss of material context, Baraka still sounds different in each of these tracks. Each version of Baraka’s poem offers us another iteration of his “voice,” and the poem, but listening to each of them does not necessarily provide a better understanding of it. We are, though, given different sonic experiences that depend upon the purpose of Baraka’s performance, the listener imagined during the reading, and the voice enunciated through the mediated environment.

Some of the voice details do remain consistent across these recordings. For example, the delivery of one of the poem’s most memorable phrase—“Hermes, the/the blacker art”—that occurs toward the close of the poem’s first section is steadily delivered in a lower register, in the hush of an aside, and might be taken as the motif of each of these variations.

“Stage Microphone TTV” by Flickr user Keith Bloomfield, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

A vast archive of recorded poetry exists. Mid-century recording projects by Caedmon and Folkways made “voices” of well-known poets, such as Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas, available for mainstream consumption. More recent anthologies and series like Poetry Speaks and The Voice of the Poet suggest that the “voice of the poet” still holds appeal. The proliferation of online sound archives such as Penn Sound and From the Fishouse further attest to an ongoing investment in recording, storing, and making available sound files of poets reading their work. And this fascination with the “sound” of poetry is not limited to mainstream cultural spheres or web-based archives. Several scholarly collections on this convergence of sound, voice, and poetry such as Bernstein’s already-mentioned Close Listening, Adelaide Morris’s Sound States, and Marjorie Perloff’s and Craig Dworkin’s The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound have appeared over the last decade.

The idea of the sound of the poem, located in the mediated voice of the poet, therefore remains relevant today. In many of these instances, however, the poet’s voice falsely takes on an authoritative “aura,” as Walter Benjamin used that word in his (recently re-translated) “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Benjamin uses “aura” to talk about authenticity in art and how that is lost when images (or sounds) can be reproduced and widely distributed, and this is not a bad thing: “technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work produced becomes the reproduction of work designed to be reproduced” (24). When Benjamin’s concept is applied to recorded poetry, two key points emerge. First, the “sound” of a poet’s voice is the product of technological conditions. Second, just as a book editor makes aesthetic judgments based on a perceived audience, a listener is imagined when a poetry performance is recorded. Too bad I didn’t know this in high school.

“A Poem for Speculative Hipsters by Amiri Baraka” by Flickr user Shawn Calhoun, CC-BY-NC-2.0

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Featured image: “Paula Varjack” by Flickr user Very Quiet, CC-BY-SA-2.0

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John Hyland recently completed his dissertation on sound, poetics, and the black diaspora, titled “Atlantic Reverberations: The Sonic Performances of Black Diasporic Poetries,” at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in a range of journals, such as The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, College Literature, and Borderlands. Recently, he has enjoyed performing with the Buffalo Poets Theater and co-edited a special issue of the poetry journal kadar koli on the relationship between violence and the expressive arts.  

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

Hearing the Tenor of the Vendler/Dove Conversation: Race, Listening, and the “Noise” of Texts-Christina Sharpe

Pretty, Fast, and Loud: The Audible Ali–Tara Betts

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

Welcome back to “The Wobble Continuum,” a three part series here on Sounding Out!. When we last left you, Mike D’Errico had brought us to the intersection of patriarchal cultural norms, music production practices and aesthetics, and the Military Entertainment Complex. His particular focus was on the sounds and practices of brostep (be sure to check out D’Errico’s  SO! Comment Klatsch from last week on gendered sounds, too), and some of those sounds leak through to today’s post from Christina Giacona. Giacona turns her ear to the group A Tribe Called Red in order to hear how they reappropriate and redress the sounds of colonization and racism.

As the series’ title suggests, her essay entails another journey to the low end, where things will once again get wobbly.

Guest Editor Justin D. Burton

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Since first contact, Native Americans have consistently needed to combat the European stereotypes that portray them as inferior and uncivilized. Barraged with echoes of the same handful of Native tropes since Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows, contemporary American society often treats the stereotypical Native American princess, chief, and savage as historical truths, represented recently in Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Tonto in The Lone Ranger. But it is not just the visual image of the Native American that has been stereotyped, so has their sonic sensibility. As documented in the film Reel Injun, Native languages and musics have consistently been “faked” by Hollywood with tricks like backwards English, pig-Latin, and Westernized imaginings of a ubiquitous Native music based on a pan-Indian society that never actually existed. Hollywood often uses Native American music to show a “primitive” society where music’s sole function is to prepare for war. However, the “Indian” drumbeat that accents the first beat of a group of four cannot be found in any traditional Native American or Aboriginal music.

While Native American-directed motion pictures such as Smoke Signals, Powwow Highway, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner finally gave agency to Natives in film, it was the all-Native DJ collective A Tribe Called Red’s self-released album and popularization of the Electric Powwow that directly challenges the perception of Native American music in modern society. In this post, I analyze the sonic composition of ATCR’s song “Braves,” exploring how A Tribe Called Red challenges North American stereotypes of Native Americans through the cultural re-appropriation of racist sounds.

“A Tribe Called Red – Hall 4 (1)” by Flickr user Trans Musicales, CC BY-NC 2.0

After World War I, intertribal powwow gatherings served as a place to celebrate newfound unity among Native Nations returning home from the war. By the 1950s intertribal powwows had spread throughout North America. With the continued strength and importance of the powwow in contemporary Native society, urban Natives in locations like New York City and Ottawa, Canada, have begun to search for ways to create the same sense of unity in urban venues. In 2008, DJs NDN and Bear Witness formed the DJ collective “A Tribe Called Red” and began curating performances in Ottawa the second Saturday of every month called the Electric Powwow: a “wild party” focused on showcasing native talent and aboriginal culture. ATCR’s website describe the music as “ the soundtrack to the contemporary evolution of the powwow.“ Bear elaborates in an interview with NOW magazine, “[the Electric Powwow] was also about creating a space for our community within the club environment.” Hip-hop DJ and turntable champ DJ Shub was invited to join the group in 2010, and the trio spent the next two years evolving the sound of the Electric Powwow into a mash-up of powwow and First Nations music with contemporary club sounds including hip-hop, dubstep, and dance hall.

“Tribe Called Red” by Flickr user Dav Yaginuma, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Much like Fela Kuti’s popularization of Afrobeat in the 1970s, made up of a combination of traditional Nigerian Yoruba polyrhythms with a blend of Western jazz and funk, and Reggaeton’s fusion of Caribbean rhythms with the aesthetics of American hip-hop in the 1990s, the Electric Powwow merges a historically traditional and non-syncretic music with popular and cosmopolitan music in a way that both honors cultural heritage and makes it relevant to a new generation. As NDN points out on Noisey, even their name follows this trend, simultaneously referencing the introduction of Nations at powwows and famous Afrocentric hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. The Electric Powwow events are not just about the creation of a new genre of music, but they also serve as a site for ATCR to speak publicly about aboriginal issues and represent themselves as a contemporary face for the urban Native youth renaissance. ATCR’s music videos and live-show projections extensively sample racist imagery from movies and cartoons including old westerns, Back to the Future III, Bugs Bunny, and Disney’s Peter Pan. As a result of their audio-visual activism, the group has become the unofficial soundtrack for the Idle No More movement, which is attempting to reassert Indigenous sovereignty rights and previously signed treaties in Canada.

By taking both visual and sonic symbols that depict racist stereotypes out of their cultural contexts, ATCR draws attention to both the specific racism of each individual image and the ubiquity of racist stereotypes. In their track “Braves,” A Tribe Called Red takes on the U.S. baseball team the Atlanta Braves by remixing the baseball organization’s Tomahawk Chop anthem, itself adopted from Florida State University.

ATCR’s version transforms the innocuous-sounding chant by showcasing its core as a Hollywood-esque stereotype of Native American song. By re-contextualizing the anthem, “Braves” prompts listeners to reinterpret this facet of American sports culture as a racist pageantry of “savage violence.”

The association of the “war chant,” the motion of the Tomahawk Chop, and the fact that these actions call for one team to attack all make it clear that American sports culture appropriates Native Culture as an example of “savagery” and “uncivilized” behavior. The Tomahawk Chop also forgoes the use of a language-based text entirely and instead chooses to use vocables that cannot be attributed to any particular Native nation, ceremony, or meaning. Like Hollywood’s use of backwards English and the war drumbeat to represent “Indians,” the Tomahawk Chop bears no resemblance to any real Native Nation’s music, acting as yet another imagined primitive stereotype that marginalizes actual Native American music.

On A Tribe Called Red’s SoundCloud page, “Braves”’s description reads, “We wanted to make a song for all the racist and culturally inappropriate sports teams that are still used today!” The group accomplishes this by creating dissonance between contemporary electronic drumbeats and the “traditional” paramilitary marching band arrangement of the “Tomahawk Chop.” “Braves” utilizes a standard dubstep song structure in 4/4 at 140 beats per minute that includes an intro, two main sections that include melodic materials, a breakdown/buildup section, a vocal “drop” which announces and is followed by the climax of the piece, and an outro that brings the track to a close. However, “Braves” does differ from other dubstep songs in the marked separation and interaction between the Tomahawk Chop samples performed by voices and marching band and the composed elements of the song performed as the Wub—a deep, wobbly synthesized sound—and accompanied by a HiHat cymbal pecking away at syncopated rhythms. Even though all the melodic content of “Braves” is based on variations of the Tomahawk Chop melody, ATCR never fully integrates actual samples of the Tomahawk Chop into the composition. The marching band and chant samples are treated as an unwanted and unexpected visitor to a party; they seem important at the entrance, but they are given an increasingly diminished role until they finally exit with a whimper.

Written as a protest against racist sports organizations to help convince them to stop using characterized ceremonies and mascots, “Braves” contains that struggle within the composition itself: dubstep, sounded as the Wub and HiHat, eventually renders the Tomahawk Chop sonically impotent. The “Tribe” drop, when ATCR marks the song by saying “tribe,” acts as the turning point in “Braves.” After this point the Wub and HiHat consistently overwhelm the sampled material. In a standard dubstep song, the tribe drop would be followed by the climax: the strongest, most complex musical section of the piece. However, the Tomahawk Chop sample that follows this drop is immediately swallowed up by a low-pass filter that rubs out the tune, starting with the highest pitched sounds, over the course of sixteen measures, heightening the lower end of the sonic spectrum. Only then does the true climax occur. The Wub and HiHat appear here for the first time without the sample band or vocalizations. After the “Tribe” drop, the samples of the Tomahawk Chop are either dominated by the Wub or swallowed up by low-pass filters and fades.

“Tomahawk” by Flickr user Lorianne DiSabato, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In this way, “Braves” acts as a three-minute sonic story of reappropriation. The marching band arrangement and vocables represent the common stereotypes of Native American music perpetuated by Western Culture. The Wub and HiHat act as disapproving commentary on these stereotypes. “Tribe,” the only word used in the entire song, not only sounds ATCR as a group, but also marks the point in the song when ATCR begins to create their own image of Native music while simultaneously disempowering the strength of the marching band.

Just like the rebel American marching band’s reappropriation of the song Yankee Doodle in the Revolutionary War, A Tribe Called Red employs irony: in order to get the song the audience has to understand the racism, and while that sort of understanding seems to represent a steep learning curve for a culture so saturated in racist stereotypes, it is also exactly the sort of understanding a multicultural nation needs in order to thrive. Like Afrobeat, Reggaeton, and the more recent alternative hip-hop group Das Racist, ATCR is an underground voice within American popular culture that speaks with reverence for its own traditions while challenging the popular perception of race relations and breaking new ground in contemporary art. “Braves” proves that the reappropriation of sonic space is a powerful tool in the fight for cultural agency.

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Featured image: “ATCR 4” by Flickr user MadameChoCho, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Christina Giacona is the Director of the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble and Instructor of Music at the University of Oklahoma. Dedicated to performing and researching the music of her generation, Christina teaches courses in Native American, World, and Popular Music. Since founding the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble in 2007, Christina has commissioned and premiered over twenty new works for the ensemble; run an international composers competition, recorded three albums, and collaborated with DJs, MCs, animators, choreographers, projectionists, and film producers. 

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

“One Nation Under a Groove?: Music, Sonic Borders, and the Politics of Vibration”-Marcus Boon

“Live Electronic Performance: Theory and Practice”-Primus Luta

“Remixing Girl Talk: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Mashups”-Aram Sinnreich

I’m happy to introduce the final post in Guest Editor Justin Burton‘s three part series for SO!, “The Wobble Continuum.” I’ll leave Justin to recap the series and reflect on it a little in his article below, but first I want to express our appreciation to him for his thoughtful curation of this exciting series, the first in the new Thursday stream at Sounding Out!. Thanks for getting the ball rolling!

Next month be sure to watch this space for a preview of sound at the upcoming Society for Cinema & Media Studies meeting in Seattle, and a new four part series on radio in Latin America by Guest Editor Tom McEnaney.

– Neil Verma, Special Editor for ASA/SCMS

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I’m standing at a bus stop outside the Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis, whistling. The tune, “Braves,” is robust, a deep, oscillating comeuppance of the “Tomahawk Chop” melody familiar from my youth (the Braves were always on TBS). There’s a wobbly synthesizer down in the bass, a hi hat cymbal line pecking away at the Tomahawk Chop. This whistled remix of mine really sticks it to the original tune and the sports teams who capitalize on racist appropriations of indigenous cultures. All in all, it’s a sublime bit of musicality I’m bestowing upon the cold Indianapolis streets.

Until I become aware of the other person waiting for the bus. As I glance over at him, I can now hear my tune for what it is. The synthesizer and hi hat are all in my head, the bass nowhere to be heard. This isn’t the mix I intended, A Tribe Called Red’s attempt at defanging the Tomahawk Chop, at re-appropriating stereotypical sounds and spitting them back out on their own terms. Nope, this is just a guy on the street whistling those very stereotypes: it’s the Tomahawk Chop. I suddenly don’t feel like whistling anymore.

*****

As we conclude our Wobble Continuum guest series here at Sounding Out!, I want to think about the connective tissues binding together the previous posts from Mike D’Errico and Christina Giacona, joining A Tribe Called Red and the colonialist culture into which they release their music, and linking me to the guy at the bus stop who is not privy to the virtuosic sonic accompaniment in my head. In each case, I’ll pay attention to sound as material conjoining producers and consumers, and I’ll play with Karen Barad’s notion of performativity to hear the way these elements interact [Jason Stanyek and Ben Piekut also explore exciting possibilities from Barad in “Deadness” (TDR 54:1, 2010)].

“Sound Waves: Loud Volume” by Flickr user Tess Watson, CC BY 2.0

Drawing from physicist Niels Bohr, Barad begins with the fact that matter is fundamentally indeterminate. This is formally laid out in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which notes that the more precisely we can determine (for instance) the position of a particle, the less we can say with certainty about its momentum (and vice versa). Barad points out that “‘position’ only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (eg, a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory, thereby establishing a fixed frame of reference for establishing ‘position’)” (2003, 814).

This kind of indeterminacy is characteristic of sound, which vibrates along a cultural continuum, and which, in sliding back and forth along that continuum, allows us to tune into some information even as other information distorts or disappears. This can feel very limiting, but it can also be exhilarating, as what we are measuring are a variety of possibilities prepared to unfold before us as matter and sound become increasingly unpredictable and slippery. We can observe this continuum in the tissue connecting the previous posts in this series. In the first, Mike D’Errico tunes into the problematic hypermasculinity of brostep, pinpointing the ways music software interfaces can rehash tropes of control and dominance (Robin James has responded with productive expansions of these ideas), dropping some areas of music production right back into systems of patriarchy. In the second post, Giacona, in highlighting the anti-racist and anti-colonial work of A Tribe Called Red, speaks of the “impotence” visited upon the Tomahawk Chop by ATCR’s sonic interventions. Here, hypermasculinity is employed as a means of colonial reprimand for a hypermasculine, patriarchal culture. In sliding from one post to the other, we’ve tuned into different frequencies along a continuum, hearing the possibilities (both terrorizing and ameliorative) of patriarchal production methods unfolding before us.

“Skrillex at Forum, Copenhagen” by Flickr user Jacob Wang, CC-BY-SA-2.0

Barad locates the performative upshot of this kind of indeterminacy in the fact that the scientist, the particle, and the ruler nailed to the table in the lab are all three bound together as part of a single phenomenon—they become one entity. To observe something is to become entangled with it, so that all of the unfolding possibilities of that particle become entwined with the unfolding possibilities of the scientist and the ruler, too. The entire phenomenon becomes indeterminate as the boundaries separating each entity bleed together, and these entities only detangle by performing—by acting out—boundaries among themselves.

Returning to Giacona’s discussion of “Braves,” it’s possible to mix and remix our components to perform them—to act them out—in more than one way. Giacona arranges it so that ATCR is the scientist, observing a particle that is a colonizing culture drunk on its own stereotypes. Here, “Braves” is the ruler that allows listeners to measure something about that culture. Is that something location? Direction? Even if we can hear clearly what Giacona leads us to—an uncovering of stereotypes so pernicious as to pervade, unchallenged, everyday activities—there’s an optimism available in indeterminacy. As we slide along the continuum to the present position of this colonialist culture, the certainty with which we can say anything about its trajectory lessens, opening the very possibility that motivates ATCR, namely the hope of something better.

“ATCR 1″ by Flickr user MadameChoCho, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

But listening and sounding are tricky things. As I think about my whistling of “Braves” in Indianapolis, it occurs to me that Giacona’s account is easily subverted. It could be that ATCR is the particle, members of a group of many different nations reduced to a single voice in a colonial present populated by scientists (continuing the analogy) who believe in Manifest Destiny and Johnny Depp. Now the ruler is not “Braves” but the Tomahawk Chop melody ATCR attempts to critique, and the group is measured by the same lousy standard colonizers always use. In this scenario, people attend ATCR shows in redface and headdresses, and I stand on the street whistling a war chant. We came to the right place, but we heard—or in my case, re-sounded—the wrong thing.

“Knob Twiddler” by Flickr user Jes, CC BY-SA 2.0

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman’s “listening ear” is instructive here. Cultures as steeped in indigenous stereotypes as the United States and Canada have conditioned their ears to hear ATCR through whiteness, through colonialism, making it difficult to perceive the subversive nature of “Braves.” ATCR plays a dangerous game in which they are vulnerable to being heard as a war chant rather than a critique; their material must be handled with care. There’s a simple enough lesson for me and my whistling: some sounds should stay in my head. But Barad offers something more fundamental to what we do as listeners. By recognizing that 1). there are connective tissues deeply entangling the materiality of our selves, musicians, and music and 2). listening is a continuum revealing only some knowledge at any given moment, we can begin to imagine and perform the many possibilities that open up to us in the indeterminacy of listening.

If everything sounds certain to us when we listen, we’re doing it wrong. Instead, for music to function productively, we as listeners must find our places in a wobbly continuum whose tissues connect us to the varied appendages of music and culture. Once so entangled, we’ll ride those synth waves down to the low end as hi hats all the while tap out the infinite possibilities opening in front of us.