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The Queerness of Wham’s “Last Christmas”
Christmas pop songs tend to revolve around just a few basic topics: 1) Jesus, 2) Santa, 3) Did you notice it’s winter?, and 4) Love. These aren’t mutually exclusive categories, of course. For...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2020/01/06/the-queerness-of-whams-last-christmas/
Can’t Nobody Tell Me Nothin: Respectability and The Produced Voice in Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”
It’s been ten weeks now that we’ve all been kicking back in our Wranglers. allowing Lil Nas X’s infectious twang in “Old Town Road” to shower us in yeehaw goodness from its perch atop t...
SO! Reads: Nicole Brittingham Furlonge’s Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature
Is literature truly a primarily visual entity? Do we only read books or are we actually actively “listening in print”(1)? These are the main questions that Nicole Brittingham Furlonge explor...
“I Am Thinking Of Your Voice”: Gender, Audio Compression, and a Sonic Cyberfeminist Theory of Oppression
I developed the text I recite in this post as the theoretical framework for an article I’m working on about audio compression. As I was working on the article, I wondered about the role of gend...
Shoo bop shoo bop, my baby, ooooo: W.E.B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud & Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight
Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150th anniversary o...
(T)racing Mother Listening: W.E.B. Du Bois & Sigmund Freud
Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150th anniversary o...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/10/01/w-e-b-du-bois-sigmund-freud-part-ii/
“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality
Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150th anniversary of...
Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies
Last December, a renowned sound scholar unexpectedly trolled one of my Facebook posts. In this post I shared a link to my recently published article “Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/08/06/canonization-and-the-color-of-sound-studies/
SO! Reads: Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder’s Designed For Hi Fi Living
According to the latest data from Nielson and the RIAA, vinyls are back. The old fashioned form now outsells CDs – but few have remarked on the fact that, unlike CDs and more like good little c...
Look Away and Listen: The Audiovisual Litany in Philosophy
This is an excerpt from a paper I delivered at the 2017 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. — According to sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne in The Audible ...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/03/05/look-away-and-listen-the-audiovisual-litany-in-philosophy/
Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music
Only overhead the sweet nightingale Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail, And snatches of its Elysian chant Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant Percy Shelley, The Sensitive Pl...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/02/26/botanical-rhythms-a-field-guide-to-plant-music/
Teach Me How To Dougie Like A Mediocre White Man
In the third episode of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), we meet Dougie Jones, a new character who is, as an otherworldly being will tell him, “manufactured.” Dougie’s sonic presence on the s...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/02/19/teach-me-how-to-dougie-like-a-mediocre-white-man/
Unapologetic Paisa Chingona-ness: Listening to Fans’ Sonic Identities
For the full intro to the series by Michelle Habell-Pallan, click here. The forum’s inspiring research by scholars/practioners Wanda Alarcón, Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Marlen Rios-Hernandez, S...
Introduction to Sound, Ability, and Emergence Forum
The language of sound studies, and even the word sound itself, doesn’t do justice to our scholarship. Sound studies is, to me, a populist discipline that has given me a social setting and theor...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2017/05/22/introduction-to-sound-ability-and-emergence-forum/
Troubling Silence: Sonic and Affective Dispossessions of the African Slave Trade
The United States has a slavery problem. Just last week, President Trump name-checked the political right’s current favorite past-president Andrew Jackson, suggesting that as a “swashbuckler,...
Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States
The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness. – Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo Sanford. Baltimore. Ch...
Vocal Deformance and Performative Speech, or In Different Voices!
**This post was co-authored by Marit J. MacArthur and Lee M. Miller Like it or not, we are now accustomed to contemporary pop vocalists manipulating their voices using Autotune and other tools or...
“Share your story” – but who will listen?
Editor’s Note: Welcome to the second installment in the “DH and Listening” blog series for World Listening Month, our annual forum that prompts readers to reflect on what it means to listen...
From “listening” to “filling in”: where “La Soeur Écoute” Teaches Us to Listen
Editor’s Note: Welcome to the second installment in the “DH and Listening” blog series for World Listening Month, our annual forum that prompts readers to reflect on what it means to listen...
Of Resilience and Men: How Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo Play with Gender in “Where Are Ü Now”
I want to listen to WAÜN in the context of Bieber’s performance of gender, specifically with an ear toward the way Skrillex and Diplo mix elements from dancepop’s 2015 toolkit to produce a t...
Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora
In an article for Pitchfork, music critic Adam Ward reminisces about digital music files that sound as if they’re “being played through a payphone,” and calls the extreme compression of the...
Afrofuturism, Public Enemy, and Fear of a Black Planet at 25
Twenty-five years after Do the Right Thing was nominated but overlooked for Best Picture, Spike Lee is about to receive an Academy Award. At the beginning of that modern classic, Rosie Perez dan...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/11/09/afrofuturism-and-fear-of-a-black-planet-at-25/
Resounding Silence: Learning to Hear the Hysteric’s Voice
This week we are pleased to welcome Guest Editor Karly-Lynne Scott kick off the last Thursday Series that Sounding Out! is running in 2015. Over the last ten months, this stream has reconside...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/10/15/resounding-silence-learning-to-hear-the-hysterics-voice/
Ritual, Noise, and the Cut-up: The Art of Tara Transitory
Marginalized bodies produce marginalized sounds to communicate things that escape language. The queer body is the site of sounds that engage pleasure, repression, rage, isolation, always somehow ...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/10/05/ritual-noise-and-the-cut-up-the-art-of-tara-transitory/
Enacting Queer Listening, or When Anzaldúa Laughs
Marginalized bodies produce marginalized sounds to communicate things that escape language. The queer body is the site of sounds that engage pleasure, repression, rage, isolation, always somehow ...
Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness, and the Trembling Body
Marginalized bodies produce marginalized sounds to communicate things that escape language. The queer body is the site of sounds that engage pleasure, repression, rage, isolation, always somehow ...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/09/14/sonic-tremblings-sound-affect-queer-body/
Straight Outta Compton . . .Via New York
Sounding Race in Rap Songs explores the production of musical identity in hip hop’s first two decades as a commercial genre. Although I don’t ignore lyrics or visual imagery, my main purpose ...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/08/31/straight-outta-compton-via-new-york/
Deaf Latin@ Performance: Listening with the Third Ear
This is the fourth and final post in Sounding Out!’s 4th annual July forum on listening in observation of World Listening Day on July 18th, 2015. World Listening Day is a time to think a...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/08/03/deaf-latin-performance-listening-with-the-third-ear/
Saving Sound, Sounding Black, Voicing America: John Lomax and the Creation of the “American Voice”
Today, SO! finishes its series reconsidering the life and work of Alan Lomax in his centenary year, edited by Tanya Clement of The University of Texas at Austin. We started out with Mark Davidson...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/06/08/john-lomax-and-the-creation-of-the-american-voice/
Sounding Out! Podcast #42: Listening in on Noisy Ghost ‘Our Madonnas Our Nobodies’
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Listening in on Noisy Ghost ‘Our Madonnas Our Nobodies’ SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA ITUNES ADD OUR PODCASTS TO YOUR STITCHER FAVORITES PLAYLIST This week, Sounding...
SO! Reads: Daniela Cascella’s F.M.R.L. (Finding Materials for Remembering and Listening)
*** Before I read F.M.R.L., I didn’t know Daniela Cascella or her work. I hadn’t read her first book or her blog or her Tweets; I hadn’t seen any exhibits she had curated or attended a read...
Black Mourning, Black Movement(s): Savion Glover’s Dance for Amiri Baraka
I don’t worry about the look of it so much. Choreography comes later, when I’m putting together a piece. I’m into the sound; for me, when I’m hittin’, layin’ it down, it’s all about...
Sounding Out! Podcast #41: Sound Art as Public Art
This April forum, Acts of Sonic Intervention, explores what we over here at Sounding Out! are calling “Sound Studies 2.0”–the movement of the field beyond the initial excitement for and...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/04/27/sounding-out-podcast-41-sound-art-as-public-art/
The Problem of Alan Lomax, or The Necessity of Talking Politics During the Lomax Year
This week, Sounding Out! kicks off an exciting four-part series exploring the work of Alan Lomax, a key figure in sound culture studies, and one whose legacy is in the midst of being reconside...
Sound at SCMS 2015
Each March one brave Sounding Out! author takes on the task of wading through the catalog of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS), to produce a curated guide f...
SO! Reads: Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora
To follow a song, to trace its roots and genealogy, to consider the context of its emergence as well as its lineage. To consider how sound and song propels political movement. To trace histories ...
LMGM’s “Lost: Choirboy” & El Jefe’s “Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon. . .” (in memoriam José Esteban Muñoz)
Come, let us sing of great men. Well, just one man, not men—and masculine gender is not essential for our purposes. Come to think of it, his greatness isn’t nearly as important as his fiercen...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/12/08/lost-choirboy-in-memoriam-jose-esteban-munoz/
Sounding Out Podcast #36: Anne Zeitz and David Boureau’s “Retention”
It’s an all too familiar movie trope. A bug hidden in a flower jar. A figure in shadows crouched listening at a door. The tape recording that no one knew existed, revealed at the most decisive ...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/10/30/sounding-out-podcast-36-anne-zeitzs-retention/
The Dark Side of Game Audio: The Sounds of Mimetic Control and Affective Conditioning
It’s an all too familiar movie trope. A bug hidden in a flower jar. A figure in shadows crouched listening at a door. The tape recording that no one knew existed, revealed at the most decisive ...
“Cremation of senses in friendly fire”: on sound and biopolitics (via KMFDM & World War Z)
There’s a 20-year gap in chronology between KMFDM’s 1993 song “A Drug Against War” and Marc Forster’s 2013 film World War Z, but sonically and ideologically they’re very, very similar...
“Sound Studies: A Discipline?”: Sound Signatures Winter School, Amsterdam, January 2014
Has the ever-nascent field of sound studies finally “grown up”? After years of intellectual development and a constantly growing body of work, including quite a few classic texts and books, ...
Learning to Listen Beyond Our Ears: Reflecting Upon World Listening Day
World Listening Day took place last week, and as I understand it, it is all about not taking sound for granted – an admirable goal indeed! But it is worth taking a moment to consider what so...
SO! Reads: Deborah R. Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda
Deborah R. Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (2012) presents an alternate story of Chicana music through a collection of case studies in Chicana/o music history c...
Karaoke and Ventriloquism: Echoes and Divergences
This piece is co-authored by Sarah Kessler and Karen Tongson. Scholarship rarely happens in isolation, despite quantitative demands in the humanities for “single-authored” works. Instead, int...
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/05/12/karaoke-and-ventriloquism-echoes-and-divergences/
SO! Reads: Isaac Weiner’s Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism
Calling devotees to prayer, preaching on the subway, broadcasted pre-recorded sermons from a moving car, organizing drum circles in the park, resounding church bells through the city – expressi...
Sound at SCMS 2014
With a wide array of departmental affiliations and disciplinary backgrounds represented among its society membership, as well as an active and creative leadership, the annual meeting of the Socie...