It’s Our Blog-O-Versary 2.0!

..........Click the Cassette Tape to Download Our Free Blog-O-Versary 2.0 Mix!........ (Image by miss_rogue; tunes suggested by our writers and editors!)

Happy Blog-O-Versary 2.0 to our amazing community of writers, readers, and listeners! Sounding Out! has finished an incredible second year of growth, exploration, and accomplishment.  ‘Scuse us while we blow our own vuvuzela a bit:

·      We Got Organized: Can we re-introduce you to our editorial collective: Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor), Liana Silva (Managing Editor), and Aaron Trammell (Multimedia Editor)? Thanks!

·      We Got Regular: Every Monday @ 9:00 EST, you’ll see a new post up on the site. You’ll also notice two new regular contributors on our rotation, Osvaldo Oyola Ortega, and Andreas Duus Pape.

·      We Hosted Guests: This year ­Sounding Out! began dedicating the last Monday of each month to guest writers from across the field and the globe (shoutout to Binaural in Lisbon, Portugal!). SO! has worked hard to recruit the finest work from a variety of voices— artists, professors, graduate students, sound practitioners like singers and radio voices —as well as introducing you to the up-and-coming scholars in the field.  You know that special sound studies issue of American Quarterly  (edited by Josh Kun and Kara Keeling) that you can’t wait to get your hands on? We can’t either, but until September rolls around, read postings from four of the contributors on Sounding Out! : Tara Rodgers, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Dolores Inés Casillas, and our own Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman.  To see the full line-up of our bad ass writing roster, click here. We couldn’t be more thrilled with our guests and we look forward to more.

·      We’ve Been Linked:  Not only have we been added to many excellent blogrolls, like  Designing Sound, Weird Vibrations, Preservation Sound, and Hear is Queer,  but posts from Sounding Out! have been mentioned in Media Watch, Pandagon, threadbared, Sonic Terrain, Blogging Ethnomusicologists, Parallax View, Pullquote, The Long Harvest, True Chip Till Death, and Game Culture.

·      We Pushed Our Coverage:  Thanks to the brilliant work (and excellent prose) of our writers, we sounded out even more audio-cultural terrain this year in the contexts of  queer studies, politics, hip-hop, television, film, sound art, sound walks, comics, and audio technologies both digital (ipad, video games) and analog (tape recording, synthesizers). We even dabbled briefly into the sound of #tigerblood but we swear we can stop at any time.

·      We’ve Had Beef:  You wanted head-to-head posts debating the cultural meaning of Bob Seger? Girl Talk and Mash-Up Culture? Classical Music? The Sounds of the Southern Black Church? Yeah, we hosted all that.

·      We Were There: Editor-In-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman scoured the programs of the national meetings of three major academic organizations (the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies) to give you the freshest picks in sound studies research presentations.   Look for expanded coverage (and more live-tweeting!) in the upcoming year.

·      We Became More Searchable:  Hey, folks, our soundwalk is a marathon, not a sprint.  Dedicated more than ever to becoming your long-term go-to guide for emerging thought in sound studies, our Managing Editor Liana Silva has been working hard to preserve Sounding Out!’s back catalogue by keeping older posts current with our newer categories so you can always find everything that you need.

Awesome Sounds From a Future Boombox (photo by Katie Dureault)

·      We Listen to You!: Never content to ride out the same groove, Sounding Out! wants to bring it even harder in year 3.0.  That’s why we are passing the mic to you, Dear Listeners, and asking you to complete our (very brief) Survey Monkey survey to find out how our site has been resonating with you and what we can do to fine-tune the vibe even more.  Think of our killer Blog-O-Versary 2.0 mix, “Awesome Sounds from a Future Boombox” as a thank you bonus for your time as well as the soundtrack for what is already shaping up to be another great year together.  Let’s rock on into the future with our bad selves.

Click here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary Survey

 

Click here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary 2.0 mix with track listing

(Just in case you missed last year’s party–and mix–click here)