Blog-o-Versary 4.0: Sounding Out!‘s Solid Gold Summer Countdown!

Click here to download our free Blog-O-Versary 4.0 Mix!

Happy SO! Blog-o-Versary 4.0 to readers, writers, and supporters! Before I once again have the privilege of counting down some of the blog’s many blessings, I want to extend a big welcome to our new readers and a hearty thank you to those who have been down from day one.  In our four years of publication, we have never forgotten that SO! is here because y’all are here, and this Blog-o-Versary is as much about commemorating the solid gold vibrancy of Sound Studies—a state we have all helped to bring about—as it is celebrating another year of our Monday morning offerings.

This year I, Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, dare to fill the glittering stilettos left by Dionne Warwick as your host for Sounding Out!’s Solid Gold Summer-themed countdown, along with co-hosts Liana Silva-Ford (Managing Editor) and Aaron Trammell (Multimedia Editor).  As the beat of our latest Blog-o-Versary mix drops—don’t forget to download it here—I will count down the site’s top ten greatest hits of this past year, with some glimmers of how SO! will continue to thrive in year five! If you feel like bringing it like a Solid Gold Dancer, don’t worry, no one here will look askance; in fact, just try to stop us from catching that groove.

10. “On a Mission” (New Mission Statements!): You want to know what Sounding Out! is all about?  Peep our new mission statement, hot off the presses by Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman and our new podcast editorial statement by Multimedia Editor Aaron Trammell.

9. “Suite Thursday” (Monthly Podcasts!): As of January 2013, Sounding Out! has moved to a monthly podcast format, coming to you on the last Thursday of every month.  This year, we have brought you sonic dispatches ranging from ethnographic research on noise policing in Brasil, interviews with leading acoustic ecologists and Theremin masters, to audio documentaries of digital humanities sound projects such as #Tweetasound (Soundbox, Duke University). In addition to downloading from our site or subscribing via iTunes, you can now stream us on Stitcher!

8. “Thursday’s Child” (Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch!):  Also as of January 2013, Sounding Out! has provided readers with an open, active comment forum in real time, where we discuss a range of topics such as 2012’s most memorable sound, the connection between sound and cinema, and the racial politics of listening.  The Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch (or SOCK, as it is affectionately called around the editorial table), begins with a deceptively simple question penned by writers and editors, and lasts as long as the comments do.  Whether you are a regular or are new to the scene, we’d love for you to join in this upcoming Thursday, August 1, 2013, when regular writer and Portugal-based multimedia artist Maile Colbert will incite discussion on psychological responses to sound.  To peruse prior Comment Klatsches, click here.

7.  “Celebrate” (Reception at ASA!):  This year, SO!, was honored to co-host the first annual “Meet and Greet” of the Sound Studies Caucus at the annual American Studies Association meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  It was amazing to bring our virtual community into “meat space”—making new colleagues while keeping the old well-fed with happy hour snacks, drink specials, and excellent conversation.  Look for more of these events at conferences with a sound studies presence in year five! For photos of the ASA meet and greet, click here.

ASA Meet and Greet, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2012 (from l to r) Marci McMahon, Eric Weisbard, Bill Boyer, Deb Vargas, and (far right) Sherrie Tucker

6. “Get it Together” (More CFPS/forums/series): This year Sounding Out! has brought you even more themed programming, integrating our wide variety of sound studies inquiry with Calls for Posts, seasonal series, and month-long forums that focus our content on key issues in the field.  In year four alone, we brought you a summer series on radio auteur Norman Corwin, two forums on Sound and Pedagogy full of great ideas, examples, and syllabi, and a “virtual panel” with IASPM-US on the “sonic borders” in/between sound studies and popular music studies.  We just wrapped up our annual July “World Listening Month” observance—which featured an exclusive podcast series from the 2013 Tuned City Brussels event—and we are still in the throes of our summer series on “Sound and Sport”—next up on June 29^th, a post and a podcast by Josh Ottum on Sound in skate parks!  On deck for Fall/Winter 2013, Aaron Trammell will curate a forum on sound and play (featuring the work of Cornell ludomisicologist Roger Moseley), Neil Verma will edit an ongoing series on Orson Welles (more details below) and  I will launch a CFP for an upcoming forum on sound and the 19^th century that will feature a post from Voxtap’s Caitlin Marshall.

5. “Come Together” (IASPM-US Joint Feature):  Thanks to the collaborative super group of Justin Burton at IASPM-US and Liana Silva and myself at Sounding Out!,  we brought you a six-week long interchange on “sonic borders” within and between popular music studies and sound studies.  Featuring new scholarship from heavy hitters such as Devon Powers, Marcus Boon, Shana Redmond, Barry Shank, and Tavia Nyong’o and number-one-with-a-bullet newcomers such as Regina Bradley, Tara Betts, Airek Beauchamp, Theo Cafetoris, and Liana Silva, this joint “virtual panel” was listed in the program of the annual IASPM-US conference in Austin, Texas and posted simultaneously on both IASPM and Sounding Out!.  Not to mention, it was a hell of a lot of fun.  If you missed the series, click here for a rewind.

4.  “New Kid in Town”: (Our first official Guest Editor!):  As Sounding Out! continues to expand its reach and publication schedule, we will be calling on the intellectual and curatorial expertise of our colleagues.  I am proud to announce that radio and sound studies scholar Neil Verma, professor at the University of Chicago and recipient of the 2013 SCMS First Book Prize for Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and Radio Drama—will be our first official guest editor, curating an exciting series on Orson Welles called From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 years.  The commemorative series begins on August 4^th, 2013 and will continue once a month through January 2014. It will feature new and exciting research from the likes of Tom McEnaney (Cornell), Debra Rae Cohen (University of South Carolina), Jacob Smith (Northwestern), and Murray Pomerance (Ryerson and York Universities), as well as a broadcast on the 75^th anniversary of “War of the Worlds” on October 30^th, 2013.

3. “Turn My Swag On” (Logos, Buttons, and Stickers!): Thanks to Riverside, CA artist Dan Torres, Jersey’s finest Jimmy Buttons , and the good people at Los Angeles’s Blackstar Printing, Sounding Out! got visible, tangible, and walk-around-able this year with limited edition buttons and stickers.  If you already have yours, wear and stick them proudly—and don’t forget to send us a photo to add to our growing  “SO! around the way collection.”  If you are in need of a little SO! swag in your life, there are three ways to come up on some: join our mailing list, network with one of our editors at a conference, or participate in the next SO! Comment Klatsch on August 1st.

SO! swag in Eugene, OR

2. “Everybody, Everybody” (Global coverage and audience grows!):  As of Blog-o-Versary 4.0, Sounding Out! is being read in over 182 countries worldwide, a number that only continues to grow with our increasingly international focus.  This year, we published pieces exploring youth street party culture in São Paulo, Brazil, chants of “Allah-oh-Akbar” from rooftops in Iran, post-liberation radio broadcasts in Africa, sonic legacies of the slave castles in Ghana, sonic artistic practices in rural Portugal, the “Tuned City” festival in Brussels, how South Korean students sound Shakespeare in Seoul, Canadian public school curriculum that enables students to remix recordings of political struggle and “media capitalism” in turn-of-the-twentieth century Egypt. Our world will only get wider in year five!

and,

1. “We are Family” (Advisory Board, Guest Writers and Podcasters):  This year the Sounding Out! family continued to grow, adding an all-star advisory board, three new regular writers—a solid gold Sounding Out! shout out to Regina Bradley, Maile Colbert, and Primus Luta—and a talented cadre of over 30 new guest writers!  And, as so many of you know, once a writer joins the SO! team, their number never gets retired. Because Sounding Out! is as devoted to producing community as it is content, we keep our guest writers connected, fostering their input, seeking their participation (SO! Tumblr correspondent, anyone? Contact Aaron Trammell at aht@soundingoutblog.com), and publicly celebrating their graduations, promotions—congratulations to newly-minted Ph.D.s Regina Bradley, Steph Ceraso, Ashon Crawley, Mack Hagood, and Nicolas Knouf and new Associate Professors Ziad Fahmy, Damien Keane and Samantha Pinto—publications, and other milestones! For more of what our talented and productive guests have been up to this year please read on below this post.  As always, check in with our SO! Media page to keep up with Team Sounding Out! as our work spreads beyond our own .com to infiltrate websites, syllabi, reading lists, and print journals near you.

And most importantly, Stay gold, Team Sounding Out!, stay gold.

–JSA, Editor-in-Chief

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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a 2011-2012 Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

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Click here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary 4.0 mix with track listing

(Just in case you missed last year’s 3.0 celebration–and mix– click here; for year two, click here; and for our first Blog-O-Versary party mix click here)

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Team SOUNDING OUT! Highlights Reel:

In addition to publishing THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali with Winged City Press in 2013, Tara Betts wrote for the character Maddy James in the multimedia dance show Any Resemblance that was presented as part of the La Mama Moves! Festival in NYC in June 2013.  Tara is slated to present at Feminisms & Rhetorics at Stanford, SAMLA 2013 in Atlanta, and MLA 2014 in Chicago. “They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis” will be reprinted in About Place for their upcoming issue “1963-2013: A Retrospective of the Civil Rights Movement” edited by Black Earth Institute Fellow Richard Cambridge.

Regina Bradley completed PhD at Florida State University in African American Literature. Her dissertation is titled “Race to Post: White Hegemonic Capitalism and Black Empowerment in 21^st Century Black Popular Culture and Literature.”

In addition to contributing “Sounding Shakespeare’s S(e)oul” this spring, Brooke Carlson is leaving Seoul, Korea, for Chaminade University of Honolulu in Hawaii, and is working on an article in progress: “Jonson, Sprezzatura, and  the (Un)Doing of Nobility.”

Steph Ceraso defended her dissertation, “Sounding Composition, Composing Sound: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Pedagogies, and Everyday Experience,” and finished her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. She will be teaching at Georgetown University in Fall 2013. Ceraso was a guest co-editor with Jon Stone for Harlot’s latest special themed “Sonic Rhetorics” issue. Her digital audio piece, “A Tale of Two Soundscapes: The Story of My Listening Body” will appear in SoundBox’s forthcoming open access multimodal book, Provocare: A New  Collection of Sonically Inspiring Projects. She will also be presenting a paper entitled “Sonic Rhetorics: Teaching Listening in the Multimodal Composition Classroom” at the 2013 Feminisms & Rhetorics conference at Stanford University in September. You can find out more about her work and upcoming projects at www.stephceraso.com

Maile Colbert had a residency at the iAir (International Artist Residency) at RMIT University. (Reel of the work created and synopsis: https://vimeo.com/66574320). She also completed the sound design and composition for the feature length documentary by director Irene Lusztig “The Motherhood Archives.” Maile presented “Wayback Sound Machine” at Musique et Écologies du Son/Music and Ecologies of Sound: Theoretical and Paractical Projects for the Listening of the World, Universitê Paris 8. She performed “Come Kingdom Come” at Sintoma: Performance, Investigation, and Experimentation, University of Porto, Fine Arts, Portugal. She performed with a new “field-recording” instrument with Andrea Neumann, Sabine Ercklentz, Marcelo Dos Reis, Angelica Salvi, Susana Santos Silva at Serralves em Festa.

Robert Ford was hired in February 2013 as the new play-by-play broadcaster for the Houston Astros major league baseball team.

Julia Grella O’Connell‘s book, Sound, Sin, and Victorian Religious Conversion, will be published by Ashgate in 2014. She recently made her debut with Syracuse Opera as Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro.

In August Amanda Keeler will begin a new position as an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the College of Communication at Marquette University.

Damien Keane completed his book Ireland and the Problem of Information, which will be published as part of the Refiguring Modernism series from Penn State University Press. In addition, his essay “Poetry, Music, and Reproduced Sound” appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis. Also, Keane came through to the other side of the tenure process at SUNY-Buffalo!

Roshanak Kheshti performed as Bluebeard (guitars and voice) at the UCSD Professor Unscripted event on June 5, 2013 narrating a biography through songs from concerts she has attended throughout her life. Some highlights included “Sweetest Taboo” by Sade, “Better Things” by Massive Attack, and “For Today I am a Boy” by Antony and the Johnsons.

Bill Kirkpatrick‘s essay, “Voices Made For Print”: Crip Voices on the Radio” appeared in Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era. In addition, he and Alex Russo started the Radio Studies Special Interest Group within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies over the past year. 

The 20th anniversary edition of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft is on its way this summer, with a new foreword by Greil Marcus.  He will be speaking at CUNY Grad Center’s 20th celebration of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic this fall.

Primus Luta has been working on reshaping the breadth of Concrète Sound System, which grew from a live set to a label, but is coming to embody almost a philosophical approach to sound.  The label saw several 2013 releases, including the Services Rendered project for which Luta did the art and music. Additionally, in 2013 he has taken to performing live again, specifically live free jazz with the group Odon which is fronted by Daniel Carter. He remains on the Rhythm Incursions podcast team, and is particularly proud of the “IDM is a MILF” episode from earlier this year. He was also given the opportunity to do a mix for Hank Shocklee at the end of 2012 which will likely get a follow-up before 2013 is done.

This year, Andreas Duus Pape had the agent he used in “Experiments in Agent-based Music Composition” and in “Further Experiments in Agent-based Music Composition” accepted for publication in Games and Economic Behavior (in joint work with Kenneth J Kurtz).  A version of the paper can be read here. SUNY Binghamton is now offering Advanced Graduate Certificates in Complex Systems Science and Engineering, which is a program Pape helped found.

D. Travers Scott will publish “Refining Intertextuality as Resonance: Pet Shop Boys Score Battleship Potemkin” in the upcoming issue of Music, Sound and Moving Image. “Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962” was published in Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies in 2012. His book on technology and disease is currently under review. He is also the new Co-Chair of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Special Interest Group of the International Communication Association.

Aram Sinnreich’s new book, The Piracy Crusade, will be published in December. The book’s first draft is freely available to read at http://piracycrusade.com, and the final edition can be preordered via Amazon here: http://j.mp/TPC-AMZ

Jonathan Sterne released in 2012 MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Sound Studies Reader. In 2013 he published “What the Mind’s Ear Doesn’t Hear” in Music, Sound and Space: Transformation of Public and Private Experience, and “Escape from Soundscape” in Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage.