Finding Resonance, Finding María Lugones
I am always listening for María: I find her most in the traces of words.
Trained as a literary scholar, I relish in the contours of stories; I savor the nuances found between crevices of language and the shades of implication when those languages are strung together. It is no surprise, then, that since the death of my friend and mentor María Lugones, I have turned to many books, particularly her book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppression, to feel connected to her. I have struggled, though, to write about her, talk about her, even think about her for many years. It wasn’t until I found a passage about spirits and hauntings in Cuban-American writer and artist Ana Menéndez’s novel The Apartment that I found language to describe a way through the grief of the last five years.
Menéndez’s novel follows many characters that all, at some point in time, come to live in apartment 2B in Miami Beach. While each person is seemingly disconnected from the next, they all leaves sonic traces of themselves for the next person’s arrival. Each new tenant leaves behind the creak of a dented floorboard, or the rumbling of the air conditioner, the faint melody of a piano, or the swish of spirits looking for a place to sit down. The climax of the novel revolves around Lenin García, a young Cuban migrant who commits suicide in the Miami apartment shortly after arriving. Anna, a journalist who migrated to the US from the Czech Republic during their communist regime, prepares the apartment for rental after the suicide. When looking through Lenin’s belongings she explains that the “Spirits pressed down on her, and again and again she rejects them. Sends them packing, back to the pre-rational past. Not a haunting, but an echo. The boy’s life a gesture pointing back to her own. A dream of a thousand iterations” (131). These spirits that surround her, that remind her of her own life’s ghosts, provide a particularly sonic connection; the tethers that connect one migration tragedy to another is an echo of commonality that creates a kin experience.
The three years I learned with and from María are overshadowed by the physical distance the pandemic required of me in her final moments. When I try to write about her, my hair stands on end, my eyes water, my nose drips, and I stretch out my hand toward a presence I feel, just out of reach. I know it’s her, I just can’t seem to touch her. I have described María’s death as a haunting—as something that haunts me. I defined this haunting as a physical presence that I could not see, but I could feel, sense. But what if, like Anna, I am feeling, not a haunting, but an echo; or more accurately, the resonances of María that echo around me constantly? What Menéndez’s passage provides is the necessity of reinterpreting my awareness of María from one of general sensing to one of specific aural attunement. If I am listening for her, how, then do I keep her with me?
Lenin, from The Apartment, provides a potential answer: when meeting with a curandera in Cuba, she tells him “The ancestors speak to you from the home of your inner life. When your inner life is spare, there is nowhere for the ghosts to sit. When you furnish your spirit, the ancestors will once again find rest in you” (143). Echoes become an analytic that provide furnishings ‘in the soul’ for sustained company of those who have passed. The reverberation of echoes—reverberations as a prolonged sense of resonance that stretches the meeting of two energies—can, quite literally, allow a reader to connect back to people across space and time. My tether to María is a resonance that simultaneously locates and disperses spatially and temporally. I hear this connection as my harmony to her melody. To further the metaphor, that resonance is the strumming of a guitar, where I am the guitar and she is the musician, and that moment where we both hear for each other, even when we do not know the other exists, is the note.
What happens when I use literary methods of analysis to find people in the interstices of sound? To search for María in what she calls the “enclosures and openings of our praxis” as a reader of her text? Now that I had to search the histories of her echo, I turned to her book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes.
When María recommends “to women of color in the United States that we learn to love each other by learning to travel to each other’s ‘worlds’,” (78) I imagine our first few encounters; encounters that were strange, difficult, and lessons in learning to listen to her on her terms. I had been invited to her home in Binghamton, New York for a meeting of a political-intellectual group she hosted, and was nervous to meet the woman I had written my Master’s thesis on, and who was the reason I applied to Binghamton for a PhD program. Her voice rang through the room, slow and clear; her mouth pursed a bit as she thought through her next sentence, her finger pointed as she spoke her next idea. In trying to stay out of her way, I became a barrier when she moved backward; she bumped into me and said simply ‘you must be careful not to trip me’ and moved along. I was mortified.
Our next few encounters were similarly odd, and lead me to think that, maybe, María was not the right choice for my mentoring needs. A few months into this first year in graduate school—where tenured male professors were violent toward me, and I was not sure I should stay in academia—I confessed to a friend in the same political-intellectual group that I was not sure María liked me or that I should work with her. Her response changed everything: this friend, who had worked with María many, many years said: “don’t do that. Don’t make her mother you. It’s not who she is. Travel to her, learn her.” I finally understood that traveling to María’s world meant listening to her from her perspective, not my own. That shift in me “from being one person to being a different person” (89) is how I first found María in the haptic world. I learned to listening to her: I learned the catch in her throat meant she wanted tea; I learned the increase in sighs meant she was in more pain that usual; I learned the shuffling of papers probably meant she was looking for her handkerchief to wipe her forehead as she had a hot flash. Each of these sonic gestures, I could respond to—could show up for her.
But with María’s death, this kind of listening is no longer available to me; I could not listen for hem or hmm or tchps. I had to learn to listen differently. In re-reading Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes I learn that it does not just contain her philosophical interventions for liberatory futures. It is a series of stories; her stories of the echoes that resonate inside of her; stories that she weaves together that happen to name philosophical practices of relationality. It is through the coerced placement of her by her father in an asylum that she finds other woman who teach her to resist; this resistance is sonic: a woman repeating over and over “I am busy, I am busy” as they electroshock her (i). It is through wanting desperately to love her mother that she finds ways her mother taught her to listen differently in order to name the capacity of ‘world’-traveling. What I had felt when I first read her work over a decade ago was a resonance; a sonic reverberation across space and time that connected my to her before our physical meeting, during our time as friends and mentor/mentee, and now after her physical death.
Connecting to María through echoes feels effortless now that I have the language. I hear now María’s warning against the dangers in the primacy of the visual. In “Hablando Cara a Cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism,” she explains:
I exercise this playful practice. The appreciation of my playfulness and its meaning may be realized when the possibility of becoming playful in this way has been collectively realized, when it has become realized by us. It is here to be appreciated or missed and both the appreciation and the missing are significant. The more fully this playfulness is appreciated, the less broken I am to you, the more dimensional I am to you. But I want to exercise my multidimensionality even if you do not appreciate it. To do otherwise would be to engage in self-mutilation, to come to be just the person that you see. To play in this way is then an act of resistance as well as an act of self- affirmation (41).
What she taught me here is that being herself meant a practice that was more than being seen. To be what others could only see was an act of mutilation to her multidimensionality. That reminder was crucial to becoming her friend during my time at Binghamton, but even more crucial now that she is gone from this world.
I’ll leave you with the most important story she left behind: she provided a method of learning that was based on the senses and focused primarily on the sonic—what she called “tantear.” This tantear has become instrumental in my own research. It is a fumbling around in the dark, a feeling around tactically that focuses on searching “for meaning, for the limits of possibility; putting our hands to our ears to hear better, to hear the meaning in the enclosures and openings of our praxis” (1). The embodied experience of stumbling, of careful and intense feeling for and with others, requires a capacity of listening deeply. It is listening that undergirds the learning. The language of the sonic provides the understanding of the feelings within the body. Listening becomes a profound practice of relationality; echoes become a mechanism of connection; and resonance becomes the confirmation that I can still be with María.
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Images courtesy of the author, except where noted.
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Daimys Ester García is a Latinex writer, artist and educator from Miami. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at SUNY Binghamton. She is currently an Assistant Professor in English at the College of Wooster, where her research and teaching is at the intersections of Latinx literatures & studies, Native literatures & studies, women of color feminisms, and decolonial praxis with a focus on coalitional politic. She is working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Comfort is Colonialism: Coalitional Commitments for Cuban-American Women Writers, which offers a repertoire of practices to re-connect Cuban-Americans with other histories of resistance in the US.
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Thank you to Wanda Alarcón for care in the form of editorial labor.
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“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón
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Press Play and Lean Back: Passive Listening and Platform Power on Nintendo’s Music Streaming Service
I remember long car rides as a kid in the early 2000s, headphones on, gazing out the window at the passing scenery while looping background music from The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon games on my Game Boy. After school, I’d occasionally throw the Super Smash Bros. Melee soundtrack on my Discman CD player, keeping me motivated while doing homework. Like many others, I found Nintendo’s music to be an effective accompaniment to everyday activities, a kind of functional listening long before streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube made it trendy. Which raises the question: how has Nintendo adapted to the streaming age?
Unlike many other game publishers, Nintendo has conspicuously kept its music off streaming services—despite having some of the most recognizable soundtracks in video game history, such as Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and Metroid. Instead, the company took a different direction by unveiling its own music streaming service in October 2024, aptly titled Nintendo Music. The platform, available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, showcases soundtracks spanning the company’s history, from 1980s NES titles to recent Nintendo Switch 2 releases.
In a listening landscape dominated by Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, Nintendo’s decision to launch its own proprietary streaming service makes it unique among video game companies. This move is idiosyncratic in a way that feels characteristically Nintendo, but it is also a bold bid to compete in the broader attention economy. By situating itself alongside, rather than within, the major music streaming services, Nintendo signals that its soundtracks are valuable cultural content worth curating and controlling directly.
Nintendo Music caters specifically to video game fans by including screenshots with each track, having a “Spoiler” filter that lets users block music from games they haven’t played, and making personalized recommendations based on each user’s play history. But perhaps most notable is its emphasis on background listening: through features like mood playlists and an “Extend” tool, video game music is explicitly framed as a companion for contexts like relaxing, working out, or doing household chores.
By repurposing game soundtracks as tools for everyday routines, Nintendo Music capitalizes on nostalgia and contemporary listening habits to deepen fan engagement and retain control over its brand—a strategic move from a company that is famously (over)protective of its intellectual property. More generally, it also reflects neoliberal logics in which music is woven into daily life to regulate mood and productivity, revealing the increasing reach of digital platforms over how we work, listen, and live.
Listening in Loops: Video Game Music in the Background
In advertisements for Nintendo Music, actors hum and sing along to famous video game tunes while carrying out their daily activities. “Whether you’re grocery shopping, straightening up at home, or getting some studying done, Nintendo Music can be the background sound to your everyday life,” the description to one video reads.
This marketing is strikingly similar to strategies by streaming services such as Spotify, which encourage listening to music in any and every context. Playlists based around specific moods or activities—like Spotify’s “Gym Hits,” “Intense Studying,” and “sad girl starter pack”—use music as a tool to manage listeners’ energy levels, focus, and emotions as they go about their lives. Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening” helps describe this phenomenon, showing how even passive, background engagement can shape listeners’ affects and experiences.
In many ways, video game music is ideal for the ubiquitous listening that streaming services promote. Game soundtracks are generally (though not always) designed for the background and are usually instrumental, setting the emotional tone of on-screen action, from serene soundscapes to intense boss battles. Unlike other multimedia soundtracks, such as film scores, much video game music is also composed to loop indefinitely, making it especially effective for sustained listening.
As Michiel Kamp demonstrates in Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music, “background listening” is one of the main ways users experience video game soundtracks. He writes that “background music both in games and elsewhere requires us to be so attuned to it that it offers no experiential friction in need of interpreting, and through this it has the capacity to attune us to our environment, be it a mythical underworld full of dangers or a convenience store full of groceries” (2024, 175).
While Kamp primarily focuses on background listening while playing games, game music can attune listeners to moods, activities, or environments even when heard outside of gameplay. In fact, video games train us to listen in this way, using music to establish the appropriate affect for narrative events, settings, and characters. These immersive qualities have made video game music immensely popular on streaming services: soundtracks from games and franchises like Halo, Final Fantasy, The Elder Scrolls, Undertale, and Minecraft have collectively garnered over a billion streams on Spotify alone.
But Nintendo, by launching its own proprietary platform, trades streaming royalties and wider exposure for something arguably more valuable: the ability to control how and where fans experience its content.
Features in Focus: Nintendo Music’s Approach to Passive Listening
Nintendo Music’s features illustrate how the service adapts soundtracks for continuous, everyday listening. Perhaps most notable is the service’s unique Extend feature, which allows users to stretch the runtime of tracks up to 60 minutes. Described in the app as “the perfect accompaniment to studying or working,” this feature facilitates seamless background listening without the distraction of frequent track changes. So if you’ve ever wanted to loop the Wii Shop music for a full hour—and let’s be honest, who hasn’t—now you can.
Alongside complete soundtracks, Nintendo Music also foregrounds curated playlists, including those based around specific video game characters, themes, and moods. The “Powering Up” playlist features “up-tempo tracks to fill you with energy,” for example, while “Good Night” has “down-tempo tracks to help you drift into dreamland.” Screenshots for each track further immerse listeners, visually reinforcing the moods and environments the music is designed to evoke. On these playlists, Nintendo’s music is presented less as individual compositions and more as “vibes.”
Packaging music around moods or vibes is not a neutral act. In Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly asserts that “organizing music by mood is a way to transform it into a new type of media product. It is about selling users not just on moods, but on the promise of the very concept that mood stabilization is something within their control. It’s a tactic for luring users to double click and start streaming” (2025, 40). Pelly’s observation underscores that mood-based playlists do more than entertain: they are a way for platforms to influence how listeners organize their time and attention.
Furthermore, Nintendo Music’s approach positions music not only as a creative or cultural artifact, but also as a commodified resource for self-regulation. This aligns with Eric Drott’s claim that streaming services often employ music as a “technology of social reproduction,” used to structure and maintain day-to-day existence. For Drott, this is “part of a broader tendency under neoliberal capitalism that prizes music, the arts, and culture not on account of their aesthetic worth but on account of their ‘expediency’ for other social, political, and economic ends” (2024, 197).
Many users still actively listen to their favourite Nintendo soundtracks on the platform, and there’s also nothing inherently wrong with background listening—it’s how much of this music was originally designed to be heard. However, presenting music as an aid to concentration, productivity, or mood regulation also risks repurposing soundtracks as a form of “neo-Muzak,” a vehicle for continuous consumption designed to keep listeners plugged into Nintendo’s broader product ecosystem.
Background Benefits: Nintendo’s Platform Power
Beyond guiding listening habits, Nintendo Music reinforces the company’s brand image of nostalgia, innovation, and family-friendly fun while increasing engagement with its intellectual property on its own terms. As a Nintendo spokesperson said in an interview with Nippon TV News, “To increase the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP, we believe that game music is an important and valuable form of content. Nintendo Music is a service that allows us to deliver this game music in a way that is uniquely Nintendo. . . . We hope that Nintendo Music will help you recall some of your favorite gaming experiences and think that it will also encourage people to play the games again” (translation by Nicholas Anderson).
Nintendo’s efforts to centralize its music are also likely, at least in part, a response to fans unofficially circulating soundtracks online. As part of a broader trend of functional music compilations (think lofi beats to study/relax to), YouTube hosts countless user-generated Nintendo music playlists designed for activities such as studying and sleeping. Despite Nintendo’s notoriety for issuing takedown notices over copyright infringement—including shutting down the massively popular YouTube video game music channel GilvaSunner in 2022—many of these unofficial videos and reuploads continue to accrue millions of views.
By providing an official home for soundtracks and its own contextual playlists, Nintendo Music is a subtle exercise in platform power, gating access to subscribers. It redirects listeners from other platforms, letting Nintendo control its content without diluting its brand on third-party services. Although Nintendo Music’s catalogue is currently slim—as of writing it has roughly 100 soundtracks—the company continues to trickle out new music most weeks, incentivizing listeners to keep coming back.
Nintendo Music promotes ongoing background listening not only to attract users who are already accustomed to mood and activity playlists, then, but also to keep them on the platform and connected to the company’s games and services. After all, every minute a listener spends on Nintendo Music looping David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambiance” from Donkey Kong Country is a minute they aren’t spending on YouTube, Spotify, or any other entertainment platform.
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Video game music is, in many respects, perfectly suited for the streaming age. From the popularity of playlists to the ascent in ambient music, streaming services’ focus on passive listening aligns with the background function of video game soundtracks. As we’ve seen, Nintendo Music takes full advantage of this, using its marketing and features to bolster branding, solidify control over IP, and encourage engagement.
For many, Nintendo Music offers an enjoyable experience and a convenient way to stream nostalgic soundtracks. But the service also exposes how proprietary platforms concentrate power and leverage passive listening for ongoing consumption, reinforcing broader patterns where work and leisure become intertwined with corporate interests. By prompting users to integrate Nintendo’s music into their activities, the platform extends the reach of its games beyond the screen and into daily life.
Whether you’re listening to famed composer Koji Kondo or everyone’s favourite troubadour dog K.K. Slider, Nintendo’s message is clear: press play and lean back.
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Featured Image: “Mario Kart” by MIKI Yoshihito (#mikiyoshihito), CC BY 2.0
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Ryan Blakeley is Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and holds a PhD in Musicology from the Eastman School of Music. His research investigates how digital platforms like music streaming services are shaping creative practices, listening habits, and music industry power dynamics.
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Playing with the Past in the Imagined Middle Ages: Music and Soundscape in Video Games–James Cook
Beyond the Grave: The “Dies Irae” in Video Game Music–Karen Cook
Sounding Out! Podcast #29: Game Audio Notes I: Growing Sounds for Sim Cell–Leonard J. Paul
Papa Sangre and the Construction of Immersion in Audio Games— Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
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