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June 1, 2026  

Sounding Out! Unplugged: “Power in Listening” (August 2026)

The cover for our forthcoming SO! anthology, coming to you on August 25, 2026 from NYU Press, original cover illustration by Dan Torres (aka Daino)

Hello listeners + readers!

We usually take July as a BYE month to celebrate our yearly blog-o-versary, but this year, we are going bigger! Team SO! is pausing for the full summer–June, July, AND August–to catch our breath in advance of the publication of the official Sounding Out! print anthology, Power in Listening (New York University Press) on August 25, 2026 (although you can pre-order now, if you’d like at Indiepubs, direct from NYU, and other book outlets). This book is a long time coming and we are really proud of what we have put together. It’s a fresh mix of brand new essays with fan-favorites that have been revised, expanded and fully updated to the present, with an introduction by the editorial collective and a forward by SO!‘s very own Neil Verma.

Power in Listening is a love letter to everyone who has participated in the ongoing collective project of the blog over our first 15 years and a fantastic way to kick off the future together. Like the blog, it’s sharp, accessible, gorgeously written, diverse, and ready for the classroom, the library, the beach, public transit, the coffee shop, the couch on a rainy day, the club . . .wherever you love to read, but now you can be unplugged too, which we all need more than ever. Scroll down for more details about the book, including a full author list!

Enjoy the coming months–the book will be out there catching eyes in August and the blog will grab your ears once again this September! Please help us spread the word about the book– we’d love it if you’d tell two friends, so that they two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. . .or you can share social media, whatever works for you!

Thank you and SO! looking forward–see you in September!

JLS, SO! Ed-in-Chief

P.S. Details to come on release parties, conference events, speaking engagements, podcasts, broadcasts, and all that good stuff! If you’d like us to come out your way to talk about the book, the blog, and all things sound, we have a Google form for that! Contact NYU Press at this link if you are interested in reviewing the book on your publication: https://nyupress.org/resourcesold/for-media/

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How listening shapes power

Power in Listening explores how listening shapes—and is shaped by—power. From the politics of “sad girl” Spotify playlists to the sonic architectures of surveillance and the gendered voices of Siri and Alexa, this collection investigates how sound and listening inform identity, embodiment, and social life. How does Beyoncé’s remix of her “elevator incident” expose the surveillance of Black bodies? How do deaf listeners use multiple senses to navigate sound? How are Latina voices racialized through ideas of volume and tone?

Building from the groundbreaking Sounding Out! blog, Power in Listening curates 36 new, revised, and expanded essays from scholars, artists, DJs, and activists across more than twenty disciplines. Together, they trace how auditory culture intersects with race, gender, sexuality, technology, and media—from radio and tape to streaming and AI.

Accessible yet rigorous, this reader reveals sound studies in motion: a field that listens as a form of inquiry, protest, and care. Each essay connects theory and everyday experience, offering tools to hear the world—and each other—more critically. Power in Listening invites readers to experience listening as a social practice, a political act, and a method of understanding one’s place within a resonant and contested public sphere.

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Authors

Neil Verma, Nichole Prucha, Rami Stucky, Max Abner, Ola Mohammed, Christie Zwahlen, Art Blake, Liana Silva, Maria Chaves Daza, Tara Betts, Marlén Ríos, Kimberly Williams, Samantha Ege, Aaron Trammell, Christina Giacona, Andrew Salvati, Kemi Adeyemi, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Andreas Pape, AO Roberts, Milena Droumeva, Steph Ceraso, Linda O’Keeffe, Michael Levine, Amanda Gutierrez, Asa Mendelsohn, Rebecca Lentjes, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Justin Burton, Gustavus Stadler, Dolores Inés Casillas, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Chris Chien, Benjamin Tausig, Hubert Gendron-Blais, Maile Costa Colbert, and Dustin Tahmahkera

Section Titles and Topics

  • Sonic Presents
  • Putting The “I” in Listening: Memoir as Method
  • The Sound You Make Is Not Your Own: Our Social Voices
  • “Hop With It, Rock With It”: Listening to Popular Culture 
  • Bits and Screeches: Technology and Sound
  • Hitting the Streets: Space, Place, and Sound
  • Panaudicism: Sound and Surveillance
  • Listening While White: Sound and Racial Privilege 
  • “Can You Hear Me Now?”: Sound, Agency, and Activism

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What folks are saying. . .

Spotlighting the work of emerging scholars under innovative rubrics like space, gender, time, race, and power, Power in Listening curates an impressive array of authors and disciplinary approaches of the highest caliber. This is a welcome, fresh take on the field of sound studies. ~Roshanak Kheshti, author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music

From voice and memoir to technology, space, race, surveillance, and activism, Power in Listening centers captivating soundworkers. and shows how listening can unsettle hierarchies and make new worlds audible. This sharply curated collection brings together newly revised classics from the blog as well as bold new essays that treat listening not as neutral perception, but as a site of power, struggle, pleasure, and possibility. Smart, generous, and unapologetically loud, this book doesn’t just reflect a field. It changes how you hear it. ~Karen Tongson, author of Norm Porn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us

Not only chronicles the dynamism of the field of sound studies, but also beckons readers to find the listening experience to be an unmistakably political social practice. Power in Listening is an exceptional achievement, uniting scholars and artists across countless disciplines to foster conversations and new scholarship for years to come. ~Iván Ramos, author of Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics

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Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, founding Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!, and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.

Liana Silva is Managing Editor of Sounding Out! She is a teacher, writer, reader, and editor living in Houston, TX. She graduated from Binghamton University’s Department of English in 2012. In the past she was Editor-in-Chief of the professional publication Women in Higher Education.

Aaron Trammell is Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine and author of Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology and The Privilege of Play. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Games Studies and was an honoree of the hobby game industry’s prestigious Diana Jones Award.

July 29, 2019  

X! : Blog-O-Versary 10.0

** Click here to head straight to our free, downloadable X! 10.0 Blog-O-Versary Mix! It’s okay, like Tupac, we ain’t mad at ya!  It’s cool to come back here though and check this out. **

We didn’t have a clue where the blog was headed when we started out in 2009, packed into AT’s humid apartment on Seminary in Binghamton, alternately helping him pack, looking through his records, and making plans for this writing thing we were going to do together to stay in touch. I had a newborn baby strapped on my chest, Aaron was leaving BU to start a PhD program at Rutgers and Liana was embarking deeply into her dissertation (and just a year later for Kansas City. . .for the full origin story, catch our recent co-authored piece “The Pleasure [is] Principle: Sounding Out! and the Digitization of Community” in Digital Sound Studies). Our tight-knit research crew was facing so much change and uncertainty, that I’m pretty sure we decided to name the blog Sounding Out! as a form of echolocation. If talking and thinking about sound waves had brought us together in the first place, perhaps their resonance could stretch out to fill the unknown contours of the future that lay ahead.

And over the past decade, it has. Not just for us as friends, co-workers, and eventually shared hive-mind cells, but for the field of sound studies, which in the same decade went from “huh?” to “emerging,” then from academic hipster cred and to everybody’s tryna put “soundscape” in everything, to the New York Times magazine does a cover story on it AND you can now get a Masters in it at Northwestern University in Chicago [shout out to SO! special editor Neil Verma, who not only edited a media stream for us from 2013-2016 but—among many other awesome things—helped get this very program up and running]. It’s no coincidence that the field’s trajectory and reach has grown exponentially along with ours, and we are proud as hell of that.

Other things we are most proud of:

  • that, on separate occasions in the past year, two brilliant people have told us that reading SO! inspired them to go to grad school because our site hosted and valued research on sound by/about women of color (these stories are literally our favorite 😭 😭 😭 and inspire us to go even harder!).
  • growing deep, connected relationships among scholars and professionals in the field infused with fun and feeling amongst the brilliance and rigor.
  • surpassing one MILLION unique clicks (not that “metrics” has ever been our goal but holla!!).
  • getting on the podcast tip early (2010!!) and staying weird as hell with it (free format por vida!).
  • always being down to shout out and collabo (over the years we’ve worked with Antenna, Locatora Radio, The Radio Preservation Task Force, IASPM-US, Soundbox, The Middle Spaces, Tuned City Brussels, WHRW 90.5, Everything Sounds, Not Your Muse, and The UC Riverside Punk Con,  among many others. In 2020 we have something going with the Zora Neale Hurston festival in Eatonville, Florida. . . stay tuned!).
  • publishing a post on “Old Town Road.” IJS. Our regular writers always bring it. Thank you to Justin Burton and Robin James, our current roster, and to all of our past fam: Regina Bradley, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Maile Colbert, Osvaldo Oyola, and Andreas Pape.
  • pushing so hard for our reach, readership, and coverage to become increasingly global (in the past year we hosted pieces from and/or about Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Cuba, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, and Ukraine).
  • developing a strong undergraduate internship program through Binghamton University that brings us literally the best interns in the WORLD 💯. They bring us new ideas, excitement, and new social media accounts, and we entrust them with everything we know about editing and digital publishing. It’s been a blast, and we are so proud they’ve all gone on to do wonderful work in the world.
  • that our roster of writers more accurately represents the diversity of sound studies scholars than any other publication out there by leaps and bounds.
  • that SO! has continued to evolve in interesting ways while strengthening and refining our guiding mission over the years: to find, nurture, and share accessible top-notch scholarship/art/thought that investigates how power impacts how we sound and listen, while amplifying sound studies knowledge toward social justice.
  • AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, that so many readers have put their faith in us and so many amazing writers have thought of us as a home for their work. We take your trust so very seriously, and remain humbled by your generosity and confidence. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for being Sounding Out! along with us.

I’m trying to keep it short and cute today, not saying too TOO much because this post [our 624th!] is neither a retrospective nor a tribute, but a celebration. . .as Diddy once said, we ain’t going nowhere! [Editors’ Note: Other notables JS has referenced in the previous decade of Blog-o-Versary posts includes Bob Marley, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Schoolhouse Rock, Dionne Warwick, the Solid Gold Dancers, S.E. Hinton, Beyoncé, Langston Hughes, X-Ray Spex, A Tribe Called Quest, Fred Moten, Bill Withers, and . . . Taylor Swift. Oof.]. And bet, we have AMAZING things planned for next year, including forums on Soundwalking while POC (starts next week!), the 50th anniversary of Charles Mingus’s Ah Um (guest edited by Earl Brooks), audiobooks (edited by Liana Silva), and sound and climate change (guest edited by Anja Kanngieser), an undergraduate sound studies showcase,  and . . . . . . . . . .

[🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁]

we just finished a book proposal for a Sounding Out! anthology: working title Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader.

[🎉 insert airhorn sound here 🎉]

YES! We couldn’t be more grateful for the last ten years, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s coming up next.  Even though we didn’t know where we were headed in 2009, we have arrived nonetheless, and all because we knew what we wanted—to create a community just like this one. Happy X! Blog-o-Versary to all of us, today!

–JLS, LMS, and AT

 

XXXXXXXXXX Highlight Reel XXXXXXXXXX

  • Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo successfully defended her dissertation, and had the chance to open for Bikini Kill in June, under her stage name Sammus. In fall of 2019 she will be starting a two-year postdoc at Brown University’s music department, and will be getting married to fiction writer Lance Akinsiku. She is presenting a Making/Doing session at this year’s 4S Conference in New Orleans in September.
  • John Melillo has a new essay on the French sound poet Henri Chopin in Ties: Journal of Text, Image, and Sound. His book, The Poetics of Noise, is under contract for Bloomsbury’s Sound Studies list.
  • In summer 2018 Kristin Moriah began a position as an Assistant Professor of African American Literary Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “Where Are the Black Angels?” her review of Mickalene Thomas’s historic exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario is forthcoming in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 123, as is “A Greater Compass of Voice: Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Black Performance in Nineteenth-Century North America,” which will be published in Theatre Research in Canada. She is excited to attend the ASA annual meeting in Honolulu where she will present “Playing the Red Record: Black Feminist Recording Practices.”
  • Phillip Sinitiere published several pieces on W. E. B. Du Bois in The North Star. He also co-organized a forum on Shirley Graham Du Bois at Black Perspectives. He is the 2019-2020 W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar at UMass Amherst.
  • SO! Ed-in Chief Jennifer Lynn Stoever published three essays in 2018/19: “‘Doing fifty-five in a fifty-four’: Cop Voice, U.S. Policing and the Cadence of White Supremacy” (Interdisciplinary Journal of Voice Studies), “Black Radio Listeners in America’s ‘Golden Age'” (Journal of Radio and Media Studies), and “Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and ‘70s Bronx” in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, which you can download for free here.

And remember, the “notes” on our Facebook page is *still the best place to hear about calls for art, calls for posts, and upcoming conferences, shows, and volumes in sound studies. “Like” us here and please continue to keep us in the loop regarding new projects. We love to signal boost, as you can probably tell by our very active Twitter feed!

Clic here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary “X!” mix 10.0 with track listing (and of course which writers suggested which songs)!

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Jennifer Lynn Stoever is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out! She is also Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, lead organizer of The Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016).  

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