To Blog

A)   Consider our mission: 

Essentially, our mission is to provide a serious public discussion about the social and political nature and impacts of sound and listening. We are as interested in pushing the margins of the field as much as we are defining its center; therefore, issues addressed in our blog range from the significance of the Vuvuzuela controversy during the World Cup to the inducing of panic by the soundtrack to the videogame Limbo to a soundwalk of Kansas City.

Note that while we often include music-focused pieces, we are not a music blog by trade. Music is a privileged cultural site of organized sound but it is, for SO!, one sound among many others that we are interested in. Therefore, we really want to challenge folks coming at sound studies through music to think outside of familiar ways of thinking and writing about it.  Each of the music-centric pieces we have published centralizes sound in a uniquely sound studies fashion: i.e. really getting to the nitty-gritty of the sonics of the music at hand, addressing the relationship of sound to image/history/experience/social identity and/or addressing other audio aspects of music such as listening.  Check out this piece on the sound of “blackness” in recent popular music or this post on “A Boy Like That” from West Side Story for examples of what we mean. Please also search our archive to see what SO! writers may have already have said about your topic, and so you may engage any posts you find in conversation. Here’s a link to our mission statement to read further: click here.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of topics the SO! Editorial collective is particularly interested in:

**listening as a critical cultural practice

**sound/listening and race, gender, sexuality, and/or class

**sound studies in current events

**decolonizing listening

**sound and bio power // the body

**sound and surveillance culture

**multimodal sound and listening practices

**indigenous sound and listening practices //indigenous sound study

**Non-US based sound work and inquiry

**sound, power, and space

**sound and video games

**sound studies and film

** digital sound studies // digital humanities work

**sound studies and methodology

**where sound studies intersects other fields: Black Study, Latinx Studies,

**sound studies pieces with a transnational methodology

**issues of voice

**sound studies and radio

**sound studies and disability studies

**sound studies in the 19th century

**literature and sound/listening

**noise and/or silence in their many forms

**histories of sound technology

In addition to traditional blog posts we will also consider:

**meditations on sound panels at national conferences

**critical soundwalks of various locales

**reviews of sound studies scholarship

**sound art reviews

**sound art multimedia pieces

**pieces by non-sound studies identified scholars/writers using a sound studies lens for the first time

**Interviews with key sound studies peeps

B)   Strike a balanced, accessible tone:

While many of our readers and writers are academic, they are by no means the totality. An important part of our mission at SO! is to make sound studies accessible to a wider audience without sacrificing rigorous intellectual conversation. This means being interesting, compelling, and accessible—and often playful—while still being smart, doing your homework, and mentioning the ideas of the folks that inspired your thinking. We encourage all points of view, including more traditional theoretical standpoints to first person pieces focused on experience, as long as they meet our other criteria and. . .

C)   Give us good writing: Bring us your A-game:

We want beautiful-sounding prose as much as we want beautiful analyses of sound in prose. We want specific details. We want evocative images. We want multimedia. We want humor. We want feeling. We want haunting diction. We want your links, but not your footnotes; We want your keywords but not your jargon. Most importantly, we want a specific point or argument to your post that is clear, interesting, and sharp. And we want it in around 1000-1200 words.

**see Dan Cohen’s post on “the blessay”  for an apt description of the style of the pieces we cultivate at SO!  

Please read Sounding Out! from link A to link Z (and everywhere in between) before submitting in order to get a feel for our sweet spot.   If, after you finish, you still think you have the X-factor, please drop an introduction to yourself and a short pitch to our Editor Jennifer Stoever (jstoever@gmail.com). If you get the green light, we’ll slot you and our editors will work with you to produce the best post possible. We slot pretty far in advance and our spots are quite competitive . . .so be persistent with revisions and don’t wait too long to start sounding it out!