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 summer 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 our 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,

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/

—

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 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.

—

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

—

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

—

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.