Sounding Out! Unplugged: “Power in Listening” (August 2026)
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.
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SO! Thursday Stream Year in Re-Hear
The offer was, I confess, music to my ears. It was the around this time last year that Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever and the SO! collective generously offered me the chance to come on board to help them draw in sound-minded editors and authors from the American Studies Association and Society for Cinema & Media Studies, and other academic associations, opening up a new space two or three Thursdays each month. The truth is I never even considered turning them down. Working together, we recruited talented folks to work as Guest Editors, crafting a number of special series posts that dig deep into mediated sonic worlds of music, radio, film, art and science.
The result has been a group of articles that I couldn’t be prouder of for their richness. Among the most widely-read articles I’ve worked on this year you’ll find Mike D’Errico’s controversial piece on gender and brostep, but also Margaret Schedel’s groundbreaking article on sonifying nanoparticles. Go ahead, try to find another sound studies venue – online or anyplace – with range like that. No luck? As I suspected. Welcome back.
Not only has working on SO! been an honor, it has also opened up new horizons for me, forged odd alliances and prompted strange harmonies – hallmarks of what exciting sound studies ought to be about. I learned something and relearned more every week. In that spirit, this “Year Re-hear” post celebrates the Thursday stream by listening back –not once, but three times — to where we’ve been.
“A Tribe Called Red – Hall 4 (1)” by Flickr user Trans Musicales, CC BY-NC 2.0
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First, the straight story.
Our year started with The Wobble Continuum, a series on race, gender and dubstep, edited by Justin D. Burton (Rider University) with posts by Mike D’Errico (UCLA), Christina Giacona (U of Oklahoma), and Burton. These articles brought new perspective on the “maximalist aesthetic” of electronic dance music and explored resistance to sonic racism, while examining sonic experience everywhere from a baseball stadium to a bus stop.
Then, beginning in February, we heard from Latin America through Radio de Acción a series on radio and the idea of region. Edited by Tom McEnaney (Cornell), with posts by Alejandra Bronfman (UBC), Karl Swinehart (Uchicago) and Carolina Guerrero (Radio Ambulante), RdA brought us fascinating stories of student activists taking over radio stations to oppose Fulgencio Batista in the 1950’s and of the founding of Radio Ambulante, at the forefront of Spanish-language creative narrative radio today.
When Spring came (remember Spring? sigh.) I edited Start a Band, reflecting on the legacy and music of the late Lou Reed, with posts by Jacob Smith (Northwestern) and Tim Anderson (Old Dominion). Tim and Jake offered penetrating accounts of how reissues of Velvet Underground records helped a generation learn to listen, and how their music quite literally gets under your skin, and sometimes even deeper.
Sculpting the Film Soundtrack, was our next series, an ambitious take on new directions in film sound design edited by Katherine Spring (Wilfrid Laurier), with posts by Randolph Jordan (Simon Fraser), Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (University College, Cork) and Benjamin Wright (University of Southern California). This series had extraordinary range, examining works by such figures as Hans Zimmer and Shane Carruth that break down old assumptions about soundtracks, while unsettling the act of listening itself.
From radio and film, we turned to art and science. First with Hearing the Unheard,
a series edited by Seth Horowitz (NeuroPop) with posts by the sound artist China Blue (The Engine Institute), Milton A. Garcés (University of Hawaii at Manoa) and Margaret A. Schedel (Stonybrook). This series took us inside the ears of dogs, out into the vacuum of space billions of years ago, and deep inside the sound of underground lava. Then came our current series, Radio Art Reflections, edited by Magz Hall, which promises to undertake a trans-national history of radio art — check out the first post by artist Anna Friz (Canada) on radio art and acoustic ecology.
Where will this stream go next? In part, that’s up to you. If you have a concept for a special series, and a sense of some exciting authors for it, have a look at our Call for Guest Editors, we’ll extend the deadline a few days.
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Remix!
In reviewing these posts, I was struck by how they form their own connections in ways we didn’t plan and probably couldn’t foresee a year ago. The Thursday stream echoes back on itself. Here, for your consideration, are three alternative hypothetical groupings of the exact same posts you see above:
Sound and Indigenous Peoples Today: a series featuring an examination of the circulation of A Tribe Called Red’s song “Braves“, a study of indigenous peoples of Vancouver’s Eastside on film, and an introduction to Aymara-language radio in Bolivia, with Christina Giacona, Randolph Jordan and Karl Swinehart.
The Microsonic: a series on itty bitty sounds, and how to get at them. Posts explore the sonic fragments in Upstream Color, the sonification of data from x-ray scatter, and the tactile sounds of Lou Reed with Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Margaret A. Schedel, and Jacob Smith.
Sonic Breakdown: a series on the sound of breaking down and how sounds break things down, from the big budget film soundtrack to volcanic rock formations, and national boundaries in Caribbean radio history, with posts by Benjamin Wright, Milton Garces and Alejandra Bronfman.
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Finally, why not let the sounds from these posts tell the story for a change?
Tickle your ears with some of the sounds we’ve featured in this stream over the last year, a little sound sandbox:
- Guest editor Seth Horowitz’s office, as an elephant might hear it
- Tape of a student takeover of Radio Reloj in Cuba in 1957
- “Lady Godiva’s Operation” by The Velvet Underground
- A tremor at Arenal, a volcano in Costa Rica
- electrosmog, a work of radio art by Kristen Roos for Radius in Chicago
- The sound of cartoons playing on a TV in a methadone clinic in Vancouver
- A sonifications of a variety of mappings of x-ray scattered particles by Meg Schedel
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Thanks to Jennifer, Aaron, Liana, Will and everyone here at SO! for putting your faith in me this year. And thanks especially to all our writers and editors for being so enthusiastic, brilliant and patient.
The SO! family salutes you!
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Featured Photo by Flickr user Jenene Chesbrough, Creative Commons License.
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