** Click here if you want to SOUND THE ALARM and listen to the mix already!! You can also scroll down following this post**

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“BRRRRRRRIIIIIIINNNNG”

is the line–and the sound–that opens Richard Wright’s 1940 wake-up-call to America, Native Son, a novel about the systemic reaches of structural racism and what happens when it works as intended: funneling privilege to white people and dealing losses–in housing, economics, education, employment, the legal system, and overall mental, physical, and emotional health and life quality–to people of color.  There have been moments in the 75+ intervening years since Wright’s novel topped best seller lists where it’s felt like folks had finally heard this alarm loud and clear; right now it seems like too many have just been repeatedly hitting snooze instead of choosing to get–and stay–woke.

But just because some folk’s can’t, won’t–or choose not–to hear it is not at all reason to stop sounding the alarm, and Sounding Out! certainly isn’t going to stop chiming in and amplifying its urgency, especially in this current moment.  It has been our mission since we began in 2009 to encourage scholarship about and via sound that helps us all do the work necessary to listen “bone-deep in the deep of bones” to that “BRRRRRRRIIIIIIINNNNG” (thank you Fred Moten, for that stunning description of listening in In the Break, and so much more).

To listen to it and, we hope, to ACT.

We are now “nine and feeling fine,” in spite of it all, still sounding the alarm within our field and reverberating to other disciplines,  inside, through, and beyond the hyperpoliced borders of the US, and at the intersection of multiple social identities: race sexuality class gender nation citizenship status. Now, more than ever, we are grateful for the work we do and the platform we have built–and we are honored to be part of the wonderful, brilliant, and powerful community who sustains us and who’s always out there, listening and doing that work. It’s been a breakthrough year for sound studies brilliance; we have actually received more unsolicited submissions this year than in previous years combined (!!!). Keep it flowing–we’ll begin setting the 2019 schedule soon!

Just a sampling of what (and where) the year nine cohort brought you: to an art installation on the streets of Mexico City, to Australia for a conversation on sound and the law and an open letter about race, power, and equity in academia, to K-12 classrooms all over the US in a Liana Silva-edited forum on sonic pedagogy, to Argentina to listen to the “song of the summer,”  to Russia to listen in to the sounds of World Cup 2018, to a galaxy far, far away, to Canada’s radio waves to hear traces of “The Idea of North,” to the contested political space of the womb, to Hamilton, to the paisa bars, mosh pits, hardcore shows, tarimas, and 1980’s flashbacks of Chicana Soundscapes (thank you Michele Habell-Pallan for curation and the intro to this forum!), and to indigenous peoples’ sound from Mt. Scott to Standing Rock.

And of course we must give special props and the deepest of gratitude to guest editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta (who brought you the groundbreaking Gendered Soundscapes of India forum), to our regular writers Regina Bradley, Justin Burton, and Robin James who bring it three times a year, to our Fall 2017 intern James “DJ Tasty” Tlsty who brought you “Listening In With Sounding Out!” on WHRW (and our podcast stream) and our spring 2018 team, Shauna Bahssin and Allie Young, who brought copy-editing expertise and respectively, posted on a 24-Hour Drone Festival in upstate NY, and created a podcast (airing on our podcast stream very soon!) about womxn’s experiences in the music industry.

To all our writers, readers, supporters, retweeters, sharers, teachers, and word-of-mouth fans: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Gracias por todo. Let’s continue blowing it to full watts in year 10.

–JLS, LMS, and AT

⏰⏰⏰⏰ SO! 2016-2017 Highlight Reel⏰⏰⏰⏰⏰

• Justin Burton‘s book, Posthuman Rap (Oxford UP), was published fall 2017, and Justin successfully applied for tenure spring 2018.

• Karen Cook is a recipient of an inaugural ACLS Professional Development Grant, and presented some recent work at the annual Medieval-Renaissance Music Conference in Maynooth, Ireland in July 2018.

• This year, Robin James assumed co-editorship (with Eric Weisbard) of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and she wants to encourage SO! writers and readers to submit their article-length work. In addition to writing for SO!, she also published an article on post-feminism and electronic dance music. She keynoted the 2017 IASPM-International conference and the Future/Present: Current Practices in Pop Music Studies conference in Uppsala, Sweden.

• Monika Mehta  published “Fan and its Paratexts,” Dossier on Fan,  in Framework (January, 2018) and “Streaming Hotstar Originals”  for the theme week Global Television Streaming, edited by Jasmine Mitchell and Lisa Patti, for in media res: a media commons project (April 2018). She also co-edited SO!‘s forum Gendered Sounds of India with Praseeda Gopinath and co-wrote the introduction with her as well.

• For 2018, Marlen Rios-Hernandez will be at the Latinx Studies Association (LSA) at D.C. presenting  “‘How Many Queers Are Here Tonight?’: The AIDS Epidemic and Punk as Contagion From Gobbing, Cruising, to Los Frikis” as part of the “Performing Dissidence: Social Change and the Stage in Musical Performance” panel. She will be at this years American Studies Association (ASA) in Atlanta presenting  a piece entitled “‘We Will Bury You!’ Listening For Chicana Punk and Other Subaltern Queer Auralities on  Vinyl” on the “Emergent Auralities: Subaltern Sounds in Latinx Cultural Production and Performance” panel. Moving forward, she’s a recipient of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) year long dissertation fellowship and intend to graduate by Spring 2019.

• Tara Rodgers just put out a solo record as Analog Tara called Fundamentals–a sample is on this year’s SO! mix! Thank you TR!–and was featured on NPR and in the Washington Post!

• SO! Ed-in Chief Jennifer Lynn Stoever just returned from amazing methodology/methods training at the Voces Oral History Institute at the University of Texas-Austin. In Spring 2018, she completed a longterm public sound art project called The Binghamton Historical Soundwalk  (with co-teacher Monteith McCollum, community partner Susan Sherwood + TechWorks Binghamton, amazing students, and seed grants from Binghamton University and the Whiting Foundation). You can read more about it in the (free) collection Listening to the City Toolkit: Engaging and Amplifying Unheard Voices Through Creative Practice from the MIT Colab Project that dropped in Spring 2018.  Earlier this summer, she published two online essays: “The Sonic Color Line, Black Women, and Police Violence, in a special forum on Sandra Bland on Black Perspectives, the journal of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and “Drake vs. the Beatles? Time to retire rap vs. rock cliché,” for CNN Opinion. She’ll be heading to Melbourne, Australia in late August 2018 to give talks as part of the Eavesdropping Art Festival coordinated by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Liquid Architecture, and the Melbourne Law School. Her nine-year-old son will be attending as well, enjoying art and keeping watch for all the dangerous animals he’s heard about on the Discovery Channel.

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!

Click here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary “Sound the Alarm” mix 9.0 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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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

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• 2016 Blog-O-Versary “!!!!!!!” mix 7.0
• 2015 Blog-o-Versary 6.0 Keep on Pushing! (Our 400th post!!)
• 2014 #flawless 5.0 celebration and mix
• 2013 Blog-o-Versary 4.0: Solid Gold Summer Countdown!
• 2012 #Blog-O-Versary 3.0: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (The Awesomeness)!
• 2011 “Awesome Sounds from a Future Boombox” 2.0
• 2010 First Blog-O-Versary party mix: A Celebration of Awesomeness