Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2024!
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What. A. Year. Thank you to all of the amazing thinkers who generously shared their writing with us during rough waters worldwide. During those times when our work feels like we’re screaming underwater, it’s especially important that we’re still out here making waves. A special shout out in gratitude to our readers, who are listening even harder during our 15th year, and rocking the boat along with us into 2025. –JS, Ed-in-Chief
Here, beginning with number 10, are our Top 10 posts released in 2024 (as of 12/19/24)!
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A Conversation by Todd Craig and LeBrandon Smith
What is it? The braids?–Kendrick Lamar, “Euphoria”
After a much-anticipated wait, Kendrick dropped “Euphoria.” It not only stopped Hip Hop culture in its tracks, but it allowed all spectators to realize this was gearing up to be an epic battle. The song starts with the backwards Richard Pryor sample from the iconic film The Wiz. For those unfamiliar, The Wiz is a film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz featuring an all-Black star-studded cast, including Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Richard Pryor played the role of the Wizard. When the characters realize the Wizard is a fraud, he says, “Everything they say about me is true”; this is the sample Kendrick uses, grounding himself in 1970s Black culture and situating where he plans to go in his writing.
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A Conversation by Todd Craig and LeBrandon Smith
“By now, it’s safe to say very few people have not caught wind of the biggest Hip-Hop battle of the 21st century: the clash between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Whether you’ve seen the videos, the memes or even smacked a bunch of owls around playing the video game, this battle grew beyond Hip Hop, with various facets of global popular culture tapped in, counting down minutes for responses and getting whiplash with the speed of song drops. There are multiple ways to approach this event. We’ve seen inciteful arguments about how these two young Black males at the pinnacle of success are tearing one another down. We also acknowledge Hip Hop’s long legacy of battling; the culture has always been a ‘competitive sport’ that includes ‘lyrical sparring.'”
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(8).Technologies of Communal Listening: Resonance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
By Harry Burson
“In both sound studies and the sonic arts, the concept of ‘resonance‘ has increasingly played a central role in attuning listeners to the politics of sound. The term itself is borrowed from acoustics, where resonance simply refers to the transfer of energy between two neighboring objects. For example, plucking a note on one guitar string will cause the other strings to vibrate at a similar frequency. When someone or something makes a sound, everything in the immediate environs—objects, people, the room itself—will respond with sympathetic vibrations. Simply put, in acoustics, resonance describes a sonic connection between sounding objects and their environment. In the arts, the concept of resonance emphasizes the situated existence of sound as a transformative encounter between bodies in a particular time and place. Resonance has become a key term to think through how sound creates a listening community, a transitory assemblage whose reverberations may be felt beyond a single moment of encounter.
For its recent performance series, simply called Resonance, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago drew on this generative concept by bringing together four artists who explore sound as an “introspective force for greater understanding, compassion, and change.” Curated by Tara Aisha Willis and Laura Paige Kyber, the series builds on theories of resonance as an affective relationship between sounding bodies developed by writers and artists like Sonia Louis Davis, Karen Christopher, and Birgit Abels. . .”
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(7). Sonic Homes: The Sonic/Racial Intimacy of Black and Brown Banda Music in Southern California
by Sara Veronica Hinojos and Alex Mireles
“Sarah La Morena (Sarah the Black woman), or Sarah Palafox, was adopted and raised by a Mexican family in Mexico. At the age of five, she moved to Riverside, California, a predominantly Mexican city an hour east of Compton. Palafox started singing as a way to express the racism she faced as a child in Southern California, feeling caught between her Black appearance and her Mexican sound. She found her voice in church, a nurturing environment where she could be herself, surrounded by her family’s love. She gained attention with a viral video of her rendition of Jenni Rivera’s “Que Me Vas a Dar.” Palafox delivers each note with profound emotion and precision, leaving even the accompanying mariachi violinist in awe. . .”
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(6). Echoes of the Latent Present: Listening to Lags, Delays, and Other Temporal Disjunctions
—by Matthew Tomkinson
“Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).
Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”.”
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by Emily Collins
“When the COVID-19 global pandemic began, news reports and studies throughout the world began citing a lot of sound-based statistics: drastic reductions in noise pollution in urban centres, AI recordings of cellphone coughs, shifting soundscapes at home with new routines and work settings, and sonic sensitivities cultivated in quarantine and isolation. At the same time, in conjunction with these new research studies and areas of interest, there was an outpouring of calls for sound recordings and contributions to digital archival sound projects, such as Sounds of Pandemia, the Pandemic Diaries project, Sound of the Earth: The Pandemic Chapter, Sounds like a Pandemic? (SLAP?), and Stories from a Pandemic, just to name a few. A perceptive post by Sarah Mayberry Scott (2021)outlines the stakes for these types of initiatives grounded in a particular yet ever-changing historical moment, and the stakes of listening (in its attentiveness) and sound (in its persuasive power) more broadly, though undoubtably mediated and defined by power relations in their various social and the cultural contexts. . .”
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—(4). Wingsong: Restricting Sound Access to Spotted Owl Recordings
by Julianne Graper
“I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic shift in the board game industry. The game received an unparalleled number of awards, including the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur Game of the Year), and an unheard of seven categories of the Golden Geek Awards, including Best Board Game of the Year and Best Family Board Game of the Year. In addition to causing shifts in typical board game topic, artistry, and demographic, Wingspan has led many board game fans to engage with the natural world in new ways, even inspiring many to become avid birders.
Following the game’s rise to popularity, developer Marcus Nerger released an app, Wingsong which allows players to scan each of the beautifully illustrated cards and play a recording of the associated bird’s song. On the evening in question, the unexpected occurred when I scanned the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) card and received a message that read:
Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted. . .”
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—(3). Rhetoric After Sound: Stories of Encountering “The Hum” Phenomenon
by Trent Wintermeier
“‘So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94). . .”
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(2). Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre
by Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
“The announcer’s piercing “lucharaaaaaán” cries from the middle of the ring proclaims the constitutional two-out-of-three-falls rule of lucha libre. But before the famous cry rings out to set the stage for the spectacularized acrobatic combat between costumed warriors, their theatrical entrances set the all-important emotional stakes of the battle. The entrances are loud, campy, interactive exchanges between luchadores and spectators. An entrance song itself cues the luchador’s persona: a cumbia could signal a técnico (a good guy); a heavy metal song more than likely indicates a rudo (a bad guy) typically donning black, death-themed getups. Luchadores saunter into the arena, stopping to pose, high five their fans, and verbally heckle their opponents. The storylines of good versus evil, betrayal and revenge, or humility versus arrogance are some of the more standard plots that motivate spectators to adamantly cheer for the favorite and jeer for the foe.
The sonic exchanges between luchadores’ and spectators before, during, and after the fight positions lucha libre as much more than a sport. And while the term spectators, suggests the privileged act of watching or viewing; here, we expand spectators within lucha libre arena to mean “a call to witness” (á la Chela Sandoval). Put simply, lucha libre is a cultural phenomenon where contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties are often tapped as fodder for theatrical plots. In the U.S./Mexico’s sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the political realities of border enforcement, immigration politics, and racial tensions are loudly heard and placed on display. . .”
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(1). to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial soundwalk praxis
by ameia camielle smith
“in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism. in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.
these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis. . .”
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Featured Image “underwater scream” by Flickr User Smellslikeupdog CC BY-ND 2.0
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2023!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2020-2022!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2019!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2018!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2017!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2016!
The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2015!
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Rhetoric After Sound: Stories of Encountering “The Hum” Phenomenon
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“So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94).
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Sweeney’s story of encountering the hum for the first time is remarkable. It begins in Taft, California, which Sweeney recounts as “a podunk little desert bowl town in the middle of nowhere. You can literally drive from one end to the other in under 10min, under 5 if you was speeding.” On this particular night, while walking down the main road of Taft, they report the scene being charged with electricity, and following this charge, hearing a moving sound, a traveling yet invisible sound. “This invisible thing was creating a noise like I had never heard before and sending a wave of static electricity throughout the air in every direction around it,” Sweeney explains. They try to track it down, but to no avail. After following the hum a few blocks and around a couple of corners, it just simply vanishes. As Kristin Gallerneaux aptly claims in her book High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, “the Hum’s oppression seems to come from everywhere and nowhere” (196), and this is especially true in Sweeney’s encounter.
While their account of the hum as electrically-charged is exceptional, Sweeney’s story adequately represents both the anomalistic qualities of the hum and its ability to elude a locatable and identifiable source. They attempt to describe the hum during this encounter as “like an invisible traveling vehicle of some sort,” but that, altogether, they are “not really sure” what it is. And they even admit that this explanation “makes no sense… whatsoever.” This difficulty in describing the phenomenon is reaffirmed not only by the stories told by other listeners but, too, the numerous scientific experiments that have been conducted after the hum’s frequent emergence beginning around the 1970s (Deming “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” 583).
In the US, two major studies have been conducted on the hum: The first in Taos, New Mexico, and the second in Kokomo, Indiana (Cowan “The Results of Hum Studies in the United States”; Mullins and Kelly “The Mystery of the Taos Hum”). Collectively, nearly three hundred residents in these communities have reported hearing a mysterious hum that exists without a known source. While it may sound like an idling diesel truck engine (Frosch “Manifestations of a Low-Frequency Sound of Unknown Origin Perceived Worldwide, Also known as ‘The Hum’ or the ‘Taos Hum’” 60), a dentist’s drill (Deming 575), “someone’s high-powered audio bass running amok” (Mullins and Kelly “The Elusive Hum in Taos, New Mexico”), or simply just an “invisible force”—as Sweeney claims—it may be none of the above. Musicologist Jorg Muhlhans asserts that “there is no clear evidence for either an acoustic or electromagnetic origin, nor is there an attribution to some form of tinnitus” (“Low Frequency and Infrasound: A Critical Review of the Myths, Misbeliefs and Their Relevance to Music Perception Research” 272). Thus, according to Muhlhans, these studies reveal that while hum’s sensorial impact is that of sound, the phenomenon itself is likely neither acoustic nor electromagnetic.
Beyond the limits of current scientific logics which attempt to make sense of sonic events and their impacts, the hum exists as an exceptional and unknown anomaly. It transcends the valuative limits of current knowledge in acoustics and ways of understanding how sound moves through, across, and within spaces to address potential listeners. “I’m not saying I saw waves of electricity or anything of the sort,” Sweeney adds to their above description of the hum as a sound “charged with electricity.” “It was more of a feeling than something you saw. I could just feel electricity everywhere, and see little tendrils of it from my fingertips as I ran them across each other… I just KNEW it was coming from whatever was making that sound, this invisible force that was traveling down the road.” In such an account, the hum defies scientific explanation, and this fact is supported by the multiple failed investigations into the phenomenon. As Franz Frosch details in their article “Hum and Otoacoustic Emissions May Arise Out of the Same Mechanisms,” some scientists have built multiple “custom shielded chamber[s]” out of copper and magnetic material to test for a potential acoustic or electromagnetic source of the hum (604). These investigations, time after time, can’t provide an answer—leaving it up to listeners of the hum to form their own.
Sweeney’s story—and the endless other stories of the hum that have been told across the world—depict the lived, affective, and rhetorical experience of anomalistic listening. To hear, to listen with the hum, is to experience the affective dimensions of a “sound” that has no apparent acoustic or electromagnetic source. This is because “sonic knowledge is framed through acoustics and experience” (84), as Mark Peter Wright notes in his book Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, and Critical Practice. So, to listen with the hum is to occupy a state of affection that is altogether unknown to not only science but the listener themself. Sweeney bluntly continues, writing about their experience of the hum, saying, “I only know exactly what I’ve told you today.” To know this sound, for this sound to exist as truth, this unfolds through stories found in the still-to-be-explained.
I consider “after sound” to characterize this felt condition for rhetorical action that is a result of listening beyond or after acoustic valuations. Instead of this being a moment void of sound, “after sound” defines a state of experience that is complicated by an attempt to control the valuative limits of what is and isn’t sonic. In this way, “after sound” only gestures toward the temporal to develop the different emergence of the sensorial. Because the hum affects in a manner similar to sound but without acoustic or electromagnetic origin, people who hear the hum make sense of this relentless experience through a condition that is after sound. Such a claim is represented in Sweeney’s admission that “[they] just have this weird feeling that this story needs to be told. That there’s more to The Hum than anyone has realized, and that maybe it needs to be further studied and looked into” (added emphasis). This felt, “weird feeling” is initiated after sound, and this is what I am considering as the call for rhetorical action. Such an affective, felt, and lived experience may only exist after the “logical” answers, failed scientific studies, and experiments lacking helpful results become determinative of sonic limits.
Further, “after sound” moves from Marie Thompson’s discussion of “source-oriented” noise (30) that she posits in her book Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism. Speaking to the phenomenon of the hum, Thompson explains that an “unidentifiable noise is often amplified in perception, grasping the attention of the listener” (29). “After sound” is an hyper-attuned condition wherein the rhetorical actions of listeners are always attentive to what-may-(not)-be acoustics. It is their presence within utter sonic mystery that fuels the potential for persuasive response. And David Deming, a researcher in Geosciences, articulates in his article “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” that “in the absence of an answer provided by science, Hum hearers tend to find an explanation and hang on to it” (579), which illustrates the potential for listeners to respond via story within the conditions foregrounded by anomalistic encounters. “After sound” describes a moment of malleability that opens up in soundtime for different negotiations of sense and affect.
Responding to the conditions of listening with story, like Sweeney does, reflects an intention to share and persuade through an expression of sonic experience. As Katherine McKittrick states in her book Dear Science and Other Stories, “story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with creative precision” (7). And V. Jo Hsu, speaking to the rhetorical potential of story, elucidates in their book Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics that “story can slow down, hold still, redefine, and/or reimagine our physical movements to renegotiate their shared meanings” (18). How I’m conceiving of storytelling after sound develops from the insights developed by these authors and other scholars exploring the rhetorical potential of story in cultural rhetorics.
Story, in the domain of sound, enables listeners to reconsider how, when, why, and where the sonic is defined and valued. While it must not be the sole rhetorical technology after sound, Sweeney clearly relies on storytelling to make sense of their encounter with the hum. This story and other stories told about the hum illustrate how listeners practice the negotiation of sound’s meaning by collectively exploring ways of investigating and experimenting with(in) phenomena. Telling stories after sound is to reach across and through a community of listeners to find shared truths that come to be through encounters with hearing. Altogether, rhetoric after sound queries the intersection of perception and intelligibility to jostle forward the meaning of listening. At a moment when the world is at a loss for answers, this is a practice of seizing opportunities for hopeful and imaginative intervention into the valuative limits of the sonic.
“I’ll end it here,” Sweeney begins in their last paragraph, “and I can assure you that everything I have told you is the absolute truth. It happened to me and not a friend of a friend. I was awake, I’m not making any of it up, and all I want are REAL answers.” Sweeney’s call for a resolution was posted 10 months ago, in May 2023. And still today, the hum continues to lack answers, and the unsolved mystery continues to impact listeners. More recently, Popular Mechanics reported in a November 2023 article, titled “A Ghostly Nighttime Hum Is Invading Random Towns. Scientists Don’t Know What It Means,” that the hum has reached Omagh in Northern Ireland and that citizens are “trapped inside [of a mystery].” So far, no matter the amount of media coverage nor number of affected people across the world, encounters are ultimately defined by sounds unknown. After sound—when communities of listeners are left behind by these valuative limits—rhetorical action persists in search of an explanation.
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Featured Image: Spiral by Flickr User Richard CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
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Trent Wintermeier is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s a Graduate Research Assistant for the AVAnnotate project, where he helps make audiovisual material more discoverable and accessible. Next year, he will be an Assistant Director for the Digital Writing & Research Lab. His research interests broadly include sound, digital rhetorics, and community. Currently, he’s interested in how researchers can responsibly engage with communities impacted by sound and the local rhetorical ecologies which materialize under sonic conditions.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Becoming a Bad Listener: Labyrinthitis, Vertigo, and “Passing”–Aaron Trammell
Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness, and the Trembling Body–Airek Beauchamp
Listening to Tinnitus: Roles of Media When Hearing Breaks Down—Mack Hagood
My Time in the Bush of Drones: or, 24 Hours at Basilica Hudson–Robert Cashin Ryan
Echoes of the Latent Present: Listening to Lags, Delays, and Other Temporal Disjunctions–Matthew Tompkinson
Re-orienting Sound Studies’ Aural Fixation: Christine Sun Kim’s “Subjective Loudness”–Sarah Mayberry Scott
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