At the turn of the twentieth century, Dakota artist-activist Gertrude Bonnin, widely known by her self-chosen name, Zitkala Ša, brought attention to the violence of compulsory boarding schools with a series of narrative essays published in the Atlantic Monthly . Existing scholarship focusing on her activism, however, lacks a sustained study of the subversive role of sound, especially music and dance, in her literary and musical projects. This essay aims to address that gap through a study of Zitkala Ša’s sophisticated sonic politics. After discussing the historical tension between prohibiting and appropriating Indigenous sounds, I explore how the boarding school press became a formidable engine for assimilation projects. A close reading in tandem with tracing the reception of Zitkala Ša’s essay “The Indian Dance: A Protest Against Its Abolition” highlights her reverse-gaze strategy while also underscoring how effectively it agitated strident assimilationists. Likewise, her collaboration on The Sun Dance Opera resulted in the project’s defying tidy categorization and denying full disclosure of the ceremony, thereby rendering its own sonic politics of self-determination. Often mistakenly considered a domesticity-centered hiatus in her literary career, Zitkala Ša’s years on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation were a period of creative sonic productivity and constitute a significant era in Zitkala Ša’s developing activism, bridging her younger, serial publication years with the sophistication of the federal-level vocal activism of her later years.

Widely discussed among scholars of cities in Africa is the need to conceive these cities as relational formations, but rarely is the sensory addressed. Scholarship on urban soundscapes has tended to emphasize aesthetic and technological practices without grappling with their aural political import. This article brings together these conversations in order to address the intersections of urban sound and politics in a small Ugandan city. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Gulu, the author examines how young Acoli men use aural, expressive social practices to sonically rework the city and their place in it. Referencing the work of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and critical theorists concerned with sound, the author argues that practices of “expressive sociability” elaborate a relational politics of city-making vis-à-vis their intimate exchanges that cross-fade with urban street soundscapes. This work aims to amplify the importance of ordinary aural practices to conceiving political valences of relational life in global south cities.

Sound artist Brian Harnetty talks about his Forest Listening Rooms project and reflects on the politics of building interactive, immersive conversations about people and the landscapes that surround them in Appalachia, as well as the artistic and philosophical influences on his unique approach to composition.

David Lynch’s first feature film, Eraserhead , is considered by many to be his strangest, due to its dark industrial imagery and dissonant sound design. This essay examines the function of audible noise in Eraserhead within the context of 1970s deindustrialization and argues that noise is a key but overlooked element of the film’s overall aesthetic design—an homage to the sounds and imagery of a fading and faded industrialized United States. Listening closely firmly establishes this impression: The sound design contributes substantially to the film’s synchretic surrealism, and its ambiguity through multilayered mechanical sound highlights listeners’ interpretive practices, particularly in comparison to most films’ use of a soundtrack to dictate rather narrowly an audience’s emotional response. Gaps between what audiences hear and what they see in Eraserhead create a void strongly suggestive of loss and longing—an impression Lynch, though often reticent about his work, has indicated in many interviews over the decades. Though many studies address the fact of the film’s innovative sound design, few examine it closely in relation to its narrative and visual elements within any sort of historical context or within Lynch’s deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic sensibility. In so doing, this essay not only highlights Lynch’s remarkably consistent aesthetic but also stresses why and how Eraserhead ’s sound design is an outlier, opening up, as it does, the expressive possibilities in an unconventionally noisy soundtrack.

Modern documentary filmmakers use fiction-influenced narrative styles that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, stretching the limits and rules of the genre set by what is referred to as classic or expository documentary. Another major change in the documentary form and narrative style is the inclusion of the filmmaker in the film. As a result of filmmakers starring in their own films, interacting with the subjects, and narrating the story themselves, documentaries have become more personality driven. In these modern methods, the voices of the narrators and/or the filmmakers carry a significant importance as narrative elements. Taking five music-related documentary films into account— Lot 63, Grave C (Sam Green); Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (Fatih Akin); Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (Sam Dunn, Scot McFadyen, and Jessica Joywise); The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: Metal Years (Penelope Spheeris); and Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul)—this paper analyzes how the voices of the narrators and/or the filmmakers are used as narrative elements, and what effects these voices have on the narrative styles and the modes of these documentaries.

This essay explores music’s power to explicate, exaggerate, and even undermine moving images, examining first the marriage of sound and film through the invention of the Vitaphone and later illustrating the maturation of this marriage through an exegesis of Nicholas Britell’s score for the popular television show Succession . The Vitaphone debuted with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer , a film that made Jolson a household name and further popularized the vaudeville tradition of blackface. It is no coincidence that the synchronization of sound and film—a major innovation that would change the way we think of both for decades to come—had such racist origins, as the history of American innovation is also the history of capitalist white supremacy. Succession concerns the Roys, a legacy media family whose scion, Kendall, considers himself an innovator. Through Britell’s instrumentals, which are written to reflect Kendall’s ups and downs, we come to understand the score not as a simple, uncritical accompaniment of Succession’s images (as the Vitaphone was for The Jazz Singer ) but as an anticapitalist voice of its own, delivering criticisms of Kendall’s avarice and cultural appropriation while still evincing compassion for him as he plunges deeper into addiction. This essay maintains that sound in film, a technology with troubling origins, is now capable of asserting itself apart from that film and thus delivering a dialectical criticism of those very origins.

This interview with the creators of the multimedia exhibit The Pull of Horses on National and Local Histories and Identities and its documentary video The Pull of Horses in Urban American Performance, 1860–1920 elucidates sound’s cause-and-effect relationship with horse-suffused culture, as well as sound’s role in recovering and re-performing the past. Curated by Kim Marra and Mark Anderson and sound-designed by Wade Hampton, the pieces “illuminate how horses shaped gender and other human identities and bodies in and beyond the emerging U.S. cultural capital, New York City, during a pivotal era of industrial transformation when 130,000 horses dwelled among 1.85 million people on the island of Manhattan.”

Scholars of gentrification often study the visual results of socioeconomic structural change in urban environments, including graffiti removal and historical reconstructions of façades, turning “ugly” factory ruins into charming residential loft spaces, etc. This article examines the gentrification of Berlin’s former working-class neighborhood Prenzlauer Berg in terms of sound. We present the Knaack Klub as a sonic case study symbolizing the erasure of the voices and culture of Berlin’s long-term residents and argue that contestations over sound, brought on by West German migrants in what can be considered a “hostile takeover” of parts of East Berlin, are a key driver of gentrification. Mining visual material including photographs, police reports, court verdicts, real estate advertisements, and street maps for acoustic clues, we are able to synthesize sight and sound, ultimately allowing us to move beyond the surface—in this case, building façades—to study the visual and sonic penetration of a gentrifying neighborhood’s intersecting public and private spaces. The study of the sonic heritage of neighborhoods or even single buildings helps us to move beyond Wilhelmine façades and the surface of courtyard living to reevaluate the relationship between urban space and community, between architectural history and policy.

In the 1990s, thanks to digital convergence, many disciplines centrally concerned with the mediated uses of sound from a variety of different orientations—communication, musicology, speech, ethnography, history of technology, journalism, theater and drama, and art, to name a few—began to recognize the need for a new term to indicate their shared focus. Here I propose soundwork as that term, laying out the reasons why we need it, how it can change our thinking across a broad range of cultural forms, the kind of cultural and political work it can perform, and how linking sound to our understanding of lived experience changes the way that we perceive the world around us.