What is phonography? In this essay, Christopher DeLaurenti, a phonographer with three decades of experience, maps an axiomatic 13-lesson pedagogy through an abbreviated history of field recording, from Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 to Tony Schwartz in the early 1960s. This paper surveys various meanings and uses of the term phonography from a text published in 1701 to the formation in 2000 of the phonography listserv, an online community of makers of field recordings. The author, himself an early member of the phonography listserv, discusses three traits to define phonography as a community in the early 2000s: inexpensive recording equipment; a community of knowledge; and the “easy fidelity” made possible by portable and lightweight Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and MiniDisc (MD) recorders. The author contrasts the traits of phonography with elements of soundscape composition as articulated by Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Andra McCartney. The paper concludes by proposing possible elements of post-phonography, including remote control recording, the possibility of voice print identification, and the generation of unimagined data.

In Pea Soup a self-stabilizing phase shift network nudges the pitch of audio feedback to a different resonant frequency every time the feedback starts to build. The familiar shriek is replaced with unstable patterns of hollow tones, a site-specific raga reflecting the acoustical personality of the room. These architectural melodies can be influenced by movement in the space, other sounds, or even by a draft of cold air. This essay covers the history of the work, from its earliest iteration in hardware when the author was a student in the 1970s through its software reconstruction in the early 2000s, as well as its influence on the author’s subsequent musical projects.

This essay is inspired by the words of Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Sun Times photographer John White, who once told me to “listen for the pictures.” His message rang clear but never more so than when in 1990 we were covering the release of Nelson Mandela in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town scene was alive and filled with so much vibrance. I was keenly aware that I must not just look, but I must listen, and use all my God-given senses to take it in. I can only describe the moment I started listening to the layer of sound, which was my own clicking camera superimposed on the chorus of sounds that surrounded me as both meta and sonorific. There was a certain rhythm to the sensation I felt in being one with my camera. It transported me to a wonderful place in time where visuals and cadences danced together. I realized there was alchemy in this and in all the other moments and locations I had spent behind a camera developing and exercising that “inner ear” my ancestors, some gone, like Gordon Parks, but others here, like White, taught me to revere. This essay is a snapshot of some of those moments—a proof sheet, if you will—from a life that began, as did the civil rights era, with instances of terror and triumph. This essay chronicles my journey as a young photographer and the many influences that shaped my creative process and eventually my worldview. This essay is an invitation to travel with me through time and see life as my camera and I witnessed it, and to hear and sense the world as I do.

This article attempts to lend an ear to the compact audio cassette: a key feature of the domestic soundscape from its introduction in the early 1960s until its gradual obsolescence in the first decades of the 21st century. The piece aims to provide a new perspective on the cassette by way of a discussion of the Start Here tapes project: a series of seven artist audio cassette tapes released in 2016 and 2017. Applying a practice-based methodology to a study of objects that are intimate and well known, the project seeks to foreground the material agency of the cassette by making work that reflexively references material objecthood. The article examines what is at stake politically in this focus on materiality, and considers the way creative forms of reflexivity might have renewed ethical and political value within a ecopolitical or biopolitical context.

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks , some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.

This paper analyzes sound-oriented public performance Tuning In—the neighborhood, a project by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, which took place in Amsterdam in May 2019. Through a combination of micropolitical theory and consideration of the (sound) art heritage that Tuning In is part of, the term ambience is transformed into a concept that helps one make sense of the way sound and place combine to effect one’s comprehension of the space they are in. Weaving in and out of the event in question while drawing on descriptions of the contemporary, sound studies, the philosophy of community, and affect theory, this article concludes by recognizing Tuning In as a sonic apparition of a communal spirit. It argues that this was an event in which one could find an amplification of an altermodernity rooted in the commons and the anti-neoliberal. Through a historically rooted understanding of the community that made itself heard during this event, Tuning In is presented as a vibrational amplification of the sort of community that is at threat in a gentrifying city. While also highlighting the potential problems arising from community making, such as the exclusion of certain bodies, this paper argues that a community must have the space within which it can “tune in” to itself and produce its own ambience.

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume , amplification , and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a writer, poet, activist, and independent scholar whose experimental triptych ( Spill, M Archive, Dub ) offers both mundane and unearthly interventions for humanity’s struggles against histories of ecological extraction and Black feminist refusals. Sangodare is a multimedia artist, musician, and theologian drawing from Black feminist writings and African Diaspora wisdom. They are co-founders of several multi-platform undertakings such as the Mobile Homecoming Project that birthed the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus (BFBC). It is one of many online and in-person spaces supporting QPOC and Black feminist communities. The BFBC, in particular, blends theory, meditation, music, poetics, and Black church traditions. In this asynchronous mantra practice, hundreds of participants receive daily “ancestor” mantras via the Mobilehomecoming.org website. These mantras are shortened quotes from the diverse writings and speeches of figures such as Marsha P. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. The social, juridical, and digital records of violence against women, POC, queer, and non-binary bodies and communities is not new. However, as consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have overlapped with conspicuous displays of anti-Black policing and asymmetric economies, the BFBC has provided an alternative space to rebuild and re-enchant social, political, and intellectual life through a remixed spiritual practice of amplifying voices. This interview highlights how race, gender, location, and time do not limit the quest for freedom. Thus, the primacy of Black queer positionality is instrumental in the chorus’s examination of both liberating and oppressive social hierarchies.

This essay reflects upon how teaching with podcasts—as well as students’ creation of audio self-portraits, audio character portraits, and digital presentations of Indigenous playwrights’ work—directed both students and professor to consider identity and positionality in new ways. Riffing on rhetorics of the ocular vs the aural in discussions of identity, performance, and embodiment, here transcultural and transdisciplinary connections emerge to consider listening as a technology for relationality.

This response offers a critical engagement with and reflection on the work of photographer D. Michael Cheers, specifically his essay on sound and photography, “Listening for the Pictures: Capturing History in Real Time,” in conjunction with selections of his photographic work on protest and Black life.