Can we expand our awareness of remote environments by connecting them to our own bodily experience? “Sound Is Round” takes a winding journey through the superimposed environments of ocean and desert, bringing sounds from the deep ocean of Monterey Bay in California to the high desert of Northern Arizona. In doing so, it brings together experiences of material sensory space expanded by a sonic sense, an amplified listening. The intertwining of these environments and experiences comes together in a notion of roundness, through the form of the Möbius strip. By approaching land-based spaces through a different orientation, thinking through a lens of fluid sounds and listening, a sense of “oceanic consciousness” is explored. A simultaneous experience of relationship to others, to site, and to distant place is reflected through personal stories of participants. The writing reflects the author’s own artistic practice, using the headphones and soundscape from a recent project Melt Me Into the Ocean, which explored connectedness to the deep ocean from land through sound walks. It also discusses the current project From a Whale’s Back, which works with video, sound, and data from the latest scientific research on tagged whales. Our connection to, and understanding of, the deep ocean environments are considered through these displaced remote experiences of place. Colliding sounds from these underwater environments with a research project around Roden Crater—artist James Turrell’s ongoing land-art work inside an extinct volcano—it emphasizes the importance of physical material sensory experience of place.

This study unearths 20th-century U.S. music histories to demonstrate that racism accompanied the entry of yoga into American “belonging” and domestication, while “Indians” were excluded. There are three yoga song sites in this study; each presents a composite of racial constructions that utilize Othering tropes long deployed to affirm White supremacy and legitimize colonial power. I analyze the sound world, lyrics, and films of (1) the 1941 popular song “The Yogi Who Lost His Will Power,” by Orrin Tucker and His Orchestra; (2) the 1960 chart-topper “Yogi,” which catapulted the Ivy Three to one-hit-wonder status; and, (3) the 1967 Elvis Presley song “Yoga Is as Yoga Does, ” from the movie Easy Come, Easy Go . Questions that guide this study include: How does racist displacement appear in historic contexts of sonic productions and U.S. proliferation in yoga? What racial stereotypes accompanied yoga’s entry into American cultural discourse? I argue the evidence supports three key findings: (1) yoga’s movement into American popular culture is inextricably tied to racism and Othering; (2) widely circulating stereotypes of Indians, yoga, and yogis in American popular music include classic racist tropes, such as the grinning Sambo, and (3) the logic of elimination operates to hide U.S. music histories of racialized yoga. I conclude that U.S. yoga and its musical and cultural productions, branded as peaceful and flexible, camouflage the settler nation and White supremacy. The article concludes with a forecast for the importance of music studies to the nascent field of critical yoga studies.

Washington, DC–born vocalist and pianist Shirley Horn was one of the most singular and respected musicians on the jazz scene during a career that spanned more than five decades. Despite minimal accolades, Horn’s contributions to the art form are rarely rivaled. She was a virtuoso pianist and a genius song stylist. In a 1992 article in the Washington Post , prolific composer and arranger Johnny Mandel explained that “Horn’s playing wasn't just self-accompaniment. It was percussive counterpart and harmonic commentary that worked with the singing to create a whole, a work of art that was more than the sum of its parts. ‘It's almost as if when Shirley plays, she has two brains. I don't know how she can play what she plays and sing what she sings.…Playing piano like that is a very complex undertaking, and singing with that amount of sensitivity and concentration—she sounds like Siamese twins.’” 1 Through recorded performances that best exhibit vocal phrasing, chord voicings, and comping patterns in the jazz tradition, Horn’s piano and vocal performance will be analyzed in order to demonstrate why her genius should occupy the top echelons of revered American musicians this country has ever produced. Jazz and classical musicians whom Horn cited as her biggest influences will be discussed to demonstrate how she absorbed and expertly integrated chosen elements of those individual styles into her own performance to create a distinctive sound and a unique approach to interpreting standard jazz repertoire. Through biographical information, Horn’s career will be examined through a lens of intersectionality to discover how social categorizations such as race, class, and gender might have played a part in informing her musical and professional choices.

Over the past decade, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has emerged from whisper-quiet corners of the Internet to become a bullhorn of speculation on the human sensorium. Many consider its sonically induced “tingling” to be an entirely novel, and potentially revolutionary, form of human corporeality—one surprisingly effective in combating the maladies of a digitally networked life: insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. Complicating these claims, this article argues that ASMR is also neoliberal repackaging of what Marx called the reproduction of labor power. Units of these restorative “tingles” are exchanged for micro-units of attention, which YouTube converts to actual currency based on per-1,000-view equations. True to the claims of Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, this reproductive labor remains largely the domain of women. From sweet-voiced receptionists to fawning sales clerks (both of whom are regularly role-played by ASMRtists), sonic labor has long been a force in greasing the gears of capital. That it plays a role in production is a matter that ASMRtists are often at pains to obscure. The second half of this article performs a close reading of what might be considered the very first ASMR film: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Through this film, the exploitative dimensions of ASMR can be contrasted with its potential for creating protected spaces of financial independence and nonnormative corporeal practices.

In January 1994, Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music, a first-time radio series collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio, began airing on hundreds of NPR affiliate stations throughout America. An ambitious and influential series of 26 hour-long documentary programs, Wade explored 200 years of black sacred music, including spirituals, ring shouts, lined hymns, jazz, and gospel. The series also featured the insights of music creators, performers, listeners, and historians who could place African American sacred music traditions within the social, political, and cultural context of their times. Wade eventually won a Peabody Award and other awards of distinction. Conceived and hosted by Smithsonian Institution curator, artist, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow Bernice Johnson Reagon, Wade required an intensive, five-year-long fundraising, research, and production journey of commitment. As the series’ associate producer, this article’s author worked with a host of dedicated radio producers, researchers, engineers, scholars, and music collectors who helped to make Wade a reality. Therefore, this article describes the series’ production journey from the vantage point of an insider, and it serves as a personal reflection on the making of a series that would set the standard for future long-form, NPR-based music documentary productions.

Over the past 40 years “sound art” has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward’s work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse.

Susan Philipsz’s Study for Strings (2012) is a 24-track sound installation originally set up at the end of a platform at the main train station in Kassel (Germany). The installation’s sonic material is drawn from a string orchestra composition of the same name by the Jewish-Czech composer Pavel Haas, written in 1943 while he was interned at Theresienstadt and shortly before his execution. For her installation, Philipsz recorded only the viola and cello parts from Haas’s score, allocated a pitch from each instrument to its own speaker, and played the sounds back on loop. According to the artist, the installation’s “silences” (the parts from Haas's score that she did not record) allude to the absence of those murdered in the camps. Departing from these comments, this paper argues that Study for Strings articulates silence as more than an element of aural experience; it is also an effect of the work’s technological, spatial, and architectural remediation of Haas’s musical material. The argument first draws on Juliane Rebentisch’s proposition that sound installation is distinct from music in its spatialization of sonic material. The work’s “absent music”—its silence—resides not only in the missing string parts but also in the way in which the retained musical parts are spatially remediated. This argument is framed by turning to ongoing discourses on how silence functions in Adornian “After Auschwitz” cultural practice.

What would it mean to consider the last works of Antonin Artaud, including his major radio piece, To Have Done With the Judgment of God —written after his return to language following years of aphasia during his incarceration in the psychiatric asylum of Rodez and upon his return to Paris just before his death—as poetry? Based upon a veritable rhetoric of repulsion and abjection, effecting an obsessive resistance to readability, Artaud utilized numerous tactics to reject the reader: unmentionable blasphemy, putrid scatology, unintelligible glossolalia, hideous violence, abhorrent politics, obscene curses, unfathomable contradictions, bewildering lists, inexorable negations, disorienting syntax, unsettling non sequiturs, undefinable neologisms, uncanny repetitions. Were these writings to be inserted into the French poetic canon, they would necessitate a radical reconsideration of poetry and poetics, indeed of the French language itself, based upon the nihilistic powers of performance and performativity.

This essay explores how one “listens to”—that is to say, how one takes in, makes sense of, and reacts to—“sounds” that are not really sounds at all but that are simply evocations of sounds served up by the authors of fiction. Although the essay’s conclusions apply to literary sounds in general, the examples on which the essay bases its observations and arguments are drawn—because their affective range is so very, very wide—from the vintage literature of so-called horror fiction. After a discussion of why some instances of scary literary sounds are more potent than others, emphasis is placed on sounds featured in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, writers celebrated for their “aurality” yet whose structural use of sonic imagery—in dynamic patterns in the case of Lovecraft, as markers of plot points in the case of Poe—has hitherto been neglected. Throughout the essay parallels are of course drawn between literary sounds and actual sounds encountered both in the real world and in the fictional worlds of film, television, and radio drama. Readers of the essay are invited to decide for themselves, but it is suggested here that “silent listening”—because it demands creative involvement on the part of its participants—results in a richer aesthetic experience.

This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI’s automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. As a result, notable AI-music programmers like composer David Cope and software developers Flow Machines have galvanized the public’s interest in AI-generated music not by creating completely alien sonic forms, but by simulating popular styles like rock and classical music. Consequently, listeners often report AI music sounds unnervingly familiar rather than aesthetically inaccessible. I argue that it is precisely AI music’s devotion to uncannily approximating its human forebears that makes it such an interesting object of contemporary sonic production. It also provides a useful historical parallel to a short-lived musical movement from the 2000s known as sonic hauntology. Much like AI programmers, producers of sonic hauntology applied digital technology to the sonic past. However, they confronted it in more deliberately political and subversive ways. Sampling sonic artifacts and cultural marginalia from the mid-20th century, sonic hauntologists created eerie soundscapes designed to challenge mass culture’s erasure of history’s political depth, or what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as late capitalism’s cultural logic of postmodernism. While AI music has yet to be exploited in this way, I argue its inherently “uneasy listening” carries the potential to further sonic hauntology’s project of repurposing the sonic past to estrange listeners from the present moment.

Nonprofit arts organization the ZBS Foundation began as a “media commune” in the early 1970s and continues to the present day: a period that spans dramatic changes in American radio culture and audio technology. The key creative figure at ZBS is the writer and producer Thomas Lopez, whose work serves as a case study in a “post-network” style of radio drama, one shaped by multitrack editing, field recording, and the ethos of the 1960s counterculture. The ZBS aesthetic comes into sharpest focus in the Jack Flanders adventure series, which demonstrates how ZBS adapted a “theater of the mind” approach to radio drama to create a “theater of the mind-body” that re-accentuated earlier conventions of the radio adventure serial for a countercultural audience. Lopez’s increasing use of field recordings to structure his narratives established a formal tension between the inner exploration of the hero’s psyche and an encounter with different cultures. I chart the development of this formal tension in ZBS’s theater of the mind-body and argue that Lopez’s work with ZBS is a bridge across multiple eras of radio, an archive of enduring characters and distinctive styles of storytelling, and a sonic laboratory for the fostering of cultural dialogue through sound.