Soundscapes, Sonic Cultures, and American Studies

What happens when we imagine the sonic worlds of literary texts, when we focus on voice in film, or when we study the sound of social protest? How can we integrate sound studies into our academic practices? How does sound relate to space and place? How can American studies scholars understand the link between sonic and social relations? Music, voices, noise, and silence are constitutive elements of phenomena that we as American studies scholars regularly investigate. However, in contrast to the well-established prominence of visual culture studies, sound features less prominently in our field's research—an oversight (pardon the pun!) this issue of JAAAS seeks to remedy.

Voice, Silence, and Quiet Resistance in Percival Everett's Glyph

This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett's novel Glyph (1999). It offers a reading of Everett's experimental work as generating a literary soundscape of the quiet voice to reflect on the functions of sonic absence in the politics and aesthetics of resistance. With Kevin Quashie's work The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) and Fred Moten's writings on the significance of sound in black radical aesthetics as conceptual bridges, it seeks to establish that Glyph explores the boundaries and possibilities of black self-determination in the American socio-political context as it pitches the acoustics of silence and voice against the mute textuality of the book. Along these lines, the explicit refusal of a voice to speak in Glyph simultaneously reveals and complicates the dynamics of racialization in literary imaginations and reading practices.

In Praise of Discord

This piece explores writing on historical acoustemology. It charts the emergence of the field, identifies its strengths and weaknesses, and calls for greater critical engagement amongst its practitioners.

'Ta, te, ti, toe, too'

Hollywood comedies of the 1950s saw the decline of a specific kind of female comedian, as unruly comediennes in the screwball tradition transformed into silly sexy vixens or tamed into homely sexless housewives. There are, however, some comedies which self-reflectively negotiate this shift. In this article, I would like to suggest that the voice of the comedienne serves as a marker of distinction. My article accordingly explores two pivotal examples of such transformative processes: Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950) and Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Both heroines feature what critics have called "the horrors of the harsh female voice." Whereas Billie's voice "survives" through schooling and refinement, Jean's voice resists all training and remains shrill and rowdy, leading to the violent expulsion of her character altogether. With the transformation and eventual disappearance of these extraordinary female actresses and their roles, such voices remained silent for a long time, until loud and brassy comediennes of a new generation were allowed to reappear on the silver screen and to raise their harsh and distinctive voices once again.

Gendered Sounds of Revolutionary American Theater

This article examines the relationship of sound and gender politics in revolutionary America by reading two late eighteenth-century dramatic texts, the 1774 pamphlet A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse (written pseudonymously by Mary V. V.), and Virginia playwright Robert Munford's five-act play The Patriots (written c1777, published only posthumously in 1798). Even though the sounds of early America cannot be accessed directly, as there was no sound recording in the modern, technology-based sense, and even though neither of the two dramatic texts has a known record of performances, the article sets out to explore how sound and speech were heard and negotiated, and how they reflected on prevailing cultural assumptions about gendered personhood, and the relationship between gender and politics. Arguably, attention to sound in these texts offers specific insights into the joint articulation of gender and transatlantic politics in the larger struggle over the American revolution. As this article shows, both texts, albeit for different reasons, strategically use gendered sounds to stage specific political interventions: By "listening" carefully to these sounds (as they are represented in writing), one can understand in more detail how acoustic environments impacted on the articulation, legitimation and deliberation of political argument in revolutionary America.

American Studies, Sound Studies, and Cultural Memory

Each year on April 18, the city of San Francisco commemorates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire with a series of elaborate and tightly scripted ceremonies. As one of the key events, the ceremony at Lotta's Fountain features, among others, commemorative speeches, the hanging of a memorial wreath, and the ceremonial wailing of fire sirens, followed by a minute of silence for the victims. The acoustic tension building up between the sirens' piercing warning sounds and the ensuing collective gesture of mournful quietude is subsequently resolved by the communal sing-along of the upbeat theme song "San Francisco" from the eponymous Academy Award-winning 1936 musical film. This performance seems to stand in stark contrast to the other events at the ceremony, which are painstakingly staged to appear historically accurate. Nonetheless, the anachronistic inclusion of the triumphant "San Francisco," written three decades after the earthquake and released in the context of a purely fictional narrative, fits the purpose of memorializing the 1906 earthquake, since it sonically embodies the "new" city's founding myth. San Francisco, especially its theme song, this article argues, memorializes the 1906 disaster as a social equalizer and a patriotic affirmation of American resilience by portraying the pre-earthquake city as a loud, decadent, and disorderly soundscape that only the earthquake could unite, refine, and ultimately Americanize.

'Language ... Without Metaphor'

Henry David Thoreau has been celebrated for his observation of the natural world. While noting Thoreau's skills of observation in relation to the natural world and his responsiveness to sensory experience, scholars have, however, tended to privilege sight over sound. Even though Thoreau was recognized by musicians such as Charles Ives and John Cage for having an exceptionally fine ear for the symphonies of nature, sound still remains a neglected aspect of Thoreau's Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. This article is a corrective to this status quo, as it reads Walden as a transmedial project in which Thoreau frequently tuned in to the sounds encountered during his sojourn in nature in order to figure the essential parameters of his experiment and to relate to the entire world of experience. The complex soundscape of Walden engenders a multifaceted awareness of modern space, as sounds of nature, sounds of progress, and the clamor of people intersect. Accordingly, this article explores how Thoreau uses a vast array of sounds to relate to the world; how he apprehended, and even appreciated, not only the harmonies of nature, but also dissonance—within nature, as well as between nature, modernity and rurality. In doing so, this article proposes a reading of Thoreau's auditory experience as a reflection on, and negotiation with, a multifaceted world where the pastoral and the industrial coexist.

Sound + Bodies in Community = Music

The analytical framework of sound studies is transforming our understanding of the political force of music. Following the lead of scholars like Nina Eidsheim and Salomé Voegelin, this essay considers the resonating force of listening bodies as a central factor in the musical construction of political community. This essay traces the tradition of African American music from congregational gospel singing through early rhythm and blues up to the twenty-first-century rap of Kendrick Lamar, showing how particular musical techniques engage the bodies in the room, allowing communities of difference to find their rhythms together.

Sonic Others in Early Sound Studies and the Poetry of Edward Sapir

Characteristically, early research in soundscapes is suffused with a sense of sonophilia; that is, a fascination with auditory perception and sound as the inferiorized Other of sight. Soundscape scholars have thus often conceived of their work as a salvage operation, which is conducted to save what would otherwise be irretrievably lost to a visual regime. This moral impetus to redeem the "sonic Other" is at the center of this article, in which I investigate how notions of sonic alterity interweave with treatments of social and cultural alterity. To explore and interrogate the nexus of social, cultural, and sonic alterity for its political and ethical ramifications, I analyze the acoustics of the poetry of Edward Sapir. Sapir played a key role in the formation of cultural anthropology and the early development of linguistic anthropology. What is far less known is that he is also the author of over six hundred poems, some of which were published in such renowned magazines as Poetry and The Dial. Focusing on the poems "To a Street Violinist" and "Harvest," I probe the dynamics of an anthropo-literary project that sets out to salvage both non-visual sense perceptions and other-than-modern, Western ways of life.

Timbre of Trash

Late capitalist production is highly dependent upon the continuous manufacture of new goods to be brought to market. The idea of obsolescence plays a key role in this process, as more recent commodities replace older, presumably less-effective products. This process is especially prominent in the technological sector, which routinely encourages the deliberate replacement of older devices— even when still functional. Digital audio technologies fall in line with these practices, and are often produced using exploitative labor practices. A serious consideration of these effects poses a difficult question for sonic artists who use electronic and digital equipment in their practice. Specifically, how can sound practitioners begin to account for and push against their tacit contribution to the detrimental effects of obsolescence entailed by the tools of their craft? This article explores this question through the lens of new materialist discourse, which outlines modes of engaging with the physical world that reject the assumption that objects are static. Instead, they employ an understanding of objects as collective agents in constant active assemblage of shared material actions that include the presence of human bodies as part of a continuum of objects within larger systems of capital, labor, and politics. The electronic audio practices of American sonic artists who incorporate obsolete, broken, and discarded objects in their work will act as case studies for this exploration. Their work helps understand possible collaborative implementations of technological audio production that recognize the collective agency involved in their physical and aural production.