Hold Music

The notion of sonic intimacy has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but less well-established has been what it means for a sonic encounter to be non-intimate. This essay proposes an opposite to sonic intimacy, namely so…

Afterword

In this Afterword, I use the observations from the special issue ‘Music, Affect and Politics’ to discuss what I see are recurring questions in the studies of music and affect: (1) the tension between new materialism and historical materialis…

Muzak, Lo-Fi, and Acoustic Violence

Violence, including acoustic violence, can be remarkably resistant to critique; the semiotic structures upon which scholarly arguments rely may appear, in their representationalism, to have a distancing effect from the sheer materialism of v…

Black Studies in the Digital Crawlspace

By Darren Mueller Featured image: I won’t be quiet so you can be comfortable, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. Let our rejoicing riseHigh as the listening skies,Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.—James Weldon Johnson, “Lift E…