Abstract
This article introduces the special issue of Social Text titled “Sound Carries,” which hears how sound carries across geographies, histories, and disciplines—carries meanings, struggles, and creative ways of being and knowing. The editors of this special issue stress that, both politically and poetically, sound and space cannot easily be parsed, and they argue for the value of thinking sound and space together in order to make sense of the worlds that people make together. The article begins by locating the intellectual work of this special issue in London—a London intractably positioned as postimperial metropolis, a city animated by ongoing colonialities, anticolonial echoes, and postcolonial potentials. It then outlines some thoughts around cartographies that echo, before tuning in to some of the specific frequencies that constitute forms of world making and presencing in the diasporic city. Next, this introduction frames the city as a “mixing desk” in order to foreground the political and spatial potential of thinking the city through sound. Finally, it outlines the multidisciplinary methodologies and approaches that comprise this special issue. In toto, the article gestures to an emergent, and interdisciplinary, field of decolonial sound studies.
The contributions to this special issue stem from a workshop held in summer 2022, hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. Over a couple of days, we gathered friends and colleagues from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in the orbit of this institutional geography to share thoughts, ideas, and nascent work in progress, all of which had at its core a concern with the relationships among sound, space, and politics. Unsurprisingly, given our locatedness, in the process our temporary collective generated conversations that gravitated toward London—a London intractably positioned as postimperial metropolis, a city animated by ongoing colonialities, anticolonial echoes, and postcolonial potentials, and thus one whose postimperial spectral presence could not not haunt our conversations about many other elsewheres. We shared and heard work on radio infrastructures and wavelengths beyond empire, the musical geographies of independence and postcolonial nation building, the spatialities of British-Asian underground club nights in the metropole, the soundscapes of carceral spaces in the colonies, antiphonies and insurgencies between places sonically surveilled by the imperial state, and the multitudinous musics that cluster and swing together in the city and are always collapsing the distances between the privileged and excluded, or between empire's inner and outer spaces.
The geographies of the world, of course, are not neatly divided. There are many global Souths in the global North, and vice versa. Cartographies are jumbled in ways that confound the representational capacities of visual, two-dimensional maps. Our conversations—and this special issue—take as their point of departure the idea that there are maps that you can hear but not always see. London emerged as our staging ground for these spatial and historical sonorities. The city abounds with the sonic legacies of colonialism and imperialism—a city of sinister reverberations and silences, a city (like many others) formed through histories of imperialism.1 As a result of these legacies, London is a whole world, meaning its sound cultures are a composition of intimacies and counterpoints, solidarities and syncopations, power geometries and tone rows, rhythms and repressions, counterrhythms and contestations, ballads and borders and hemispheric hemiolas.2 The city itself is a set of worldly sonic geopoetics.
Although still so often framed as some kind of global center, our collective listening positioned London elsewise. Thinking in and with sound opens a way of hearing mobilities, movements, migrations, and relationalities that travel in many directions at once. This is true of sound in general. It is often stated that perceptions of sound—usually compared to vision—are multidirectional, rushing in from everywhere.3 And here we want to extend this to thinking about sound and spatialities more broadly. Sound is not easily contained by the unidirectional colonial logics of centers and peripheries. Instead, it leaks and echoes and spills and constantly combines and recombines, becoming both an essential tool of presencing and placemaking—especially for marginalized communities—and a fundamental, even unremarkable, part of everyday life in diverse urban communities. In this respect, London is at once special and unexceptional. It is inevitably full of the entanglements produced by the imperial, postcolonial, and global world system, but so is everywhere else. As geographer Doreen Massey reminded us, all places are meeting places.4 In sonic terms, then, the distinct rhythms and harmonics that make city life what it is are always a product of movements from many different histories and directions.
The articles in this special issue hear how sound carries—carries across geographies, histories, and disciplines; carries meanings, struggles, creative ways of being and knowing. It is our contention in what follows that, both politically and poetically, sound and space cannot easily be parsed.5 Sound is spatial imagination and experience as much as it is social text. In this introductory article and in those that follow in this special issue, our concerted and collective effort is to stress the politico-intellectual value in thinking sound and space together in order to make sense of the worlds that people make together. We do so from a particular geographical context, with all the orientations and implications toward questions of coloniality and decoloniality that this brings, but in ways that seek some kind of fidelity to the unboundedness and dynamism of sound. We proceed from here by outlining some thoughts around cartographies that, we suggest, echo, before tuning in to some of the specific frequencies that constitute forms of world making and presencing in the diasporic city. We then frame the city as a “mixing desk” in order to foreground the political and spatial potential of thinking the city through sound, and we finish this introduction by outlining the multidisciplinary methodologies and approaches that move across the contributions that follow and that keep this special issue in time.
Cartographies That Echo
As we write this introduction, a year and a half on from our workshop, the city is periodically turned inside out.6 Every couple of weeks, the center of London fills with people marching for ceasefire in Palestine and against genocide in Gaza. For an end to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. For liberatory futures. The city center becomes a sea of flags and voices, drawing connections between oppressed peoples and places and turning the metropolitan heart of empire into a giant anticolonial map. In the ephemeral space of the march—and in all the movement spaces that extend into the city beyond it—people are doing the work of reorganizing the world's histories and geographies to imagine life beyond imperialism. Sound helps bring this map into existence. The march moves through London like a planetary orchestra, with rhythms and chants assembled from many sources, at once being directed in anger toward the city's parliamentarians, in love toward the Palestinian people and Gaza, and in community toward the march itself and the ways it remakes the city and its own time-space extensions.
Sound has the potential to take on cartographic capacities, doing the work of opening spatialities beyond those drawn by compasses and quadrants (though plenty has also been made of the limits of sound in doing this work).7 This is not to suggest a practice of plotting sonic distances and marking audible territories, but instead, as Ana María Ochoa Gautier writes, a process of making “an intellectual cartography that asks us to pay attention to the many possibilities of thinking in sound . . . —one that is less a map and more a conglomeration of stories.”8 This framing (also invoked by Sara Salem and Tom Western's contribution to this special issue) requires “listening across time and place in a manner that lives up to the challenges of twenty-first century geopolitics.”9 For our purposes, this means following sounds as they move, in constant feedback, bringing places closer together across physical distance and amplifying political and aesthetic commonalities that shuttle across histories and geographies.10
“In our thousands, in our millions.” The Palestine march as a cartography of sound, story, and stretched spatiality does this connecting and amplifying. Sound carries to and from the march space, combining the cadences of chants from Arab revolutions, the second-line structures of brass band parades, the sound-system cultures of the Caribbean, the rhythmic pulse of the Brazilian bateria, the vocalizations of a solidarity movement that rings from city to city, and a set of new sonic practices rehearsed each time in efforts to keep the movement vital and keep the pressure on. In the process (and what we mean by the city being turned inside out), the usual veneers of an ever more tightly policed and unaffordable urban life are replaced by the “open song” of the colonized, marginalized, and precarious populations and those who stand in solidarity with them.11
The ways that sound carries, then, open ways of hearing geographies of relation and circulation. In the face of the static and vertically rooted culture-language area, Édouard Glissant gives us a lexicon of relay, poetics, and, importantly, echo that guides us here. Glissant's poetics traffics in the currency of art, language and literature, and sound and music to position the echo as a key mode of understanding, perceiving, and orienting ourselves to a world that always exceeds us but to which we are always already in relation. Echos-monde, as he calls them, are a series of places or people or ideas that are everywhere and simultaneously hold everywhere within themselves.12 If this describes the anticolonial London gathered and galvanized in the space of the Palestine marches, it also helps us find ways out of the analytical tendency to position London as some kind of center, reproducing the colonial geographies of metropoles and outposts. Rather, thinking the city's polyphony through the lens of echos-monde, through Glissant's relational poetics, does the work of turning all peripheries into centers until the very idea of centers and peripheries is, in Glissant's words, abolished,13 and in our reckoning, irrelevant.
Following this relational thinking more closely into worlds of sound and music, Louis Chude-Sokei writes of echo as “metaphoric of diversity and cross-cultural interaction,” signaling both a production technique and a spatial relation.14 Unlike the forced diversities and encounters produced through the imperial world system, however, echo brings things into relation “without the architecture of colonialism . . . to adjudicate or authorise hearing, meaning or blending.”15 The noun echo describes the process of a soundwave bouncing between surface and listener, the sound itself modulating in that movement. However, to experience an echo as a sound is to know that at some point the echo's source becomes irrelevant.16 It is not a coincidence that echo is a technology and technique that carries from Caribbean philosophies and music cultures to the rest of the world, from the place where European racial taxonomies and hierarchies were so violently imposed and concretized. Yet within (and against) this violence, people found ways of “living, working, and surviving together.”17 Echo, for Chude-Sokei, is also a metaphor for reciprocity, making and holding space for community and connection beyond colonial forces. Echo bounces sound back and forth across diasporic geographies, creating new relations along the way.18
If sound carries like this, across distance, bringing people, and things, into relation, then it has the potential to precipitate and facilitate relations of care. This encompasses what Tina Campt calls “frequencies of care” when asking, “What would it mean to use sound to map the caring relations of our communities?”19 As sound has long been a key means of evading, subverting, and resisting the colonial world forced onto people, it is also a sensory means by which people find and look after one another. A map made of frequencies of care resonates beneath the cartographies produced for empire, shaking and unmaking those imperial transparencies that always seek to keep people in place. Sound carries these relations and vibrations, these ways that people hold each other together and resonate with one another, across distance, irrespective of geopolitical power relations in the wake of empire.
What we are suggesting is that sound and music, waveforms and grooves, offer a creative means of finding paths out of the imperial legacies of mapping, classifying, cataloguing, authenticating, owning, dispossessing, oppressing. We do not mean to pose any simple binary opposition between the sonic and the visual here. Rather, we simply mean to contrapose the visual logic—the “way of seeing”—that inheres in the imperial map, codification, or category, to emphasize the cartographic possibilities of thinking space and sound together, of tracing the spatialities that sound and music produce, and of evoking the political potential and alternatives offered in Glissant's echos-monde. For Katherine McKittrick, the rhythms and echoes of diaspora create “a geographic praxis that is outside the colonial-imperial-capitalist logics,” one that is beyond the logics of “market-time-nation-time-blood-and-land.”20 The Palestine march offers just such political, and poetic, potential for us. Its spatial promulgations sound out possibilities beyond our conventional maps. Its noise, its music, becomes experiment, invention, reparation, collaboration, a kind of collective freedom. And this in turn feeds into broader practices of diaspora geography, which “is not the act of making maps; rather, it is the act of sharing ideas about where liberation is and might be.”21
Echoic cartographies thus do a kind suturing work. They are a set of bearings that people use to reassemble the worlds built by colonialism. They are “constellations of co-resistance,”22 a set of stories, frequencies of care, freedom dreams, and inverted and inside-out geographies, all of which cannot be mapped beyond or outside the register of sound. Sound and what Jayna Brown refers to as “alter-frequencies” pose spatial/temporal folds in the here and now, ways “‘out of the quagmire of the present.’ ”23 From our workshop, and across the articles in this special issue, a vocabulary coalesces that facilitates this kind of listening: amplification, antiphony, encryption, decryption, jamming, beatmapping, sonic modernities, subterranean movements, shadow histories. This vocabulary works as a set of metaphors for analysis and critique as much as a set of sonic practices and production techniques. Together these ideas do cartographic work that opens spaces of audibility and ways of retuning the city.
World Making / Amplification / Presencing
Back to London. Another London:
The first verses of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's 1973 poem “Yout Scene” paint a sonic picture. They describe a group of young Black British men gathering, chatting, laughing, listening, outside “Desmond's Hip City,” a Brixton record shop serving this community with reggae music coming directly from Kingston Jamaica, and from London's Caribbean diaspora. The poem depicts an everyday scene, one of Black British conviviality, of a South London community whose Britishness is soaked in a “sweet musical beat” that makes distant and constitutive elsewheres audibly present.
As much as Johnson's words describe, they also demand to be read out loud. The patois in which “Yout Scene” is written precipitates its own enunciation, a kind of reading out loud that brings the verse to life. These are words whose textual and aesthetic force is embedded in the very sounds they command, sounds that carry the reader, or listener, to Johnson's London, a London whose cultural coordinates stretch to Jamaica and back, to Windrush and its colonial prehistory, to a racist postcolonial settlement in the heart of the empire in 1970s Britain, to a diaspora spatiality that cannot be represented without sound.
If Johnson's dub poetry speaks to the late twentieth-century British experience of inner-city Black youth, its transcendent effect is derived from its lyric and sonic qualities and capacities. Any oral culture makes its mark in the world through sound, the very trace that gives orality its intangible presence, its aesthetic form.24 However, to stress how that orality makes a mark in the world through sound is to gloss the world-making capacities that sound possesses. We can be clear that, for the “bredrin” of “Yout Scene,” the “sweet musical beat” is spatially, socially, and politically productive, just as the reading out loud of the poem is imaginatively and cartographically productive for any reader picking up a copy of this poem. In other words, sonic expressions and sonic cultures are forms of world making, what McKittrick calls “rebellious inventions.”25 Or, more precisely, sound helps us better understand forms of presencing that people use to make and sustain worlds. From broadcast infrastructures, through public listening practices, to the underground genres of fringe or radical music cultures, sound and music routinely produce spatiality and spatial lexicons for presencing.
“Outside a Hip City.” That the collective listening in Johnson's poem is happening on the street is important. Amplified sound moves outward from the record shop and becomes public—a shared sonic iteration that makes (new) publics, that moves and is moving and that retunes the city.26 In the context of postcolonial and Black histories, human migrations have precipitated struggles to come into representation in spatial and political contexts that routinely silence particular voices and forms of sonic expression. For marginalized communities in differential historical and geographical contexts, the challenge to speak and be heard has been key to staking claims on belonging. “Moving from silence into speech,” as bell hooks puts it, “is for the oppressed, the colonised, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.”27 Amplification, both as sonic practice and as metaphor, is a political and a spatial praxis, coalescing into forms of presence and community. It is a form of world making.
Sitting in close proximity to Johnson's “Yout Scene,” we can think here of the sound system culture that began to extend across London from the early 1960s. As Caspar Melville writes, it is not just that these elaborate and artisanal sound rigs moved across the city, providing London's Afro-diasporic communities with temporary, and mobile, nightclub and dance spaces in a context where licensed clubs, bars, and pubs were largely off-limits for Britain's Black population. It is also that the sound system was a multilayered, organized (and hierarchical) system—a business—involving
the operator (who owned and managed and played the system live, as if it were a huge instrument), the engineer (responsible for the technical specifications and set-up for maximum volume and depth), the selector (who chose the records to play), the “DJ” (who vocalised over a microphone . . . ), and the box-boys (responsible for transporting and placing the amps and speakers and humping the heavy record boxes).28
Though patriarchal, hierarchical, and masculine, as Melville writes, the sound system provided an infrastructure for learning, training, and the generational transmission of extant skills in the community. For example, one technician in the Shaka sound system of south east London, Metro, had been an electrician in the army; another of the Sir Coxsone sound system worked on the air traffic control system at Heathrow Airport. The dances themselves, though not without their own power relations, were spaces of safety and care within Black communities whose access to the other public spaces in the city was still racially policed and curtailed.29 In all these senses, sound system culture in London (and beyond) is just one example of how sound and music are world making, in and against the grain of the racially stratified, postimperial city.30
Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman lends a historical ear to this idea of a kind of world making, this amplification that, we suggest, effectively turns cities inside out. With a particular focus on religion, Bohlman traces European urban history through a convergence of religious soundscapes—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—moving in overlap and counterpoint into the public spaces of cities across the continent. The sounds of worship, for Bohlman, “moved from the sanctuary to the public square, sometimes in gradual stages, but often through the dramatic modulation of public soundscapes.” Jewish h.azzanim (cantors) “turned outward to public spaces as liturgical music became cantorial music”; mosques moved from the courtyard to the street, with the adhān ringing out across city spaces.31 Amplification was central to European religious and cultural diversity, “signifying the sonic limits of tolerance”32 and, again, retuning cities.
Of course, the limits of tolerance—sonic and otherwise—in Europe are well known, and Bohlman also traces the attenuation and repression of these cultural counterpoints and diversities, both through European fascism and antisemitism and through racism and Islamophobia, where the effect of policing these alternative amplifications was to create “a public space of silence.”33 This in turn speaks back to wider colonial entanglements and the mutual constitution of sound and empire, at once on global scales and in ways that resonate through urban European histories. As Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan put it, “The emergence of European imperial orders and the concomitant rise of political democracies have also been matters of the ear.”34 Sound cultures, and sound technologies, have long been used to impose discipline and order across the colonial divide, both through militaristic violence and through the frequencies and wavelengths of imperial taxonomies. For example, the term noise, in particular, has a racialized and racializing history, being so often invoked as a marker of inferiority: “The command to silence, grew from an effort to contain the din—the noise of the ‘Negro,’ ‘Chinaman,’ and ‘lazy native’—commonly portrayed in European travelogues over four centuries.”35 And European sonorities and systems of harmony continue to imagine their superiority, existing as the aural counterpart to Enlightenment notions of “reason” and “light.”36 We can hear in the modulation of city soundscapes a form of aural policing. In London, street musicians in the mid-nineteenth century were deemed a foreign presence in the city. These musicians—some of racialized European backgrounds, and others in the city owing to imperial migration—were grouped together as an “organ nuisance” in the press, labeled “Music-Grinders of the Metropolis” in the writings of the city's elites, and on the receiving end of noise legislation in the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act.37 An 1860 cartoon in Punch magazine called for “a musical and political decontamination of English soil,” with the visual depicting a group of musicians being booted off the cliffs of Dover into the Channel below.38
Into the twentieth century, the loud convivialities of urban life were subject to various noise-abatement campaigns and measures, often focused on regulating the use of sound playback technologies. As sound scholar Karin Bijsterveld recounts, efforts were repeatedly made to construct an essential difference between music played by musicians and music produced by playback devices, betraying a classist hostility toward sound cultures built on recorded music. The counterargument was that gramophones and radios—as relatively inexpensive sources of music—had become the musical instruments of the working classes, so to ban their noise would be to target these classes disproportionately.39 Recorded music constituted a working-class sound culture, in which listening became an act of sharing music rather than making noise. In the 1950s, the Blaupunkt Blue Spot Radiogram, one of the earliest domestic record players, became a standard feature in West Indian homes in London, affording the ability to create a Caribbean soundscape at home in the diaspora.40 As these technologies evolved into the sound system culture outlined above, Black institutions—often those associated with the sociabilities of sound—were regularly targeted by the police. For example, the Mangrove Café on All Saints Road on Notting Hill was raided twelve times in 1969–70, and the Metro Club, which regularly hosted sound system dances, was also frequently raided and targeted. They were not isolated cases.41 Nor has the policing of Black noise gone away in London. In 2022, London's Westminster Council tried to ban people from gathering and playing dominoes in Maida Hill Market Square, in North West London, citing noise issues and antisocial behavior. The accused, a group of Black elders whose families came to Britain as part of the Windrush generation of the 1950s, took the council to court, claiming its order was racist and discriminated against Caribbean culture: “If you are West Indian, you just can't play dominoes without making a bit of noise.”42 The domino players won. The ban was lifted.
“But when nite come / policeman run dem dung; / beat dem dung a grung, / kick dem ass, sen dem pass justice / to prison walls of gloom.” For Linton Kwesi Johnson, and his depiction of Black British London of the early 1970s, Black life is always under threat from a whiteness that envelops, polices, incarcerates. Amplification, the sound that emanates from Hip City, is presencing; it is world making. But for that very reason, it can also be heard by power as a disruption. So when bell hooks goes on to assert that “speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination, . . . it is a courageous act—as such, it represents a threat,”43 we can expand this to say that alternative sound cultures more broadly often represent a threat to the imperial order, to the imperial state and its imperial interests, hence the policing of sound in London and across the colonized world, hence the efforts by the United Kingdom's Conservative government to paint the Palestine marches as extremist in late 2023/early 2024.44 Just as sound carries across the colonial divide, so do efforts to police it as techniques of oppression tested in the colonies bounce back to the metropole.45
The ability to silence and suppress sonic expression, then, has been central to the exercise and operations of power in its many different manifestations.46 As Johnson's “Yout Scene” reminds us, certain sounds, and orientations to sound, become indexed to ideas of race and ethnicity, and policing noise is a racial and carceral technology playing out along the sonic color line.47 Music and sound, therefore, their articulation and manipulation, have been key vehicles and sites for decolonial, Black, and radical struggles. In other words, as Paul Gilroy writes, Johnson considers (sonic) culture “a vital force endowed with revolutionary potential, especially in the segregated worlds colonialism made.”48 Indeed, for Gilroy, Johnson's rebel disposition and the “freedom-seeking tradition to which he subscribes” are “nobly augmented by the poetic idiom he created.”49 These traditions and idioms, and their amplification, are always filling public space, expanding beyond the muffling techniques of imperial policing, retuning our cities.
Sounding the City / London as Mixing Desk
The Palestine march and Linton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry locate us in London, which, as we have stressed, for this special issue is a geographical context central to the articles that follow. Johnson worked as a librarian at the Keskidee Centre on Caledonian Road in North London, and as is obvious from both his poetry and activism, Johnson's London was a “sophisticated anticolonial furnace” influenced by his involvement with the Caribbean Artist's Movement, the impact of Black Power, and his solidarity with the national liberation struggles that fed into the formation of the London-based Black Arts Movement.50 Not dissimilarly, the Palestine march is a combination of sound and study. The words of poets and decolonial scholars abound on homemade placards; some people simply bring copies of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth to hold aloft. Many elsewheres congregate in the metropole, and the city itself becomes a sounding board for broader anticolonial geographical imaginations intent on working through the power geometries of overlapping territories and intertwined histories that colonialism has precipitated.
This has been the case for a while. Priyamvada Gopal writes of how London in the 1930s became an anticolonial “junction box,” gathering oppositional figures and ideas from all across the British Empire. The irony is obvious, but it was in London that it was possible to articulate criticisms of British imperialism without the same degree of repression as in the colonies. And it was London, in Gopal's words, that “made it possible for colonial subjects—writers, intellectuals, labour activists, campaigners and journalists—to encounter each other, and to organise away from more repressive contexts.”51 The city became a space of “reverse tutelage,” as anticolonial voices from colonized places at once internationalized British opposition to empire and sped up the push to end it altogether.52 Throughout the twentieth century, London continued to be something of a relay, or maybe a switchboard, for decolonial soundings, studies, and spatialities that extend across the world.
These metaphors are appealing. However, if relays and switchboards are twentieth-century technologies of centralization and one-to-one communication, maybe it is more apt for us to imagine the city as a mixing desk: a multichannel, many-to-many model, with numerous inputs and outputs.53 A mixing desk routes sound from many sources and then channels it outward for collective, public listening. Although the desk traditionally requires an engineer or DJ to do the virtuosic work of mixing and combining sounds, here we tap into a history of sonic arts that develops through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century and that moves away from individual(ist), composer-led approaches to sound technologies and Euclidean space—exemplified by the monumental compositions of Edgard Varèse in the 1950s—and toward collective, community practices in which everyone is at once listener, composer, and producer of sonic spatiality. This shift, traced beautifully by Gascia Ouzounian, creates a “confluence of acoustic, political, social, sensorial, and lived spaces.”54 And although we equally do not wish to fall too easily into the trap of automating the city, or imputing a computational model of urbanism,55 the mixing desk thus presents a metaphor for combinatoriality, collaboration, and collectivity. The multichannel city is a space for the mixing of histories, geographies, and many different local knowledges, and its dynamic capabilities speak to a set of characteristics shared across sound production and movement spaces: of fades, volume and pitch control, time scaling, line outs, and channel inputs. The mixing desk, like the city, hybridizes sound, making something bigger than, or even just different from, the sum of its parts. It enables us to hear in many, many different ways, if only we make the effort to listen.
This special issue attempts this mixing work. It seeks to make space for, and articulate, some of the ideas outlined in this introductory article—cartographies that echo, world making, amplification and presencing, the city positioned as something like a mixing desk—in an attempt to contribute to a multi- and interdisciplinary decolonial sound studies that is steadily growing in volume. Each of the authors here, coming from different disciplinary perspectives, has an investment in sound, resulting in a collection of articles, conversations, and experimental approaches to working with and through music and sound that recognize their multiple relationships with, and in, the world. As an ephemeral collective whose conversations continue, we write variously from disciplinary backgrounds stretched across geography, sociology, history, gender and sexuality studies, music studies, and race studies.56 By the same token, we all share some relationship with London. Yet this special issue is not about London in the sense of the city being a case study or compendium. Instead, and as we have suggested in these framing remarks, each article conglomerates narratives that collectively spill over neat notions of bounded and bordered space. Some are based in the city; for others it is background interference. The map, tapestry, or score that emerges here makes no claim to comprehensive geographical coverage. It is neither an atlas nor an anthology. Instead, this special issue offers a set of techniques that sound carries forward for thinking the relationships between politics and space.
Tao Leigh Goffe's article tracks the collapse, appropriation, and infrastructures of post-WWII radio broadcast technology, shuttling between London and the Caribbean in ways that bring into focus the postcolonial pulse of this intertwined spatiality and its dependence on soundwaves and the technologies that precipitated them. Her article teases out the textures, patinas, and trajectories of relational geographies forged between the Caribbean and the United Kingdom through music and sound, their technologies and infrastructures. Other articles in this special issue take London itself as the site of productive, if problematic, soundings whose political and historical implications for the production of ethnicized difference, emergent hybridities, and imaginative geographies are worth grappling with. Tariq Jazeel's contribution, which engages with the recent history of “Asian underground” music, also dubbed “New Asian Kool,” stresses how this music's emergence in London's East End in the late 1990s was both enabled and constrained by its subterranean containment as a notionally “underground” form of cultural production. His article takes the underground not as a literal or normative countercultural space but instead as a metaphorical holding space for ethnicized difference, one produced by music and a “scene,” and one that soon became replete with generic constraint. Its dissolution as a meaningful genre category, he shows, points to the umbilical relationship between British Asian (sonic) culture and the shifting topographies of late twentieth-century articulations of Britishness.
Likewise, Les Back and Stevie Back's article focuses on the work of contemporary London-based Black British musician Hak Baker, whose emergent singer-songwriter urban sound, and style, is dubbed by Baker as “guv'nor folk,” or G-folk. Working closely with Baker and other folk musicians, including Angeline Morrison, Back and Back stress the importance of locating this music in a rich, antiracist tradition of British folk music (much of which is as urban as it is rural) that confounds any immediate association of British folk music with whiteness. Folk as music genre, they stress, must be thought and ontologically conceived as openly, relationally, and expansively as a city like London, and when it is, myths of purity and whiteness so associated with notions of folk themselves lose any necessary anchor or hold on the political imagination. Back and Back's narrative about the Black presence in British folk is sonified through a Spotify playlist that helps carry their argument.
In Sara Salem and Tom Western's article, which excavates anticolonial antiphonies across the Eastern Mediterranean, London would seem to give way to Cairo, Athens, and other elsewheres while continuing to lurk as a specter of colonial authority and sonic surveillance in the historical narratives that comprise their contribution. Their article adopts a nonlinear structure that ranges across geographies that defy colonial cartographies and classifications, bringing together places and anticolonial struggles that are so often understood separately, disjunctively, and serially. In teasing out the sonic resonances, echoes, and circularities between movements in Cairo, Athens, and beyond, Salem and Western bring into close connection an Eastern Mediterranean circuitry more often conceived in terms of a global geography of what Lisa Lowe calls “vast spatial distances.”57 From their looping narrative emerges an ongoing praxis of political resonance, carrying across time, space, and languages.
For a Sonic Chorography: Resonant and Rhythmic Methodologies
Taken together, the articles in this special issue constitute a kind of “sonic chorography,” which is to say, a form of space writing that takes sound as its starting point. To be sure, sound is a kind of writing itself, but rather than thinking of this merely as phonography, we suggest sonic chorography to invoke the relations between sounding and spacing, or the relationships between sound and the (re)writing of place. This is our project here. From the electrical shops of postwar Jamaica, where pioneering engineers built loudspeakers that would change the world (Goffe) to the music nights in the East End of London that pulled British-Asian music scenes in and out of shape and South Asians into the national narrative (Jazeel), from the musical convivialities of the docklands a few miles farther southeast (Back and Back) to the sonic third worldisms that were broadcast over radios and chanted in the streets of Cairo and Athens (Salem and Western), this collection shows how sound is always making space and vice versa. By thinking chorography—literally “space writing”—as something audible, something aural, we take a neglected idea from the history of geography, sonify it, and hear how sound and space are in constant productive and political tension with each other.
And this, we argue, in closing this introductory article, amounts to a set of resonant and rhythmic methodologies for hearing the politics of spaces made and remade. They are resonant because resonance foregrounds the necessary open and generous relationality of sounding and listening. Borrowing from recent work in Indigenous sound studies, the relationship between the listener and listened to should not be one of subject-object but instead one of subject-subject. Resonance pushes against what Dylan Robinson refers to as a “western sense orientation” where we, as researchers, might simply “dismiss, affirm, or appropriate sound as content.”58 Our engagement with sound does not, in other words, conceive it simply as “data.” Equally, we resist the easy liberal conflation of voice with subjecthood that inheres in modern society and is written into legal and political systems that make people legible before the state. (Think, for example, of the court or judicial “hearing” that imposes itself as the legalistic mechanism through which truth and/or justice can be administered.) Although we make no claims here of situating ourselves in, or contributing to, indigenous sound studies, nonetheless, by thinking the ways that sound carries, and what it produces in that movement, we are inspired by Robinson's methodological attunement to the “life, agency, and subjectivity of sound” within the context of the worlds from which it emerges.59 This is what our analytical frequencies are attuned to in the articles that follow.
And these methodologies are rhythmic because this happens across both spatial and temporal registers. Against the Eurocolonial ordering of space and time (Greenwich Mean Time quite literally inscribes London as point zero of spatial and temporal subordination),60 the sonic chorographies that unfold across these articles operate as a set of spatial counterrhythms. At the start of this article we suggested the term hemispheric hemiolas as a way of understanding the sound cultures that cohere in a city like London in the twenty-first century. The shifting cross-beats and counterrhythms of this musical-geographical figure open spaces of being and knowing in sound that carry across the territorialities of nations and borders, as well as the temporalities of pasts and futures. Rhythms, and counterrhythms, operate as resources and navigational tools for those of us seeking to hear and build worlds after empire. This special issue thus joins with recent work on sound, space, and politics: work that posits aurality as a necessary part of understanding colonialism;61 work on audible infrastructures and intimacies that narrate musical imaginations and sonic geographies;62 work on diasporic audio poetics, political reverberations, and sonic citizenships;63 work that sounds out against colonialities built into structures of listening, organizing, and understanding sound and spatiopolitical relations.64 Sound carries these conversations and, like rhythm, enjoins them to keep on moving. Sound carries life in our cities and keeps them reverberating. Sound carries this writing and the collectivities it engenders. Sound carries.
We thank the Music Futures initiative at the University College London Institute of Advanced Studies for a grant that made the Sound Carries workshop possible in June 2022. In addition, we thank Sara Salem, Tao Leigh Goffe, Matthew Smith, Caroline Bressey, and Clive Nwonka for their participation in the workshop.
Notes
A hemiola is a musical pattern whereby a group of two notes are played over three beats, creating a two-three polyrhythm. Invoking this figure as a geographical idea evokes how the supposedly two separate halves of the world are always moving in the same times and spaces—albeit in ways that create offbeats and aporias, irresolutions created by colonialism that continue to be the backbeat of life in imperial metropolitan cities.
We are careful here not to essentialize or reify sound in any way or to reproduce what Jonathan Sterne calls “the audiovisual litany” of sensory perception in Western modernity, wherein the differences between hearing and seeing are often understood as a set of binaries: “Hearing is spherical, vision is directional; hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective; sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object” (Audible Past, 14). As Sterne details, this litany is not a set of biological facts or some neutral description of the senses but comes into existence through a set of theologically informed ideologies that carries through the modern project. The audiovisual litany is loaded with value judgments, whereby the senses are organized and placed into the service of a politics that assigns certain tasks to vision (objectivity, clarity, reason) and to hearing (interiority, immersion, affect). Here we are particularly interested in collapsing the idea that hearing is primarily a temporal sense, with vision a correspondingly spatial one. Our thinking on this is also informed by the work of Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, who add to Sterne's litany the notion that “sound is Southern; vision is Northern” in their debunking of ideas that peoples and cultures in the global South are somehow “closer to sound and hearing than their European counterparts” (“Remapping Sound Studies in the Global South,” 2–3). As with both of these projects, we avoid naturalizing and essentializing sound and pursue instead a relational, collective listening that follows the movements of sounds and their meanings across a set of entwined historical and geographical terrains.
Massey, For Space. On London's relational geographies specifically, see Massey, World City.
The connections between sound and space have been treated most extensively in Georgina Born's edited volume Music, Sound, and Space and in Gascia Ouzounian's Stereophonica. In her introduction, Born pulls together multiple bodies of scholarship to theorize sound and space across one another, including methods of spatialization that exist within music and sound art composition, in spaces of musical performance and sound installation, and in wider urban and cultural geographies. Particularly salient here is Born's reading that plenty of commonalities exist between spatial theory and sonic practice: both space and sound are inherently mobile and always in motion; both are intrinsically relational. In Born's words, music and sound “are particularly fertile conduits for spatial experience in that they have the capacity both to compound and to orchestrate in novel and affective ways the spatial affordances of social life writ large” (“Introduction,” 24). Ouzounian, likewise, traces a history of thought and practice related to auditory spatiality as it emerges across such fields as philosophy, physics, physiology, psychology, music, architecture, and urban studies. Of direct relevance here is Ouzounian's narration of sonic propagation, or “the inherent ability of sound to pass through a medium and traverse space” (Stereophonica, 16). Tracking the historical developments of these ways of hearing, Ouzounian writes that “not only could sound propagate over long distances, its propagations could produce distinct effects—and not only sonic ones” (17). Other texts that feed into these ideas include Connell and Gibson, Sound Tracks; Feld, “Waterfalls of Song”; Jazeel, “World Is Sound?”; Kong, “Popular Music in Geographical Analysis”; Leyshon, Matless, and Revill, Place of Music; Saldanha, “Music, Space, Identity”; Smith, “Beyond Geography's Visible Worlds”; Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity, and Music; and Wood, Duffy, and Smith, “Art of Doing (Geographies of) Music.”
For a good historical account of this, see Ouzounian, Stereophonica, 125–50.
Ochoa Gautier, “Sonic Cartographies,” 271. On audible territories, see LaBelle, Acoustic Territories.
Steingo and Sykes, “Remapping Sound Studies in the Global South,” 24. Our project with this special issue in many ways builds on Steingo and Sykes's work with their volume Remapping Sound Studies. As the title suggests, Steingo and Sykes's volume also centers on sonic cartographies, albeit with more of an anthropological and ethnomusicological focus than this special issue of Social Text. Steingo and Sykes, and the work of the authors gathered in Remapping Sound Studies, do the important work of “listening to and from the South” (8) as a means of expanding and correcting the overwhelmingly global North focus of the sound studies canon as it has developed in Euro-American academia. Their efforts to “develop a new cartography for sound studies” (4)—and the navigational tools they craft to do so—enable us to hear the crossings and carrying work that sound does in constantly traversing the global North and South and traversing the colonial divides that produce Norths and Souths in the first place.
Again, Steingo and Sykes's writing is helpful here, as they conceive of sonic history as “a narrative of jagged histories of encounter, including friction, antagonism, surveillance, mitigation, navigation, negotiation, and nonlinear feedbacks, rather than as efficiency, inexhaustibility, increasing isolation of the listening subject, and increasing circulation” (“Remapping Sound Studies in the Global South,” 12).
“Open song” here is a nod to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, who write of “the open song of the ones who are supposed to be silent” (Undercommons, 51).
Ouzounian identifies echo as “that which can never be apprehended” (Stereophonica, 18).
Our thinking here, and across this introduction, is also guided by Paul Gilroy's writing of The Black Atlantic.
José Esteban Muñoz, quoted in Brown, Black Utopias, 8.
Again, we do not wish to slide into a binary of orality and literacy here, which, for Sterne, parallels the spirit/letter distinction in Catholic religion and, leaning on Jacques Derrida, earmarks a “creeping Christian spiritualism that inhabits Western philosophy” (Audible Past, 17)—to the extent that this binary, and its latent religiosity, is essential to the history of the West itself. Our thinking here is closer again to Glissant, who asserts that, particularly in contexts of slavery and postslavery in the Black Atlantic, “the word is first and foremost sound” (Caribbean Discourse, 123–24).
For a good discussion of musical and sonic publics, see Born, “Introduction,” 35–40. See also Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape; and Ochoa Gautier, “Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification, and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America.”
London's sound system culture, and its racialized policing, is depicted in Franco Rossi's 1980 film Babylon, which fictionalizes the story of Dennis Bovell's Sufferer's Hi-Fi in mid-1970s London. Steve McQueen's Small Axe film House Party (2020) is another depiction of London's sound system culture.
Elliott-Cooper, Black Resistance to British Policing. Hervé Tchumkam, in “Banlieue Sounds,” listens to similar dynamics in Paris, where the sonic-spatial specificities of the banlieues at the peripheries of the city, and how they are perceived as transgressions when they move into the spaces of the city center, are also a replication of colonial spatialities, policing, and order.
At the same time, we recognize that silence can also be a form of resistance and not just a key form of policing in the operation of colonial and state power (though it definitely is this). This is to say, the proclivity to silence particular voices—that is, to ensure some sounds, narratives, and expressions do not come into representation on terms true to the singularity of their own difference—is not the only meaning silence can have, either sonically or spatially. As Adrienne Rich writes in her poem “Cartographies of Silence” (Dream of a Common Language, 17),
Or, as Ochoa Gautier's “Silence” puts it, silence “can also be used as a significant political, symbolic, and interpretive strategy to respond to situations of conflict” (183–84). Far from existing as a binary of voice and silence, where one is agency and identity and the other is suppression and submission, these two sonic strategies merge into a praxis, a shifting set of textures, presences, and polyrhythms, both coming into representation and evading its demands.
Stoever, Sonic Color Line. George Revill also writes about sound as a tool of exclusion and inclusion in “Music and the Politics of Sound.”
We are grateful to the journal editors for pushing us to think about the meanings and models of these metaphors.
The symposium Sound Carries was part of an ongoing funded initiative at University College London's Institute of Advanced Studies called Music Futures, which grew from an experiment in bringing together scholars working on music (and sound in our case) in an institutional context that lacks a dedicated department of music. For more on Music Futures, see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/music-futures.
Born, Music, Sound, and Space; Devine and Boudreault-Fournier, Audible Infrastructures; Goffe, “Bigger than the Sound”; Hemmasi, Tehrangeles Dreaming; Hill, Black Soundscapes White Stages; Stokes, “Afterword.”
Brent Turner, Soundtrack to a Movement; Brueck, Smith, and Verma, Indian Sound Cultures; Chávez, Sounds of Crossing; Denning, Noise Uprising; Weheliye, Phonographies; Western, “Covered Mouths Still Have Voices.”
