Eidsheim argues that the acousmatic question is not “who am I listening to,” but rather should be oriented toward “how is it that I listen in this way” and “why do I associate this type of sound with a particular body?” She asserts that timbre is not inherently associated with certain (often racialized and gendered) bodies, and explores how we might listen in a way that challenges essentialist ideas between sounding and race.
Stoever is interested in the processes by which we came to understand certain sounds as being associated with blackness, and how racist ideologies surrounding these sounds has cast them in a negative light.
Stoever draws on listening and sounding histories (she explicitly notes that there is not one monolithic history of sound but rather multiple, intertwined histories), and explores how American systems of sound valuation (that are tied up in race and gender and class) were founded between the antebellum era, leading up to the civil rights movement and the moves for colorblind racism. She develops the idea of the sonic color line, which describes the process of racializing sound, and the listening ear, “a figure of how dominant listening practices accrue—and change—over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms” (Stoever, 2016: 7).
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Whose Voice!?!!
4 of 7
Unrespectable Resilience
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Black Sonic Excess
“I’ve lately wondered how biases about physical excess might intersect and compound with analogous prejudices about black sonic excess” (177)
“For resentful listeners, black noise is like dirt; it is, to paraphrase anthropologist Mary Douglas, sonic ‘matter out of place’” (177)
“Incidents of black sonic impurities ultimately hinge on the following twin assumptions: black bodies make noise; and black ears can take– embrace, withstand, shrug off– noise” (177)
Threatening physicalities of Black sound and the threatening sounds of black physicality (178)