Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Abstract

Growing out of the inaugural Music and Sound Studies working group at the Cultural Studies Association of 2022, this special issue of American Music Perspectives explores how music and sound relate to the sociopolitical valences of our current crisis conditions. Though diverse in method and subject, each article in this issue takes up everyday crisis vis-à-vis sound, using various affective approaches to show how sonic processes help us navigate, resist, apprehend, or make space within our conditions as a function of their complex affective force, irreducible to any one aspect of music performance, artistic intention, or literal subject-matter. In our view, bringing theories of affect into conversation with multidisciplinary perspectives across music and sound studies opens up exciting new paths for research in both directions. Thinking music and affect together expands the possibilities of ethnographic and semiotic methods, while from the other side of the equation, sound and music’s uniquely ephemeral materialities have much to offer theorizations of affect’s aesthetic and political implications.As music scholars reflecting on sound’s relationship to current events, we have long turned to affect theory as a promising framework. Thinking about sound and affect together underscores the often oblique ways that sound and music can function in society, in addition to and beyond any semiotic connotations revealed through close reading. In discussing Janet Jackson’s 1986 album Control, Capetola (2020) posits that the sounds and visuals in the accompanying music videos demonstrate how album themes of “feminism” and “control” affectively and vibrationally come into being. In his book Contingent Encounters (2022), DiPiero thinks through affect to theorize improvisation, offering a socially situated and radically contextual view of group interaction that resists new materialism’s emphasis on musical “outcomes.” For this issue, we also invited those working in popular music studies to engage with both affect theory and sound studies, underscoring how both fields are attuned to felt experiences of music.An important precedent for embodying such joint sound-music-affect theories is the work of musician and composer Pauline Oliveros. In 1989, Oliveros released Deep Listening, which names a praxis as much as a recording. In her own words, “For me Deep Listening is a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus” (Oliveros 1999). For Oliveros, listening to music means attuning to both sound and affect. “Below the surface” of sound, we arrive at affect, both the viscerality of the vibrations it produces and the emotional feelings that it might provoke. Subsequent writing about sound and affect in critical theory has accentuated the challenges and rewards in working with both concepts simultaneously.Building on the work of performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, queer and affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2014, 2021) has described a turn from affect to sense and sensation across the humanities, which itself builds on the 2000s affective turn’s move from identity to affect. Since 2010, sound has increasingly appeared in texts engaging with affect theory. In Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, Amber Jamilla Musser powerfully theorizes her own notion of “deep listening,” grounded in bodily (albeit not necessarily musical) attunement (2018). Meanwhile, in Queer Times, Black Futures, Kara Keeling engages with Sun Ra’s musical refrains to theorize a highly affective notion of femininity (2019). However, sound’s presence in these texts ultimately is more metaphorical than material.Meanwhile, in sound studies and popular music studies, affect is often conceptualized as an assumed component of sound. In Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performing Techniques, and Ways of Knowing, Julian Henriques theorizes that bodies are open to being affected by the forces of sound (2011). In Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century, Dhanveer Singh Brar theorizes that sound “creates affects” that register the geographic and class specificities of its producers (2021, 3). In The Politics of Vibration: Music as Cosmopolitical Practice, Marcus Boon theorizes that sound “pull[s] listeners affectively towards it”—and toward new types of collectivities with one another (2022, 119). While affect is mentioned in each of these texts, it is conceptualized as an extension of sound, and not something that also exists in itself, even apart from sound.Recent work in Black studies and Latinx studies highlights the potential of working simultaneously in sound studies and affect theory. In Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon T. Crawley conceptualizes a notion of collective breath that creates new sensualities of being through feeling with sound and vibration (2017). In A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad, Richard T. Rodriguez theorizes a notion of mutual touch that “traces a number of sensuous connections involving listeners, lovers, spectators, collaborators, friends, fans, and exemplars” through a shared love of music (2022, 26). These recent works offer a bold blueprint for moving forward in theorizing how sound and affect work both separately and together, rendering new insights particularly in times of crisis.Finally, there have also been explicit attempts to think sound and affect together, including Thompson and Biddle’s Sound, Music, Affect (2013); Mee and Robinson’s Sound Affects (2023); and Seigworth and Pedwell’s The Affect Theory Reader 2 (2023). This special issue of AMP aims to contribute to such efforts by offering a survey of exciting and timely perspectives with an emphasis on the work of graduate students and early career scholars. The articles included in this special issue take up the function of sonic vibrations by interrogating sound’s variegated engagements with politics and social life in our contemporary moment, overdetermined by the experience of both acute and chronically compounding crises. In the process, they illuminate aspects of sound’s political operations, and, at the same time, they help further the conversation around what affective perspectives can contribute to music studies: engaging with but ultimately exceeding semiotic interpretation, each contributor to this issue shows across diverse media the concrete ways in which sound’s affective force reshapes our understanding of the world and our engagement with it.First, Iris Blake’s “Sounding Suspension and the Unresolved: Pandemic Grief as Accumulation in Coco Fusco’s Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” draws on work in ethnic studies, sound studies, and memory studies to theorize a sonics of “suspension and accumulation,” which grapples with the layers of death and loss from COVID-19 and previous pandemics. Connecting the waves of sound to the images of waves in Fusco’s film, featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Blake situates affect as a point that links visuality and sonics.Kathleen Galloway’s “Climate Games, the Blue Humanities, and Listening to the Deep-Sea Ecosystems in Games in a Time of Ecological Crisis” engages acoustic ecology with the concepts of the “blue humanities” and “persuasive games” in order to show how 2016’s Abzû forces players to encounter “beyond-the-human” environments in new ways—ways that carry the potential to foster different modes of relating to conditions of ecological collapse. Rachel Elliott’s article, “Musical Introspection and the Affective Group-en-Fusion: Existential Reckoning with the Political and Climate Crises,” similarly focuses on the climate crisis, but does so through an investigation of a different medium entirely: streaming radio. Using and extending Jean-Paul Sarte’s analysis of serial sociality, Elliott analyzes a nonprofit, community radio program’s capacity to foster group-en-fusion, Sartre’s term for a kind of pre-political community that becomes aware of one another in common experience.Jennifer Smart’s “Object-Oriented Sociality: Marina Rosenfeld’s Sound Installation Art” mobilizes performance studies, cultural studies, and sound studies to linger with Rosenfeld’s performance art, suggesting that “how we listen in the gallery is inevitably informed by our broader encounter with recorded sound” and exploring how the artist’s work “creates space . . . for other actors, feelings, and experiences to come to the fore.” In the process, Smart grapples with how sound art’s presence in the still visually oriented gallery or museum space invites a reorientation of the hierarchy of the senses and how audience members come to know their bodies.Analyzing political speech, music, and sound, Carolin Müller’s “Whose Crisis Is It?: Embodied Resistance and Sonic Warfare” tracks how sound “becomes a matter of survival” in contemporary Dresden, where fascist politicians and leftist resistance movements clashed in the streets in 2020, waging sonic warfare against the backdrop of the so-called migrant crisis. In the process, they show clearly how sound’s semiotic meaning is not irrelevant but also not totally correlated with its affective function as a marker and constitutive generator of social space. Tracing a different disjunction between music’s meaning and function, Kate Hamori’s “‘It’s Brutal Out Here’: Adolescence, Betrayal, and Vulnerability in Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR” makes connections between betrayal trauma theory, the COVID-19 pandemic, and popular music, tracing how Rodrigo’s performance of emotional vulnerability and nostalgia helps listeners cope and even heal “while maintaining a safe cognitive distance from pandemic-related stress.” In a quintessentially affective move, Hamori demonstrates that music need not directly engage with a topic like COVID in order to nevertheless bear on it.Finally, Derek Blackwell’s “For the DJ Tells Me So?: Genre, Community, and the Construction of Christian Hip-Hop” employs communication studies, popular music studies, and ethnographic interviews with musicians to explore how Christian hip-hop “plays an important role in how the Christian faith is defined, perceived, and positioned within society”—thus challenging the secular/sacred divide. Through tracing definitions of Christian hip-hop across practitioners, Blackwell highlights how the identity crisis in the genre extends onto a crisis in how the Christian faith at large is portrayed in the media.Bringing affect into conversation with music is not, as Ana Hofman reminds us, inherently emancipatory or even political (2020); at best, however, thinking sound and affect together within a context of music studies helps us to more concretely apprehend the contingent specificities of our aesthetic and political entanglements, attending to all the details that matter, both seen and unseen. As Walter Benjamin famously put it in 1940, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (1955, 257). And yet, as Stuart Hall would have it, each crisis is borne of specific conjunctures in unique constellations. The articles in this special issue take up the specificities of our crises, turning to sound and affect together to think through Benjamin’s timeless observation in the present moment.