Recycling Audibility as Sound Design for Life

Abstract

In Latin America and the Caribbean the historical audiovisual and audio-recorded ethnomusicological archive is being recycled under different political and aesthetic imperatives. Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples reappropriate and transform the archive through strategic decolonising practices that recast the political and aesthetic conditions of audibility for which ethnographic sounds were originally produced. In colonial and postcolonial settings, the distinction between the colonisers and the colonised in terms of their knowledge about sound is not between amateurs and professionals. Rather the political invention of rationality as a key to professional labour simply deems the knowledge of sounds by the colonised irrelevant, irrational, or non-existent. This article explores the contemporary intensification of the labour of recycling sound archives as decolonial strategy, where so-called non-professionals often work at the techniques of sound design necessary for the reappropriation of the sound archive. This is often lived as an amorous process of reinstating the audibility of such sounds into the designs of life.