It’s a dark and stormy night on the Taconic State Parkway, in upstate New York; snaking along the path of the Hudson River, the road is usually scenic but tonight is draped with rain and headlight glare. A voice from North Country Public Radio calls off a list of names, frenetically free-associating about Dominick Calsolaro and Lucinda Hannon and Mary Perrin Scott and all the other generous people who donated to the station to keep public radio alive, and the time they recorded an interview with Howard Zinn on CD as a thank-you gift for supporters, and how incredible it was, and so on. The radio host sounds like a carnival barker, a hawker fleecing pigeons on the boardwalk, an auctioneer, or an old friend excitedly retelling a story you’ve heard a million times.Social scientists call the relationships we have with figures in the mass media “parasocial”—the way we feel as if a familiar TV or radio host or musician is almost a friend (albeit in a one-sided friendship).1 Yet the way this public radio broadcast made me feel was more than not-alone. The frantic speaker drew me into a community where we share values and are part of a political project, to support public broadcasting or activism or the teaching of history from a radical perspective. It was a kind of “soundwork,” the ingenious term Michele Hilmes developed to capture the vast array of modes of expression in sound that transcend particular media (records, TV, radio, streaming) and genres (soundtrack music, a podcast, a live DJ set, sound art).2Hilmes has shown us how sound is something to work with, and as this special series continued through the second volume of this journal, “The Soundwork of Media Activism” opened our eyes to the ways people put sound to work, across a vertiginously broad array of cultural and political contexts. Indigenous Americans cut records and broadcast across the vast scope of Indian country, as in Josh Garrett-Davis’s essay, while individual artists such as Zitkála-Šá dexterously threaded their way through institutional oppression while still pointedly and persistently asserting the power of their own peoples’ music, song, and dance, as in Kristen Rose Brown’s piece.3 Sound becomes the surface for social solidarity to be built upon, sometimes catch-as-catch-can, whether in the informal scenes of male sociality in Gulu, Uganda, as in Joella Bitter’s essay, or mediated through radio and recording for Kichwa women of Ecuador, as Georgia C. Ennis shows us.4Sound radiated out of Castro’s Cuba on the waves of Radio Free Dixie in the 1960s, in our contribution from Brian Kane—flipping the script of the United States’ own propaganda apparatuses of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which aimed to trickle in dissent to the territories of America’s geopolitical rivals.5 Sound could be the ineffable and vaporous cement of social bonds for marginalized groups, each keen to sustain their own culture against threats near and far, but sound could also be aggressive—an attack or at least an imposition. In 1989, the US government notoriously used a “wall of sound” to assault Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, blasting the Clash and Metallica into his sanctuary at the Vatican embassy in Panama City.6 Amplified sound has since been a weapon for anti-abortion activists, as Rebecca Lentjes, Amy E. Alterman, and Whitney Arey show us; people seeking reproductive healthcare at clinics experience sonic harassment, as do doctors and staff, in ways that are not only heard but literally felt, in the vibrations that rattle stands of informative literature in the waiting room.7Soundwork can be meeting together in a forest and listening for the truth in communion with strangers and neighbors—a way of understanding each other—as in sound artist Brian Harnetty’s work in Appalachia.8 It can mean working out a vision of the future, in which sound falls in and out of the picture and people are not intelligible to each other, as Nikita Gale finds in Octavia Butler’s brilliant science-fiction imagination.9 Being in the present, seeing the future: Soundwork can also mean documenting the past that does not necessarily want to be remembered, as in the case of Quebec activists who have kept an ongoing account of the province’s abusive radio screeds against a rainbow coalition of villains, made up of cyclists, college students, queers, Muslims, and First Nations, among many others. A hatemongering moment might seem evanescent in the medium of talk radio, yet Simon-Olivier Gagnon’s essay reveals how, through archival practice, soundwork proves otherwise.10The scholar Julie Beth Napolin recently observed, speaking of her 2020 work, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form, that “things vibrate, things resonate…resonance is a sympathetic vibration.” Napolin points out that resonating necessarily includes more than one: In sound, at least one thing is resonating with another. Soundwork reveals that “the basic fact of existence is not one but two”; we are resonated with, not to or at. In other words, resonance means our “withness.” “When you say something, my mind, my self, my body, becomes a resonating chamber for that idea,” Napolin argues, “and I discover, in a concrete way, what I didn’t know that I thought or held to be true before.”11Opening ourselves to hearing, to transforming and being transformed, we can change through sound. The writer L. M. Sacasas, in his newsletter The Convivial Society, recently spoke of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s work, noting, “Resonance is a way of relating to the world such that we are open to being affected by it, can respond to its ‘call,’ and then both transform and be transformed by it—adaptive transformation as opposed to mere appropriation.”12 As Rosa himself put it:If we saw the world not as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s escalatory game would become meaningless and, more importantly, would be deprived of the psychological energy that drives it. A different world would become possible.13The soundwork of politics is all about opening the way for such transformation. Rosa described it as “mutually responsive reachability”; in our series, Kristen Rose Brown spoke similarly of Zitkála-Šá’s art and activism, and our “ability to listen and speak as vital, reciprocal processes for developing activist consciousness.”14 Following Napolin and Rosa, we can see—or hear—how soundwork rattles us and we resonate with each other, in ways that reveal things we did not know before, or that we did not know we knew. The rattling can be good or bad—recall the assaults on abortion clinics—but more often, the essays and interviews in this special series remind us how soundwork is always storytelling, and through storytelling a way of making contact and building bonds. They show us how sound is an essential and often unrecognized part of social and political struggle.Thank you to Josh Shepperd for originally conceiving of this special series and inviting us to participate, as well as Georgia Ennis and Jen Shook for their deep engagement and editorial insights throughout the process of developing these pieces. Resonance’s founding co-editors Jay Needham and Phylis West Johnson stewarded the project with a steady vision and kept our shared experiment on course, even providing the opportunity to expand it beyond a single issue. Yet thanks most of all are due to the remarkable interdisciplinary scholars who ran with the concept and became a part of not only the series but also the early days of this unusual, young journal. Their imaginative insight, too, is soundwork and activism.Returning to Hilmes, we see how soundwork cuts across the categories that we typically use to organize human expression. As expressed by so many of the talented authors in the special series, soundwork might be an event or moment in time, a document or an object, or it might be a braid of practices and traditions stretching from the past and into the future. Whether in the air, in vinyl grooves, or through binary code, it beckons as a means to understand each other and effect change—from the most fleeting sidewalk encounter to a broadcast that blankets the land and sea, or a recording that endures through a century. It is sound, working through scales of intonation and up and down scales of time.