Power in Listening: New book showcases groundbreaking work in the field of sound studies

Why do digital assistants such as Amazon’s Echo have female voices? Can recording the sounds of melting glaciers, or the silence in spaces once filled with birds, inspire environmental activism? How do Spotify’s “sad girl” playlists shape identity? 

The questions explored by Sound Studies cross disciplinary lines to consider the role that sound and listening play in our daily lives, culture, and political systems. A new anthology edited by Binghamton University Associate Professor of English Jennifer Lynn Stoever and alumni Liana Silva, PhD ’12, and Aaron Trammell, MA ’09, collects some of the best work in the field.

“It’s called Power in Listening because it’s all about how sound can be a venue for power to show itself, to act on people, and to be challenged by people,” Stoever explained. “If we attune ourselves to that, we can make change.”

Silva, who earned her degree in English, and Trammell, who earned his degree in comparative literature, attended the first graduate seminar Stoever taught at Binghamton in 2008; the following year, the three launched the Sounding Out! blog, the first publication venue for the field of Sound Studies. 

Sounding Out! has been hugely influential in the rapidly expanding field and has been visited by 1.2 million unique users from all over the globe. The 700-plus articles on the site are regularly taught at more than 350 colleges and universities worldwide, Stoever said.

Today, Stoever is Sounding Out!’s editor in chief, while Silva serves as managing editor and Trammell as multimedia editor; since 2010, they have also worked on an accompanying podcast series. Silva is a teacher, writer, and editor based in Houston, Tex., while Trammell is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

Power in Listening features five new essays, as well as a retrospective of 30 of the top essays from the blog’s first 15 years, all newly revised and expanded from a present-day perspective. Topics span more than 20 academic disciplines, with articles written by artists, activists, and deejays, as well as scholars.

“So, it’s all new, even though versions of the pieces have been published online,” Stoever said. 

Organized into themes such as Memoir as Method, Our Social Voices, Listening to Popular Culture, Sound and Racial Privilege, and more, the pieces connect with readers’ lived experiences and daily lives, and also explore how we relate to one another.

The book includes one of the blog’s most famous pieces, Silva’s “As Loud As I Want to Be: Gender, Loudness, and Respectability Politics,” which draws on her experiences as a Puerto Rican woman in academia. Other essays discuss the connection between jazz and employee surveillance in the post-pandemic workplace, Muhammad Ali, the Los Angeles punk scene, Beyoncé, video games, music, television, and more.

The reader is ideal for instructors teaching an introductory course in Sound Studies, but also graduate students, interdisciplinary scholars, or anyone interested in the field. 

“We wanted it to be paced well for teaching and self-exploration, which go hand-in-hand,” Stoever said. 

Sound brings people together as listeners, scholars, and creators; over the past 17 years, Sounding Out has sought to facilitate these conversations in an accessible, open-access format.

“People and the connections between people continue to be our most important resource. Whether in academia or in life, being siloed in our individual locations and disciplines is not the way forward. We need to work collaboratively,” Stoever reflected. “We started this conversation because we knew it was important. Sound is important in so many more ways than we could have anticipated.”