NIXEDMEDIA™

In Jennifer Stoever’s introduction to Sonic Color Line and Steph Ceraso’s “(Re)Educating the Senses,” both authors address the immense role listening plays in shaping people’s experiences. As Stoever discusses her purpose for writing Sonic Color Line and the influences that inspired it, she explains how listening affects racialization in society. Throughout the introduction, she refers back to a concept called the “sonic color line,” which “describes the process of racializing sound—how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’” (Stoever 7). Paired with this idea is the “listening ear,” which serves as a driving force, showing how dominant listening practices grow and change over time, and how dominant culture forces individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms (Stoever 7). Ceraso’s piece is more personal as she explains how engaging in multimodal listening, rather than regular listening, can create a full-body, esthetic experience. Although these texts discuss listening under starkly different contexts, there is some overlap in their subject matter.

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When Ceraso describes how to engage in multimodal listening, she states that the first step is to “unlearn” one’s old ways of listening. This is because the accumulation of past experiences with sound results in the formation of listening habits, which can create biases towards outliers of one’s habits (Ceraso 110). This relates to Stoever’s “sonic color line” because in addition to discriminating based on appearance, white people have also established socially constructed boundaries that “racially encode sonic phenomena such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones” (Stoever 11). In the US, markers of “whiteness” are innately identified as American, while anything else is considered as “incomprehensible and unintelligible” (Stoever 12). These associations exist because of decades of socialization, which has caused people to relate certain sounds with specific races, and impedes the multimodal listening that could prevent cultural generalizations. To exemplify the racialization of sound, Stoever mentioned how a black actor, Frank Wilson, was denied a role in Freedom’s People because he sounded “too much like a white man” (Stoever 12). This particular case stood out to me because a YouTuber that I watch, who goes by “BlackySpeakz,” has often been assumed to be white because of the way he talks. Similarly, I have had people tell me that I “sound white” when they’ve heard recordings of me talking. In both instances, I believe that the reason BlackySpeakz and I “sound white” is because we “talk proper” (don’t use a lot of slang), which society has associated with “whiteness.”

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Another aspect of Stoever’s introduction that stood out to me was her detailing of the systematic racism that exists in the US. In the opening and throughout the text, she mentioned how normalized “whiteness” has made white Americans feel entitled to respect for their sensibilities, sensitivities, tastes, and control over the soundscape of the “public” space, which, subsequently, causes white authority figures to expect more compliance from people of color (2). As her examples of the Sandra Bland and Spring Valley High School incidents exhibit, this is the unfortunate reality of the US. Despite years of “progress,” the country still maintains systems that oppress people of color and consider them as “the Other.” Through this distorted worldview, screams of pain, fearful prayers, and even silence are turned into “blackness”: dangerous noise, outsized aggression, and a threatening strength (3). While there obviously has been great improvement in the way that people of color are treated in the country, I believe that the quote included from Liana Silva sums up at least part of the situation: “loudness is something racialized people cannot afford” (23).

 

On a lighter note, when Ceraso talked about esthetic experiences and how encountering the same sounds in different contexts can reinvigorate your enjoyment of it, I couldn’t help but agree. Her example of listening to a song through computer speakers, then listening to that song live at a concert demonstrates that point perfectly because there’s an entirely different aura when you’re in a crowd of people singing along to a song you enjoy, and it creates a synergistic flow of energy between the performer(s) and the audience. Similarly, when songs have multiple versions (e.g., a single version and an album version), there is either more or less enjoyment when you’ve grown accustomed to one version and then listen to the other. The most recent experience I have of this is with EarthGang’s song “UP.” Originally the song was released as a Colors Show performance (on the YouTube channel “COLORS”), then on their recent album Mirrorland, and a lot of people, myself included, much prefer the Colors Show version to the one on the album. While I understand that they changed it to fit the album’s theme more, the Colors Show version had more infectious energy. One difference I noticed between Ceraso and I, is that a song will naturally become dull to her across multiple listens, while I purposefully play a new song I found on repeat until it feels more “normal.” When I say “normal,” it doesn’t mean that the song is dull to me, it just means that I don’t immediately search for it when I go to listen to music.

 

For my aural mode project, I will be recording myself performing a poem that I wrote that touches on the marginalization of African Americans and making an instrumental to add extra dynamism to the piece. The performance will have a slam-poetry style of delivery, which I think will add more emphasis and power to the words (as slam poetry usually does). I’m not sure how I will structure the instrumental yet, but I want to try to make it accent the major parts of the poem, ideally without taking any emphasis from the words.