The Sound Engineers

While enslavers deployed visual oversight and clock-regulated bells to control plantation life, enslaved people throughout the antebellum South engineered sound concealment practices to protect their religious autonomy from white surveillance. They constructed ‘hush arbors’ in the woods where dense vegetation dampened worship sounds, practiced ‘turning down pots’ to trap sounds during clandestine prayer meetings, timed gatherings to coincide with thunderstorms, and stationed lookouts to detect approaching patrols. Each practice represented a form of sound engineering, which is defined as the deliberate manipulation of sound, space, and environment to physically shape the acoustic world. The enslaved formed an ‘inaudible institution’ – a network of sonic concealment technologies that enabled bondspeople to worship within a system designed to eliminate religious autonomy. Analyzing Works Progress Administration narratives, plantation records, and legal codes through frameworks from Science and Technology Studies, acoustic ecology, and soundscape theory, this article reveals that sonic concealment constituted a form of technological resistance. Enslaved communities developed practical knowledge of sonic concealment through experience, refined techniques across generations, and adapted strategies when necessary

Field (mathematics) · Resistance (ecology) · Sonic boom · Sound (geography) · Diverse Musicological Studies · Music History and Culture · Sound Studies and Aurality