Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean

The editors of this excellent new volume invite scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean into the emergent field of sound studies. Sound is not so much an object of study, this book implies, as an opportunity to deepen the texture of historical analysis in an impressive number of ways. In their definition of the topic, the editors include “sound-scapes, music, noise, and silence” (p. x), a breadth all the more imperative given (they point out) the disproportionate celebration of Latin America and the Caribbean for its music. Thanks to this fine framing as well as the quality of the individual pieces, the insights far exceed the particulars of region; these essays deserve to be read by anyone curious about the epistemological payoff of thinking about sound.The volume’s opening chapter listens to the voices of speakers and singers recorded in popular music and fiction. Placing nineteenth-century fiction alongside twentieth-century recorded song, author Fernando de Sousa Rocha refuses to distinguish sound recording and text writing, pointing out that “writing itself is a sound recording technology” and that written texts, too, allow us to approach sound (p. 4). In both, he notices the suppression of marginalized speakers or singers, tracing the spectral presence of voices that disappear in collectivity, or behind the name of an ostensive author, but incompletely, returning to “forge new polyphonies” in “the never complete disembodiment that technology affords” (p. 17). De Sousa Rocha offers a powerful rumination on the social nature of recorded sound and the need for more critical listening.Pursuing related insights on the social nature of sound and the possibility of disembodiment, Christine Ehrick considers radio in 1930s – 40s Buenos Aires. Fearing that the body would (or had) become unmoored from the biological bases of social order, critics of “radio transvestism” or “sonic drag” worked to stem the transgressions that seemed to flow from radio technology. Their anxieties drew from the recognition that radio personas, Ehrick points out, are not disembodied. They are sonic bodily projections, and voice is a critical way in which the body performs gender, as well as class and ethnicity. These are essential insights for the internet age.Editor Alejandra Bronfman’s contribution, nimbly entitled “Weapons of the Geek,” explores the shifting power dynamics enabled by new sonic technologies. Telephone and telegraph technicians in Cuba in the 1930s and ’40s gained powers unprecedented for laborers of their class, as their employers and governments lacked the expertise to repair the technologies they relied on. Politics must be understood as a different kind of contest in such a world, she argues quite convincingly — not as a matter of a monopoly on violence or the mobilization of masses but as a question of technical expertise. Technological advances created “a reorganized political space” with risks and advantages for the power ful as well as the rebel, all agreeing on the essential position of the “tinkerer” (p. 70).Lest we conclude that sound technologies consistently reorganize relations of power toward greater equality, the next piece gives a far darker view. Alejandro Madrid traces a tangled knot of sound technologies in the form of an electronic dance music song that sampled a sound slice of a dramatic political scandal. In a virtuosic application of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Guy Debord to the global-local scene of contemporary Mexican politics and popular culture, Madrid shows that the track and its marketing disclose not democracy in action but the commodification of that very idea. Following this sound bite through its various incarnations shows the balance of power emergent in neoliberal Mexico, in which even the upper middle classes have given up hope of representation by political elites.Gonzalo Araoz’s chapter draws listeners into the “extraordinary sonorous sphere” of carnival celebrations in Oruro, Bolivia (p. 102). Araoz describes a ritual during which many different songs of the morenada genre are played for hours on end. Within this rhythm are moments of silence, some the result of stretched tones, others between stanzas and filled with vocal or instrumental commentary. Rhythmic and sonic excess, the cacophony of tune fusion, the experience of playing rattles and dancing for hours on end, and the resulting experience of unpredictability create a “thick” sonic present that inscribes the music on the minds of participants so that they hear it long after the bands have gone. There is thus good reason this carnival was declared a UNESCO world heritage phenomenon, Araoz maintains; the “intangible and transcendent temporality” of its musical celebration interrupts and reworks temporal norms, those prevailing assumptions that we will move steadily, progressively through a timescape perhaps adorned but not altered (and certainly not constitutively shaped) by sound (p. 102).Araoz’s essay is satisfying in part because he cares so much about how his object of analysis actually sounded. In some of the other chapters, the content of words conveyed in sound is more important than the sound itself, or the politics of sound are less important than the politics of sound technologies. Sound is such a slippery category, though, and the study of it so unfamiliar, that such scratches are to be expected. (I do admit to being surprised at the postscript’s conclusion that listening to the sounds described in the essays would not alter the understandings produced there.) This volume showcases the heterogeneity of sound studies as it is currently practiced, revealing a tremendously fertile, emergent field, interested primarily in inspiring scholars to listen

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Framing (construction) · Latin Americans · Linguistics · Literature · Silence · Sociology · Sound (geography) · Visual arts · History · Media, Communication, and Education · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media

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