The Degree of Listening - Listening is Archival
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Review: Abundance → Movement → Nature →
Last night, I went to a party. The music started around 9:30 p.m. and didn't end until midnight. I live behind a cemetery, and every Sunday (every single Sunday) the mariachi bands play. Their music echoes through the mausoleums, competing with one another across the grounds. Every part of my neighborhood sings.Down the street, Jamaican families play reggae and lover’s rock. My mother is the loudest person I know. She stomps when she walks. She snores like she's announcing her presence to the whole house.
These are sounds I've known since before I was born. Sounds I learned in my mother's womb. I learned my family and community through listening before I had the language to describe it. My mother’s voice is air moving through vocal cords, and my neighbor's drum is a membrane moving. The footsteps I hear upstairs, are a body moving through space. Even the silence is a moment we become aware of subtler movements that were already there. Like the wind and water flowing.
Sound is not just an acoustic phenomenon but a cultural and political one. In the States, Black traditions often employ sound as a mode of communal expression, memory, and survival, while dominant white middle-class norms have historically privileged quietness, privacy, and individual control. Conflicts over noise reveal deeper struggles over belonging, public space, and whose ways of being are allowed to shape the environment.
Movement → Vibration → Sound → Listening → Relation
When does sound become criminalized?
What borders dissolve when we listen differently?
When we believe our way of listening is neutral or universal, we stop being curious.
Listening is not passive. It's an active cultural practice. The sounds that comfort us, irritate us, or draw our attention are shaped by histories of race, class, migration, geography, and power.