Black Digital Sound Studies

Conversations about Black sound studies have existed in many spaces: in works like Fred Moten’s In the Break and Ashon Crawley’s Black Pentecostal Breath, which challenge the aesthetic possibilities of Black sound and Black studies simultaneously by theorizing Blackness through jazz and gospel music performance; in spaces like Daphne Brooks’s “Black Sound and the Archive” working group; in the writings of foundational music critics such as A. B. Spellman and those who we do not often hear as critics but have written insightfully nonetheless, like Abbey Lincoln. Black sound studies is in W. E. B. Du Bois’s sorrow songs, in Alexander Wehlieye’s remix of the DJ, in my own grandfather’s conspiratorial insistence that the organ player in Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” wasn’t actually supposed to be in the recording.1 Black sound studies is how we make aural sense, be it through music, silence, technology, the roar of activism or the quietude of grief, and everything between or otherwise. Following Manning Marable’s insistence on Black studies as at once descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive, I imagine Black sound studies as a process that explores the depth of Black auralities, corrects mishearings, and incorporates the centrality of Black sound into a broader liberation politic. In short, Black sound studies is a way to understand how Blackness is constituted through sound and to allow that understanding to work with what is at stake in Black sound, be it issues of appropriation, criminalization, silencing, or the particularities of gendered violence.

What, then, is Black digital sound studies? In Digital Sound Studies, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien acknowledge Black studies as a field that has “acknowledged the political complexity of sound since its inception” (5). Black studies scholars across all mediums have long known that to study Black life is to listen to Black people, and to listen to Black life through digital and technological media—the radio, a video on social media, or through a streaming platform—is to engage with an aural disruption of space-time. Black digital sound studies can offer ways to think through what it means to engage the auralities of Blackness through the digital in particular, providing a framework to better understand the questions that arise when we are trying to make sense of a sonic being in the world. Listening to Black life through the digital (and the digital humanities) requires that we attend to sonorities across centuries as well as to the broadest spatializations of diaspora. The sonic as rendered through the digital offers a possibility for studying Black life without engaging in a kind of reductive violence of control. Through avenues such as social media, innovative sonic techniques, and regularly bypassing officiality, the digital is able to amplify the things that Black people say about themselves and mitigate the violence of looking plainly at the horrors that have been inflicted on Black people. The sonic, however, is not without cost, since listening can also be a violent event. From social media platforms like TikTok, whose audio cultures have galvanized digital Blackface, to audio recordings of incidents of police brutality, the sonic often participates in violent mathematics.2 Listening, however, offers a path toward what Fred Moten has described as a “fugitive” knowledge production because it is not the official, preferred mode of evidence for the state. Similarly, Andrew Navin Brooks uses Moten and Harvey’s concept of the undercommons in order to arrive at a kind of “fugitive listening” that “allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper” (2020, 25). The listening that Black studies facilitates thus demands flexibility, speculation, and interpretation, and it has the power to move toward a less violent inquiry into Black life. In what follows, I offer samples of how digital humanities tools, methods, and histories can help us attend to this work.3

Amplifying the Silenced

Embedded within the study of sound is the study of silence, a phenomenon for which I offer two explanations. The first, from ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa, is that silence cannot exist. In her explication of silence as a keyword for sound studies, she recounts the story of composer John Cage entering an anechoic chamber, a room designed to be completely silent. Despite its design, Cage reported that he heard two distinct sounds. He was informed that the low sound was his blood pumping and the high one was his nervous system. Ochoa posits, then, that silence operates as an acoustic impossibility, and that it does not and cannot exist. Extending this declaration through the science of acoustics and into the cultural realm, I contend that the silencing of Blackness is indeed an acoustic impossibility. Despite the pervasive strategies of silencing that are imposed on Black people, beginning with the reduction of Black life to a violent mathematics that McKittrick describes and continuing to range from the censorship of hip-hop to the discipline of Black girls in the classroom, it remains impossible to silence Black life or death in any form. A voice always persists, “says she.”

My second consideration of silence is from Audre Lorde, who casts silence as both a false protector and a tyrant. She warns that “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us” (44). While she acknowledges the pain of being consistently misheard and intentionally misunderstood, she ultimately concludes that the silences of marginalized people will not save them, so it is always better to speak. Considering Ochoa’s argument about the impossibility of silence alongside Lorde’s insistence on silence as a tangible thing to be overcome, I understand silence to be, much like race, constructed and reconstructed in such a way that affirms dominant positions and oppresses those whose sound is of a different and disruptive frequency. To silence someone is to actively shroud them in an inaudibility, to keep them from being witnessed through some combination of discrediting, compressing, or otherwise diminishing their aurality.

The digital and digital humanities practices can and do act as a means of amplifying those who have otherwise been threatened with inaudibility. Furthermore, the acts of sounding and silencing are more than physical vibrations but also encompass the metaphorical resonances of what it means to be heard. Social media, especially Twitter, operates as a powerful space in which sound moves between metaphorical hearings and physical soundwaves. These digital spaces have tremendous amplifying potential, especially as curated by scholars working within digital humanities practices. Consider, for example, the esteemed Dr. Lorgia Garcia-Peña’s tenure denial at Harvard University in 2019, which went viral on social media, particularly on Twitter. The denial sparked a movement to publicly celebrate the expansive contributions of Garcia-Peña, both through the hashtag #Lorgiafest as well as “Ethnic Studies Rise,” a website created by scholars Raj Chetty, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, and Alex Gil. In addition to intellectual communities metaphorically speaking out by sending letters to the university’s administration, the tenure denial inspired in-person protests on Harvard’s campus that involved speaking, shouting, singing, and other forms of aural expression. Prompted by these efforts, there have been renewed conversations, online and offline, about the lives of Afro-Latinx women in the academy, the inequitable mysteries of tenure, and how universities placate protest rather than enacting structural change. Garcia-Peña’s tenure denial was an act of silencing, a way to refuse the validity of her work and diminish her real impact on a number of fields, from ethnic studies to Caribbean studies. To extend the metaphorical discussion about who has a seat at the proverbial table, the response to Garcia-Peña’s tenure denial involved a connection—indeed, an amplification—of those already seated at the tables of their own institutions and libraries, as well as places outside the academy entirely—wherever conversations about ethnic studies might be taking place. Our silences will not save us, and neither will one table at one institution. The value of the digital here is to bring together those who seek to disrupt the shadowy hierarchical structures of the university that amplify the critiques of Black voices.

Distance from Violence

McKittrick’s “Mathematics Black Life” is inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” which explores the possibility of knowing more about Black life without committing further violence within the act of the narrating that life. Specifically regarding the archive of slavery, Hartman asks, “Do the possibilities outweigh the dangers of looking (again)?” (4). That is, does the violence of looking outweigh the benefits of knowing more about Black life and those accounts of Black life that might otherwise be lost to us? This is a question for both inside and outside the archive, listening in addition to looking. Digital methodologies—and in particular, machine learning and automation—have the potential to mitigate the potential violence of listening again (and again) to the violence that gentrification makes audible. In my own work, I listen to the sounds of gentrification in Washington, D.C. Intersectional Listening is a sometimes sprawling project that, at its heart, asks how Black people experience the violence of gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Part of this work has involved what is known as passive acoustic recording, or the capture of many intermittent recordings over a long period of time—in my case, nine months. To process the data generated from the passive acoustic recording, I use a classifier, a process in which I “train” a program to recognize particular sounds in a recording then feed it a large amount of data in order to query the program for various sounds. For example, if I manually tag a number of “siren” sounds in a training set for the span of a day or even a week, I can then feed the program the data for six months and automatically receive back sounds that are similar to the sirens that I manually tagged.

This is not a flawless system, because the sounds of the city are anything but uniformly classifiable; rather, it is a way to think through the sonic characteristics of a gentrifying neighborhood. Furthermore, the analysis of these sounds offers an aural interpretation of what it is to be Black in a gentrifying space. With that said, scholars such as Safiya Noble in Algorithms of Oppression and Ruha Benjamin in Race after Technology have shown that machine learning and artificial intelligence are consistently constructed and employed more broadly in ways that uphold white supremacy. But, as Benjamin also observes, these technologies can be retooled for solidarity and reimagined for justice, when they are wielded with intention and care. Similarly, just as Akasha Gloria Hull and Barbara Smith asserted that the bias of Black women’s study must be to “consider as primary the knowledge that will save Black women’s lives,” the knowledge of a Black digital sound studies must be to listen for that which will save Black people’s lives (22). Machine learning can be applied toward this purpose, and in my work, I classify and tag aspects of a soundscape in an attempt to get closer to an understanding of what is being shifted and disrupted as D.C. gentrifies.

Gentrifying space features a rich soundscape, including car horns, constant music of varying genres and volumes, construction, public transportation, and people. When I speak about listening to these spaces, about the displacement of local music scenes and the persistent criminalization of Black sound, I am often asked if my recorders can capture the sounds of gunshots in the neighborhood. The frequency of this question speaks to the connections people often make between crime and what people often believe Blackness to sound like, and it remains a complicated question because it is indeed possible. If I were to attempt the process of automating the recognition of gunshots, I would begin with fireworks, which are similar enough sonically to manufacture a reasonable training set. They are also relatively easy to find in terms of the calendar, most prevalent on the days before and after the Fourth of July.4 It would be possible, then, to solicit a list of gunshots from a machine-learning algorithm, without having to listen to each instance manually or at all. When people ask me about passive acoustic recording and gunshots, I explain this hypothetical process and the possibility of doing that work with machine learning. But in the same breath, I tell them why I refuse to perform such an endeavor. I have never gone looking for these violences because I do not ever want to be asked for them. I will not create a dataset of gunshot sounds because I will not cooperate with the Metropolitan Police Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or any other such entity that would seek these sounds for the purposes of surveilling, harassing, detaining, and incarcerating Black people. To return to Hartman’s question, the disastrous possibilities of surveillance and tracking outweigh the potential of machine learning to maneuver around the dangers of looking and listening again. In this case, therefore, I understand my work as a Black digital humanist to intentionally refuse to create a particular dataset.

This refusal is an engagement in silencing work, an attempt to cover the deeply embedded, falsely sewn connections between Black life and the criminality of gunshots in an inaudibility that deems a dataset of gunshot audio as not needed because of its potential for violence and also because it lacks the relevance that racism would prescribe it. My refusal follows the work of Yeshimabeit Milner’s call to “abolish big data,” which she describes as a “call to action to reject the concentration of Big Data, to challenge the structures that allow it to be wielded as a weapon. . . .” Public discussion of refusal is a key part of a Black digital sound studies, especially because this dataset already exists in the form of the “Shotspotter,” a technology that “provides acoustic gunshot detection and precision-policing solutions to help law enforcement officials and security personnel prevent and reduce gun violence and make communities, campuses and facilities safer.” Public refusal of a database that would do similar work as the Shotspotter, which is indeed active in Washington, D.C., is important because it offers a needed aural critique against institutions of policing and surveillance, even as these systems are praised for ensuring public safety.

Intentional Obscurities

My final sample of how the digital might encourage us to hear Black life is inspired by a conference presentation by the eminent Zandria F. Robinson. In 2018, the annual “PopCon” conference on popular music was themed “Only You and Your Ghost Will Know: Music, Death, and the Afterlife,” encouraging participants to engage in conversations about pop music, death, and the musical ghosts that haunt us. Robinson spoke about Amazing Grace, the 2018 documentary of Aretha Franklin recording her best-selling live album of the same name in 1972, pinpointing a moment when the audio of the album differed from that which was captured on film. Specifically, there is a moment in “Mary, Don’t You Weep” where Franklin, having spun the congregation into a fervor, “calls” Lazarus back from the dead, just as Jesus did in the Gospel of John. The Southern California Community Choir grounds her by vamping, “Mary, don’t you weep,” along with James Cleveland’s percussive piano playing, as she sings to the congregation that they are about to “review the story of two sisters.” When she gets to the height of her account, Franklin, as Jesus, says that “for the benefit of you who don’t believe, I’m gon call him three times,” at which point the members of the congregation begin to audibly shout. She then proceeds to call Lazarus three times, the first two being composed enough to elicit an echo from the choir, the third call transforming into a more otherworldly wail that pushes the congregation and choir into even more intensity. This final call is the one that raises Lazarus, the one that has him “up walking like a natural man.”

Franklin’s calling of Lazarus is not included in the film, and Robinson argued that Franklin, as a witch, as conjure woman, as Jesus, “hoodooed” that moment away from the film because surely she had called someone back from the dead that night, and she could not abide all of her transformative power being on visual display. Although I was well aware of Franklin as a supernatural figure, having just seen the documentary the night before and weeping alongside many others in the theater, I had not considered her using practices of intentional obfuscation to avoid the fetishization and surveillance of cosmology. The digital, in this case film, can act as a mode of communicating with ancestors about what must be obscured or, alternately, shared, told, or called. But through magic or hoodoo or conjuring women or water being spilled onto the recording equipment, audience members simply cannot have, or know, certain things.5 This moment is couched in Franklin’s altogether refusal to release the film several times while she was alive and its eventual completion and release on her death. Even within its cinematic release against her wishes, there are still facets that remain visually unknowable, like the calling of Lazarus. Zora Neale Hurston makes a similar point in Mules and Men, about the common practice of offering one thing to a white anthropologist for them to “play with” while keeping the most sacred elements of Black folklore inside, not for public consumption. What Black people refuse to give the digital has the potential to help Black people to shape and retain the narratives of their own lives. Sometimes the role of this work is not to sharpen every audio file or identify every sound but to make obfuscation possible and emphasize that some things must be held close rather than amplified.6 Holding things close becomes even more important as gruesome instances of state violence are amplified and made viral, and the trauma from looping Black death is dismissed as a necessary part of raising consciousness.

Possibilities

The examples discussed in this chapter provide just a small sampling of the range of possibilities for how Black digital sound studies might encourage the active refusal of an intensely traumatic study of Black life. However, they offer a reading that is perhaps more optimistic than warranted. Instead of using sonic digital practice to amplify Black life and maneuver around algorithmic violence, the digital is also used to count screams, breaths, or shots heard.7 The importance of Black digital sound studies, then, requires us to engage critically, and even skeptically, with the sonic. In addition to this skepticism, digital humanities as a community must reject the notion of research as an authorization of universal access, no matter the time period or research subject. In keeping to these responsibilities, a theorizing of sound through the digital has the potential to amplify the silenced, engage data in healthier ways, and offer language to explore how Black cosmologies might complicate what we presume to be true. I offer these examples as a starting point for thinking about the possible as we embrace the relationship between the sonic and the digital, especially as we incorporate the histories of those that have already done so (and continue to do so) into digital humanities work. McKittrick suggests that “the intellectual project of Black studies . . . provides a deliberate commentary on the ways in which Blackness works against the violence that defines it” (19). This work must honor and bear witness to this violence while complicating silences, refusing algorithmic injustice, and holding space for that which resists the digital in order to reject the repetition of antiblack violence.

Notes

1. From the time I was a child, my grandfather insisted that the organ player showed up on the spot and was inspired to play along because the music was so good. It seemed that improvisational to him.

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2. Deborah Wong’s 2017 analysis of police belt recorders describes how officers, before they murder someone, can become stuck in a harrowing loop of shouted instructions.

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3. My use of “sample” here is influenced by Marisa Parham’s contribution in the 2019 volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities, in which she describes samples as “cultural performances that both crystallize and iterate signals.” I am also drawn to the sample as a fundamental part of hip-hop music and Black music culture more broadly. The sample is a performance, yes, but also operates as a template, a question, a suggestion, or even a palimpsest. These samples are examples meant to be remixed, chopped and screwed, and considered in ways that help us (Black people) hear and sound anew.

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4. Using fireworks may also be a traumatic listening experience for some, rendering the training of a dataset altogether impossible. Here I consider Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, No Explosions: “To enjoy/fireworks/you would have/to have lived/ a different kind/of life.”

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5. At one point during Amazing Grace, water is spilled onto a bundle of wires.

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6. Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum further explore the work of obfuscation in their 2015 book Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. They describe the process as “the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (1). Whether an act of hoodoo or data camouflage, obfuscation works to conceal and delay.

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7. Sonic artist Rachel Devorah’s 2017 piece Overmorrow sonifies data of gun violence in the United States by assigning shootings to musical notation played by various percussion instruments. After three iterations of the project, Devorah has acknowledged that this project centers whiteness and does not currently operate in the service of Black life, even as Black people are disproportionately affected by gun violence in the United States.

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Bibliography

1. “About Shotspotter.” https://www.shotspotter.com/company/.

2. Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.

3. Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015.

4. Crawley, Ashon T. Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 

5. Devorah, Rachel. “Overmorrow.” Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 3 (2017): 173–77, http://racheldevorah.studio/works/overmorrow/.

6. “Ethnic Studies Rise.” https://ethnicrise.github.io/.

7. Franklin, Aretha. Amazing Grace. Directed by Sydney Pollack. Debut at DOC NY Film Festival, November 14, 2018.

8. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008):1–14.

9. Hull, Akasha Gloria, and Barbara Smith. “Introduction: The Politics of Black Women’s Studies.” In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, xvii–xxxii. New York: Feminist Press, 1982.

10. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. First published 1935.

11. Lingold, Mary Caton, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien. Digital Sound Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018.

12. Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider. Berkeley, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984.

13. McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics Black Life.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014):16–28.

14. Milner, Yeshimabeit. “Abolish Big Data.” Medium. July 8, 2019.

15. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

16. Navin Brooks, Andrew. “Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons.” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 6 (2020):25–45.

17. Noble, Safiya. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.

18. Nye, Naomi Shihab. “No Explosions.” In The Tiny Journalist. Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions Ltd., 2019.

19. Ochoa, Ana María Gautier. “Silence.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 183–92. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015.

20. Parham, Marisa. “Sample|Signal|Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

21. Robinson, Zandria. “Sonic Asé: Black Folks Making It So in Life, Death, and Beyond.” Presented at the Museum of Pop Culture Pop Conference, Seattle, Washington, April 12, 2019.

22. Wong, Deborah. “Deadly Soundscapes: Scripts of Lethal Force and Lo-Fi Death.” In Theorizing Sound Writing, edited by Deborah Kapchan, 253–76. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.