Introduction

Listening

Intentional methods of listening offer insights beyond text that I find critical in sound studies and other areas of ethnomusicology and expressive culture. Regina Bendix calls for an ethnography of listening in folklore that does more to consider “the more intimate, affective linkage between burgeoning scholars and their disciplinary subject” by way of ethnographic listening (2000, 34). Engagement with sound, she continues, helps researchers “to understand the transitions between the individual, cultural, and transcultural dimensions” of expressive culture (41). This, she argues, will facilitate insights beyond what can be textually notated.

Along similar lines, Deborah Kapchan considers the politics and ethics of acts of intentional listening and witnessing as processes of knowledge transmission that lead to ethnographers “attuning… to the materiality of the in-between, to the place of instability, to moment upon moment of openness” (2017, 288). Wong thinks through the idea of witnessing differently, framing it as “listening without the need to get something from it; spectating as a listening act with no acquisitive interest (the opposite of collecting, taking, or owning); witnessing as a way to decolonize ethnography” (2021, 273). This goes hand in hand with D. Soyini Madison’s (2020) emphasis on a non-judgmental, generous listening as one key to ethical critical ethnography.

Of particular importance to me in studying audio performances as alternate means of expressing localness and community is Alexandra Vazquez’s theorization of listening in detail. Vazquez writes about details as “those fugitive and essential living components that contribute, in very specific ways, to an event and its aftermath. Details might be interruptions that catch your ear, musical tics that stubbornly refuse to go away. They are things you might first dismiss as idiosyncrasies. They are specific choices made by musicians and performers and come in an infinite number of forms” (2013, 19). Listening in detail is an imaginative process, aiming not to find a singular correct meaning of a performance but to suggest alternate interpretive possibilities informed by the listener’s experiences. Attending to these moments allows for new ways to decenter dominant narratives. Throughout this dissertation, I analyze sonic details of broadcasts that are meaningful to me. They may or may not hold the same significance for other listeners. I nonetheless find them worthwhile to examine because of what I can glean from them about complexities and relations inherent to the radioscape.