Houston’s Slab Scene: DJ Screw, Car Culture, and Chopped and Screwed Hip Hop w/ Langston Collin Wilkins

Slab trunks feature sound systems and visual displays. Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those

Celebrating World Listening Day 2018: Global Acoustic Ecology, and Biosphere Soundscapes of the future w/ Leah Barclay and Teresa Barrozo

On July 18th this year, Teresa Barrozo‘s question — What might the Future sound like? — will be opened to global participation. We bring news of World Listening Day, and speak with Teresa about her intervention. We also hear of data archival developments in acoustic ecology. And we speak with Leah

How Racism Shapes What we Hear: An American History of the Sonic Colour Line w/ Jennifer Stoever

This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white

Secret Soundscapes: Art That Brings the Sounds of Rats and the Biosphere Alive w/ Brian House

This time we talk with a fascinating sound artist and composer Mack met at a recent meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. As his website puts it, “Brian House is an artist who explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His background

The Evolution of Urban Media: Sonic Communication from Caves to the Smart City w/ Shannon Mattern

This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay,

Dead Air: Exploring Silence in Literature, Hurricanes, and Media w/ John Binguet, Rodrigo Toscano, and Chris Cheek

On our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible. We begin with author John Biguenet discussing his book Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015)