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Most of the Yiddish songs we know today were created in the first half of the 20th century and distributed through commercial channels such as sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, records and CDs, theater stages, and more recently through songbooks produced in educational settings around the world. Our discussion focuses on lesser-known songs – Eastern Yiddish musical folklore, which emerged over a period of approximately four hundred years preceding the formation of the “popular” repertoire. Although we lack transcriptions of melodies or lyrics from before the end of the 19th century, a comparative study of documentation collected from then until the middle of the 20th century reveals that older layers of this musical-poetic creativity had been preserved over long periods of time. I refer to this older repertoire as the "musical pripetshik." Similar to the traditional combined home-heat-generating cooking oven known as the pripetshik, this old song repertoire was an integral part of Jewish culture, evolving in meaning and function over time. While for many, the image of the pripetshik corresponds to the nostalgic song by Mark Varshavski of 1901, this lecture will explore the earlier history of this and other poetic and musical images to offer an appreciation of their significance. This lecture originally took place on July 23, 2024. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Military Entertainment Complex: Chimurenga Afrosonic Making of Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Mhoze Chikowero is the story of the making of post-independence Zimbabwe from the sounds and songs born of the country’s armed liberation wars, waged against British Rhodesian white settler rule since the 1890s. The war from 1896 through the twentieth century to resist the initial colonization, as well as the one waged to reclaim land from the colonial farmers in the 2000s, is known as Chimurenga, and the music it produced is thus called Chimurenga music. The sounds and music were Afrosonic—that is, deeply grounded in the ideology of the 1960s–70s war, spawning the cultural liberation of a people whose self-expression the colonial system had criminalized and oppressed for close to a century. The living labs of the liberation war, Chimurenga, powered not just military but also cultural rearmament, thereby producing cultural blueprints for a confident, regenerative public consciousness and expressiveness as independence. The open-access title captures the sounds of self-liberation, framing a state of militant audibility in public cultural expressiveness, public policy propagation, and contestation. It invites readers to imagine, see, hear, and feel self-liberation war redeployed as popular entertainment in the service of state making. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia. The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution, and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.” These inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities. Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades. Privileging the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a decolonizing state. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Stacey Copeland, Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage and Identity at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, joins Jana Byars to talk about⁠ Lavender Sounds: From Lesbian Radio to Queer Feminist Soundwork⁠ (University of Michigan Press, 2026) delves into lesbian radio history and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork—a unique blend of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the heart of the book lies a powerful idea: sound is not just heard but felt, connecting generations through shared voices and struggles. In conversation with award-winning and cutting-edge queer and feminist podcast producers from across Canada and the U.S., Lavender Sounds invites us to turn a feminist embodied ear to the past to uncover the ways gender, race, and sexual orientations are embedded in our everyday media listening practices. From pioneering Canadian radio shows like Vancouver's The Lesbian Show and Montreal's Dykes on Mykes to today's queer chumcasts and audio documentary, Lavender Sounds is a journey through auditory landscapes where joy, protest, intimacy, and identity intersect. This book opens a vibrant conversation about how radio and podcasting are vital tools for marginalized communities to connect, create, and claim space in the media world. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) brings together insights from religion, anthropology, sound, and migration studies to explore the sonic traces of untouchability and forced migration across the Bay of Bengal. Based on an immersive, multi-sited ethnography with Matua devotees—a low-caste, Bengali-speaking Dalit religious community fragmented by Partition, war, and postcolonial displacement—the book explores how sound sustains identity across fractured geographies. Using richly detailed descriptions, the book follows traveling archives of song, story, and ritual performance through West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andaman Islands. These sonic practices—congregational singing, drumming, and itinerant storytelling—forge belonging beyond nation-states, connecting the Matua's fifty million members across borders and seas. In a world dominated by visual culture, Communities of Sound centers listening as a mode of knowledge and care, revealing how sound shapes our sense of self and cosmos. More than scriptures or doctrine, it is sound—entangled with authority and power—that binds this transregional Dalit movement and animates its collective action. The book is generously illustrated and references an online companion with video and audio examples. Author bio: Carola E. Lorea is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Tübingen, at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she leads the ERC-funded project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia. She is the author of Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016), and editor with Rosalind Hackett of Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power (2024). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How the sound of the female playback voice impacts Bollywood's cultural, musical, and cinematic environment. Drawing on sound studies and performance theory, scholar Shikha Jhingan explores the discursive nature of the female playback voice in Bombay film songs in The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology (Wayne State UP, 2025). Mapping the production, circulation, and reception of the voices of singing stars—notably Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle—Jhingan situates the singing voice as a cinematic object with limitless possibilities of distribution and dispersal. She employs the perspectives of a diverse range of listeners across a vast media landscape to illustrate how the affective charge of the female playback voice, combined with developments in audio technology, has led to a gradual expansion of opportunities for women in film, popular music, and media and audio production. With nuanced exploration of the way the human voice becomes intertwined with devices such as the microphone, radio, cassettes, and digital technologies, Jhingan argues for the sonic excess of the female voice beyond the narrative and visual. The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema is an authoritative addition to the field of sound studies with implications for gender studies, performance studies, and cinema studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, "La Divina Assoluta," remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent - genius in the ring with catastrophe. Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently, as the lifeblood for a Callas hologram. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability - the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument. Singing bodies are working bodies, enacting an intimate and complex form of artistic labor and cultural signification. Using one of Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias (Bloomsbury, 2021) envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramovic, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum. Ginger Dellenbaugh is a musician and historian who has written and lectured on music and politics, vernacular notation systems, and the cultural history of the voice. A trained opera singer, she performed for over a decade in Europe and the United States. Ginger is currently a lecturer at The New School in New York, USA and completing a PhD in musicology at Yale University, USA. She lives in New York City and Vienna, Austria. Ginger Dellenbaugh’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily lives has been comparatively gradual – so gradual, crucially, that it is easy to forget just how much we take it for granted. As explored in Microphone (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Ralph Jones, every phone has a microphone. Every laptop has a microphone. We are surrounded by microphones. The microphone wields enormous power. But when we're 'on mic' we aren't just powerful, we're vulnerable. Microphones can destroy careers as quickly as make them. The microphone is inextricable from our need to be heard. This book takes a curious, always humorous look at this object as a metaphor for power and how the fulfillment of our desire to be heard has created a multi-headed beast we are still learning how to tame. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part, through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority Black population. Analyzing the work of Afro-Caribbean artists that catalog and critique sonic surveillance, the book questions the ways that quiet gets produced both as a regulatory ideal of racial, gender, sexual, national, and civilizational belonging and as a universal object of desire. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The YIVO Sound Archive houses over 20,000 recordings (including 78, 45, and 33rpm discs, open-reel and cassette tapes, piano rolls, and compact discs and other digital formats) as well as various artifacts related to sound recordings. It is is one of the most extensive and frequently consulted Jewish music collections in the world, embracing Yiddish and Hebrew folk, pop and theater music, Holocaust songs, liturgical, choral and instrumental compositions and, of course, klezmer music, as well as spoken word, oral histories, interviews, and radio programs. In addition to serving researchers, the Sound Archive maintains a special link to the Yiddish cultural world, and has close relationships with many musicians who utilize its resources in creating their art. It serves anyone seeking to include Yiddish music in their life or work, including teachers, journalists, camp counselors, and radio producers, among others. Join us for a fascinating insider discussion of the history of the YIVO Sound Archive, important areas of its collections, projects it has facilitated, and other stories of the past 40 years. Moderated by Hankus Netsky, this event will, for the very first time, bring together the founder of YIVO's Sound Archive, Henry Sapoznik, current YIVO Sound Archivists Lorin Sklamberg and Eléonore Biezunski, and former YIVO Sound Archivist Jenny Romaine. Learn more about the YIVO Sound Archive: https://www.yivo.org/Sound This panel discussion originally took place on September 13, 2022. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana's Drum Wars (Duke UP, 2025) Mariam Goshadze traces the history of noise regulation in Accra, Ghana, showing how the 1990s and 2000s conflicts between the Ga people and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches during the annual city-wide ban on drumming illuminates the inner workings of Ghanaian secularity and the importance of "traditional religions" to African urbanity. Goshadze shows how the drumming ban represents a reversal of the top-down model of noise regulation and illuminates the reality of Ghanaian secularity, in which the state unofficially collaborates with indigenous religious authorities to control sound. In so doing, Goshadze counters the tendency to push African “traditional religions” to the margins. The author, Mariam Goshadze, is an Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion at Leipzig University. The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and special guest host, Melanie Kiechle (Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech), chat with radio producers Chris Hoff and and Sam Harnett about their sound production project, The World According to Sound. Hoff and Harnett came to Virginia Tech to put on their octophonic sound show, Ways of Knowing. We recorded this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things in Virginia Tech's Athenaeum, and the conversation includes thoughts and questions from a live audience that gathered there. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Deirdre Loughridge & Dr. Thomas Patteson is a guided tour through centuries of instruments that never existed. From ancient myths to futuristic media, these imagined devices appear in literature, theory, video games and art, at times echoing real instruments, other times pushing far beyond the bounds of technology. This book presents a wide-ranging collection of such creations, showing how they reflect changing ideas about sound, invention and the limits of the possible. At once a cultural history and a study of creative thought, it uncovers unexpected links between music, design and the human urge to make meaning through sound. These are not just fictional artefacts – they are windows into what music might mean, even when it cannot be played. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the Greco-Roman world, gods were known to tame soundscapes, or acoustic landscapes. Zeus, Apollo, Orpheus, and other Classical deities demonstrated their power by bringing order to chaotic sound worlds, replacing cacophony with harmony. In late antiquity, Christians took up this archetype and applied it to Jesus. For many early Christians, the advent of Christ resembled the modern phenomenon of a musical key change, but on a grand scale: Jesus initiated a recalibration of the cosmic soundscape, ushering in a new world. However, according to many Christians in late antiquity, this universal key change was not yet complete. Late ancient Christians believed that they could participate in the ongoing sonic work of Christ by Christianizing the acoustic landscapes of the world. In Sounds for a New World: The Christianizing Soundscapes of Late Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2026), Dr. Philip Abbott explores how late ancient Christians envisioned themselves as participants in the worldwide retuning effort, harmonizing the Classical world to the new Christian reality. Rejecting the sounds of traditional Greco-Roman and Persian cultures, Christians advocated a variety of sonic practices to realize their grand retuning endeavor, including shouting, singing, silent meditation, chanting, and even belching. From the Latin West to the Syriac East, late ancient Christians formed a polyphonous chorus of diverse voices all joining in the great harmonizing work of Jesus as they Christianized the soundscapes of the world. For years, scholars have noted the monumental changes that took place in early Christianity during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. But Dr. Abbott turns our attention to an unexplored aspect of this transitional moment, arguing that it was not simply a political or religious revolution - it was a revolution of the senses. Central to this sensorial transformation was sound. As Christianity gained imperial power in the fourth century, Christians began the process of re-tuning the world for Christ. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In an era dominated by visual information, what can the sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmospheres uncover new dimensions to states of emergency and their implications for collective life? In Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (U California Press, 2025), Christina Schwenkel examines the use of sound in COVID-19 response efforts in urban Vietnam. Based on “soundwork” conducted in Hanoi in 2020 during the pandemic’s first year, she shows how acoustic technologies played a pivotal yet overlooked role in state efforts to achieve record-low infection rates worldwide. Across lived experiences of quarantine, lockdown, and spatial distancing, Schwenkel explores sound-based interventions to curb virus transmission, and the public’s response to these auditory measures. From instant messaging alerts to public health videos and neighborhood loudspeakers, sonic governance sought to transform urban sounds and listening practices to mobilize action, drawing people into networks of care and control. As anthropology stands at a crossroads, Sonic Socialism makes the compelling case for the value of sensory autoethnography in reimagining a more careful and caring ethnographic practice in a post-pandemic world. Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She currently serves on the Editorial Committee of University of California Press and is Vice Chair of the AAS Publications Editorial Board. Her research examines the material legacies of infrastructural warfare in urban Vietnam and the Cold War circulations of people, objects, design technologies, and architectural practices among socialist-allied countries in its wake. She is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana UP, 2009) and the award-winning Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020), which together explore the material practices through which people remember and rebuild in the aftermath of empire. Her most recent book, a sensory autoethnography entitled Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (UC Press, 2025), extends her work on urban disaster and decay to encompass media infrastructures and the anthropology of sound. Sonic Socialism is available in open-access format via Luminos. She can be reached via her personal website: https://christinaschwenkel.com. Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on modern Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at [email protected]. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.