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Having students understand ideas of expansiveness, asymmetry, and non-linearity as central to black cultural expression and critique-even as artists refuse to sacrifice an expressed political commitment to black resistance-begins to suggest ways for students to contemplate the intersection of identity politics with the unexpected, fantastic elements of expression that lie outside of more recent flattened diagnoses of black nationalism."

"krewe coumbite is an archive and remix process conducted by muthi reed. reed gathers and assembles media through sharing, relationship, deconstruction, making, sampling and mixing. Central to their process is the observance of Black sound, rituals and feelings. krewe coumbite is a study in dynamic being-ness (finesse, shape, free form and movement, ontology, ritual, vernacular) that is Blackness. Borrowing from the Black love strategies cultivated by maroons, rastas, social aid and pleasure clubs, mutual aid societies, movement organizers, the Black Arts Movement, Harlem Renaissance, urban rebels/rebellions of the 1960s, Jamaican Sound System, freestyle and hip hop culture of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, krewe coumbite engages local presence and the non conditions of space through occupying publics, interior time, light and sound projections, convergence and soul culture."

Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future's reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing. Our work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.

"Toussaint-Baptiste's current exhibition, Set It Off, addresses affective and relational possibilities of sound through the perspectives of minimalism and a resistance to predetermined representations of Black American experiences by favoring instead abstract visual and sonic expressions of Blackness."

"Three custom guitars, a gong, maracas shaped like large closed fists, and a series of drum-heads ornated with his classic hand and slogans like 'LOOK AT THIS' and "PLEASE WAIT" The gong states the self-explaining text 'GONG'. While crafted with a luthier's precision, the artist's mischievous design-guitars with one string, some fretless-results in unexpected sounds. The black-and-white guitars are connected to small amplifiers. Alongside the instruments, Shrigley will also present a new series of black and white drawings."

"The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners."

"A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity."

"Depending on when one visits Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark, the current exhibition by the visual artist Gary Simmons at Southern Exposure, one will experience two very different, equally worthwhile shows. A visitor attending the show during regular gallery hours on any given day will face a work of installation art: An impressive tower of speakers sits, along with a boxy old television, on a low plywood stage."

"post by Kristin Moriah looks at Du Bois's novel Dark Princess, and explores the relationship between sound and freedom in the text."

"NIC Kay's #blackpeopledancingontheinternet explores ways that Black online communities have engaged in the transcultural exchange of dance, movement, and music, claiming and maneuvering the internet as a space for visible, culturally coded play, political organization, and innovation."

"That color and smell have a sensory connection is long-established, but there's debate about whether associating the smell of strawberries with red or smoke with black is something structured in our brains, based in language, or resulting from experience. A study published this week in the peer-reviewed, open-access PLoS One called "Cross-Cultural Color-Odor Associations" suggests it may be cultural."

"Ellis speaks with a stutter - more specifically, a glottal block - a form of speech dysfluency that creates silent gaps in his speech that he calls "clearings," often without warning and sometimes for prolonged periods of time. For most of his life, these clearings became unintentional performances of improvisation."

"When presented with visual flashes of a black disk and audible beeps, the number of beeps may dictate how many disks you see. Illusion discovered by Ladan Shams, Yukiyasu Kamitani, and Shinsuke Shimojo."

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"Sound Garden is a 16 inch high, 15 foot square platform of wood squares that recreates a section of a gymnasium floor, or a high-finish dance floor. The parquet is framed by a three foot wide planter of white pansies in full bloom. Suspended above the platform, in the manner of a public address system, are four out-sized black speakers. The speakers emit a three-phase, four-track audio component of verbal instructions for dance routines, the bouncing of a basketball on the floor of the gymnasium, tap dancing and the swiping of an eraser on a blackboard. The work thus takes the form of a rather peculiar hybrid structure with visual, auditory and olfactory dimensions."

"After hearing about the murder of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager who was shot to death by George Zimmerman in a gated community in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012, I grappled with the urge to grab my godsons, nephews, cousins, brothers, and husband and never let go. I grappled with the Du Boisian question of the color-line, redressing it to consider "what does it feel like to be not only a problem but a target?" With these thoughts in my mind, I especially grappled with listening to the audio records of the 911 calls documenting the death of Trayvon Martin, just released late Friday March 16thby the Sanford police department."

"Bodyscape is inspired by the body of a dancer as sonic source. The information is taken via biosensors and microphones, which record movements and events generated by the body. In this ecosystem, the dancer produces sounds, mainly inaudible, which are then amplified and send back to the performance space, where the dancer interact with them as biofeedback. The site-specificity of the work relates to the spatial considerations and resonances. Field recordings were collected at the border of Botswana and South Africa. L'épidemie virale en Afrique du Sud, a text from the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, informed the journey. The text describes a virus transforming white persons into black persons. A text about privileges."

"To read Susan Sontag's 2003 essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, with pencil scribbling references to current-day wars is to be expected. Hers is a profound rethinking of the intersection of news, art and contemporary depictions of violence and our memories of them. So, too, could the word "Ferguson" be readily jotted in the margins. Meandering the intersections helps us navigate memory well beyond any of the recent conflagrations between Black citizens and militarized police forces in U.S. cities. "

"Stereomodernism" addresses the life, struggle, triumphs, and deaths of African Americans from 1619 to the present. The mix reinstates the original framing of techno as embodied aural history-and does so from a Black theoretical perspective, as a direct foil to Rainald Goetz's 1998 novel Rave.