Sound Smeared Across the Page: Opacity and Black Aesthetic Creation

• In Event: Futuring Scholarly Expression Through Sound, Sound Design, and Music: A Listening Session with Liner Notes

Abstract

This presentation generates from a yearlong collaborative inquiry project exploring how Black and Indigenous creative collectives sustain themselves over time. As the facilitators of this research project, we relied upon our intuitive artistic practices to feel our way through its arcs, pivots, and joys: Ruth Nicole – a poet, playwright, SOLHOT visionary, and performer; Emery – a beatmaker, sound designer, and DJ/turntablist. From this project came a scholarly audio paper (Petchauer & Brown, 2023), as well as ritual performance scripts, bead work, a shared sonic archive, and more – assembled into a digital ensemble (Forms of Freedom, 2023). In this presentation, we address (and make audible by playing examples) how Black aesthetic creations across this project oscillate between clarity and opacity (i.e., a lack of transparency). Guided by McKittrick (2021), we address how this oscillation is not a representation in need of resolution but rather sparks the rigor and wonder of curiosity.

Authors

• Ruth Nicole Brown, Michigan State University

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Teachers College, Columbia University