Every afternoon from March 1 to 19, a barrage of fireworks fills the plaza outside the City Hall of València, Spain, with cloudbursts of colorful smoke and a cacophony of thunderous blasts. This pyrotechnic display, the mascletà, is named for the firecrackers (masclets) that bring it to life. Because it happens at midday, creative manipulation of explosive sound takes precedence over visual appeal and becomes the determining factor of a successful mascletà. The mascletà is a defining feature of the Valencian soundscape, cultivating and communicating sonic cultural identification for members of the Valencian Community. More than merely an ephemeral component of this sonic identity, the mascletà’s sociocultural valences also manifest in the built environment that supports its continued vitality. The architects of recent renovations to City Hall Plaza even assured that the trees now populating the square would not ‘disrupt’ the annual display. Despite its fleeting nature, then, the mascletà continues to influence València’s residents and visitors through and beyond its own sonic articulation. As I explore in this paper, this staying power in a collective aural memory allows the mascletà to reproduce the archive of beliefs, behaviors, and feelings that inform it. Although the rhythms and timbres of individual mascletaes differ, as an essential component of València’s “sound space” (Llop i Bayo 2004), the mascletà develops an aural–tactile poetics that draws listeners closer through repeated resoundings (Chávez 2017). The mascletà reverberates within and between its listeners to generate a deeply felt sense of sonic belonging through explosive noise.

In this paper, I grapple with the ongoing influence of college marching and pep bands’ military legacy through an examination of the “battle of the bands” as an event during which rival bands trade off playing repertoire, assigning victory to whoever plays last without repeating songs. Although these events structure themselves around the language of a military skirmish, they also produce a space of shared intimacy between rival groups, during which competing bands must be in physical and sonic proximity to each other and listen attentively to the other group to extend the battle through strategic song selection. Engaging with the annual Davis Picnic Day Battle of the Bands as a participant-observer, I argue that these battles are demonstrative of college bands’ resistance to their militaristic legacy and their attempts to subvert what Elizabeth Freeman calls chrononormativity, or the “use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (2010). In this eight-hour marathon of music shared between seven bands from universities across California, the battle framework dissolves into a collaborative and playful diversion into queer time through acts of liberationist collectivity–such as one band’s hour-long solo section open to all participants regardless of their institution or instrument. This work contributes to a burgeoning interest in the complex community-building effects of wind bands, marching bands, and drum and bugle corps (Huxtable 2022, Jorge 2022, Wells 2022, Green 2023). This re-characterization of battles of the bands sheds light on one such community’s aspirations to reckon with the band’s military legacy.

League of Legends, the world’s largest e-sport, has an extensive musical ecosystem that includes products ranging from collaborations with high-profile artists (such as Lil Nas X and Imagine Dragons) to records and concerts produced by an in-house music studio. And yet, even with music videos garnering millions of views and sold-out concerts in the world’s largest stadiums, the most iconic sound of League e-sports derives from a dubstep song found in the deep corners of a 2000s pay-to-use online music library. “Silver Scrapes,” first used as filler music during the 2012 League world championships, has grown in the decade since into the most iconic sound in e-sports; “Silver Scrapes” has come to refer to both a specific moment of heightened competitiveness and the singing and headbanging of thousands of fans that often accompanies it. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at professional League e-sports tournaments, both regional and international, as well as in online e-sports fandom communities, I argue that “Silver Scrapes” has become a communal performance ritual that primarily functions to produce an affect of liveness. In doing so, I examine the communalism arising from relations between bodies and sound at live events and how it is transposed into a nebulous quality of “liveness” upon which e-sports philosophically and economically depend. “Silver Scrapes,” despite its humble origins, helps elucidate the historical trajectory of e-sports, the place of sound and the body in highly technologically-mediated environments, and the ethically complex labor of producing liveness.

Live music events have long been associated with furthering collective values and providing spaces for individuals to elevate other aspects of their identities (Cudny 2014; Turino 2008). This is especially true in participatory musical engagement, which is a democratic approach to entertainment that lends to deeper listening and removes hierarchical expectations associated with artist, audience, and other roles in musical performance spaces (Feld 2012; Holt 2020; Rice 2010). This reality was especially observable during two participatory performances during the 2021 iteration of Tremor, a boutique alternative music festival occurring in São Miguel, the largest of nine islands in the Portuguese autonomous region of the Azores in the North Atlantic Ocean. The communal gathering spaces fostered by Tremor in natural and humanmade environments throughout the island challenged existing uses of landscapes and city space, often filling them with spontaneous sonic improvisation from a multigenerational and multinational audience. I posit that participatory music performances with recycled objects for instrumentation provide spaces for the democratization of engagement through generative play, employing the elements of surprise, collaboration, and fluidity for increased participant involvement and satisfaction. I will support this assertion using interviews and observations from my fieldwork in the region alongside the phenomenological analysis of two musical performances. Beyond considering the title of electronic dance music (EDM), I navigate the sounds produced through their delivery of tactile play to communicate noise, the transformation of material knowledge, and diverse understandings of cooperative presence.