Queer noise musicians in the US explore survival, social crisis, and natural decay, creating embodied performances that invite interplay between musician, audience, and environment. Through the lens of auto-destructive performance art, Queer medical practices, and electronic music history, three Queer harsh noise acts from the Northeastern US act as case studies for staging medical, political, and familial trauma as a method to free themselves and the Queer community from institutional silencing. In live performance, both Farrah Faucet and Gyna Bootleg use amplified medical equipment stemming from their chronic disease treatments as embodied musical objects. Pittsburgh duo Niku Daruma explores parental and spousal physical abuse on stage through juxtaposing sections of electronic noise and physical altercations. These physical objects and interpersonal relationships are made central to performance, calling on the witnessing audience to engage in a communal act of transfiguring its power and affect. The act of witnessing is made potent through the do-it-yourself social spheres surrounding these artists, which allow for consensual interactive exploration of traumatic themes including sexual violence, chronic disease, and Queer struggle, and instills a collective language of bodily communication that rejects coercive elements. This research aims to make Queer US noise music a distinct practice, separate from Japanese noise music and British power electronics, through these social factors and performance practices, highlighting ways in which Queer noise performers unsilence personal and collective trauma.

In 2017, the ACLU threatened to sue the city of Chicago, as it was on track to pass a restrictive bill that would severely limit street musicians from performing in the downtown “Loop.” Though the city has vacillated on these regulations, these recent debates are so contentious because they target a group of young, Black drummers from the South Side that self-identity through their unique five-gallon hardware bucket “sound” and a mentorship network that calls on young drummers to make a “positive dollar” with their music: the Chicago Bucket Boys. While many Chicagoans refer to the Bucket Boys as local celebrities and “the face of Chicago,” others reject their connection, describing them as droning “noise,” and instigating grassroots campaigns to make changes to the city’s noise ordinance and mobilize the police on them. Through interviews with Chicago street musicians, audience observations, and historical mappings of noise ordinance enforcement, this project argues that struggles surrounding where the Bucket Boys can spread their liberatory “sound of a positive dollar” are more than just struggles over sound regulation - these are also struggles surrounding who is included in the “image” of the city and who has access to the city’s public spaces. While music scholars are often removed from debates surrounding noise ordinances, this project uses previous work in acoustemology, acoustic territories, and sonic placemaking to demonstrate how music scholars can enter these conversations and promote new ways of imagining city sound regulations that resist weaponization and retain the “public” in “public spaces.”

On July 18, 2022, World Listening Day, Taiwan was awarded the World’s First Quiet Trail Status on the Cuifeng Lake Circular Trai (翠峰湖環湖步道) by Quiet Parks International. In this trail, the quietest measured volume is less than 25 decibels, which is almost lower than the hearing range of the human ear. In Taiwan, it has become increasingly common in recent years to describe the mountain forest environments as “silence,” using these terms to convey the soundscape or the listening experience that brings a sense of immanent peace and healing.

However, defining quietest based on non-human noise and lowest decibel level recorded at a specific moment raises methodological questions, as mountain soundscapes are never truly “silent” in Taiwan. By analyzing the case of the “Quiet Mountain Trails Project” on the Cuifeng Lake Circular Trai, this article asks how “natural silence” become the momentum that constructed the relationship between humans and mountain soundscape. I aim to discuss such “silence” narrative, in fact, set an anthropocentric and American aesthetic standards appeal as environmental ethics for bio-soundscape and listening. Therefore, this article challenges the Western-centric assumption promoted by natural recorders that “the quieter the natural environment, the better” in the context of Taiwan and advocates for embracing all sounds in nature through multiple listening modes.

Miami Florida’s tourist economy has not only shaped its rhythmaculture but made it progressively expensive for locals to access their own cultural spaces; in consequence, since the 2010s, drum circles on the beach have become prevalent spaces where locals gather in co-creative “flow” and sociability. In 2023, the South Pointe Beach drum circle grew into a crowd of hundreds of participants, garnering attention from media, tourists, and the police. This weekly event transformed into a socio-political movement, protesting to change the Miami Beach ordinances that list drumming as a subversive “loud and unnecessary noise.” The city’s attitude towards drumming testifies to the cultural politics that continue to systemically ostracize the drum from public spaces. Moreover, many of the undocumented Latin American participants who initially founded the gathering retreated into silence, leading us to question, what voices are necessary or unnecessary noise? Although the South Pointe Drum circle was shut down in 2023, the tensions caused by issues of class, first amendment rights, and privatization of public space has not dissipated. My ethnographic research allows the voices of the drum circle to speak for themselves, enabling their agency and urgency; furthermore, I draw from critical theory such as Jacques Ranciere and Lauren Berlant, as well as anthropologists such as Igor Cherstitch, Martin Holbraad, and Laura Kunreuther to situate the South Pointe Miami beach drum circle as a space of socio-political dissensus where collective “flow” constructs an urban utopia that is simultaneously as public as it is “off the grid.”