Over the bustle of 70,000 attendees, journalists, and exhibitors, musical strains lilt through the hallways and out of conference rooms as Tabletop Role-Playing Game (TTRPGs) fans and creators share brief moments to play games during some of the busiest weekends for TTRPG communities. TTRPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons (1974), create spaces to explore the imagination. To create these stories, players of tabletop roleplaying games draw on their lived experience and knowledge to create their personal imagined worlds. The phrase “all my music is based off my home games” speaks to how my interlocutors, as both musicians and TTRPG players, use music to bridge the social gap between strangers by harnessing a shared understanding of musical ideas. Drawing on definitions of literacy in music studies and using ethnographic methods concerning sonic affect (Garcia-Misprieta, 2020) and phenomenological experience (Turino, 2014), I detail how musical literacy serves as a way to connect strangers at TTRPG tables through play, connect to a crowd during live actual play shows, and as a topic of discussion in musician conversations. I argue that the musical and sonic practice of public TTRPG play provides insight into how and why musical and sonic literacies are deployed and performed in social play and performance. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and ethnographic interviews (2023-2024) conducted at TTRPG fan conventions across the south-eastern and mid-western United States, I work to expand ethnomusicology’s understanding of musical affect and play in primarily non-musician communities.

Mobile, Alabama claims the oldest Mardi Gras tradition in the U.S., often asserting its distinctiveness from other Carnival sites such as New Orleans (Samuel Kinser 1990; Isabel Machado 2023). Yet, Mobile’s Carnival has often lacked explicit cross-Carnival exchanges and its historiography has failed to recognize Carnival's true origins outside of the U.S. This began to change when, in May 2024, African American members of Mardi Gras organizations launched their first Caribbean Carnival, formalized under the Gulf Coast Caribbean Carnival Association (GCCA). This initiative challenges dominant narratives by recognizing Carnival’s Afro-diasporic roots and expanding the festival’s musical landscape beyond New Orleans’ secondline tradition. Featuring soca performers and inviting participants to “play mas,” the GCCA introduces a transnational sonic dimension to Mobile’s Carnival. As a port city, Mobile provides a valuable site for examining South-South cultural flows , connecting the U.S. South, the Gulf South, and the broader Circum-Caribbean. Engaging with scholarship on Caribbean diasporic musical performance in the U.S. (Ray Allen 2019; Alison McLetchie and Daina Nathaniel 2020), I argue that Mobile’s evolving Carnival practices exemplify the sonic interplay between U.S. Southern and Caribbean musical traditions. Given that many Mardi Gras musical forms originate from Caribbean and Latin American traditions, this direct engagement with Caribbean Carnival music highlights the cyclical nature of diasporic musical exchange. By positioning Mobile’s Carnival within a broader transnational framework, this study contributes to ethnomusicology by foregrounding how sound functions as a site of cultural negotiation, identity formation, and diasporic connectivity within the U.S. Carnival landscape.

“At the end of the street, the marching band appears in full regalia!” exclaims Walt Disney on the long play (LP) Walt Disney Takes You to Disneyland as he guides listeners through the soundscapes of Main Street, U.S.A. At the “end of the street,” a march reminiscent of John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever begins to play. Main Street, U.S.A. is Walt Disney’s hyperreal depiction of “a typical American town” set between 1890-1910. This assumed “typicality” makes Disneyland an important site for the construction of an imagined U.S. American cultural identity that is linked to the sounds of marching bands. Intriguingly, the music on the LP does not play in the theme park, yet it serves as a valuable referential marker to the production of a U.S. American identity that transcends Disneyland’s borders. Drawing from double-diegesis (Camp 2017) and pop nostalgia (Dwyer 2015), I argue that Disneyland reifies the marching band sound as a sonic marker of U.S. American identity both within the theme park’s physical space and its manufactured soundscape. Through semiotic and hypertextual analyses, I examine: 1) the sonic relationship between Sousa marches and the original music of the LP that evokes the soundscapes of Main Street, U.S.A. and 2) the role of the marching band in the dissemination of U.S. American identity in and out of Disneyland. This analysis demonstrates the prominent role that Disneyland and its music have had on the intricate production of U.S. American national identity in contemporary culture.