The practice of sampling is a pivotal cornerstone in Black sonic life. While best known as a part of hip-hop’s repurposing of funk, disco, and soul music, sampling draws on rich histories and genealogies, carrying the potential to help us imagine new worlds. In this paper, I outline a framework of sampling with critical intention, a mode of sampling that prioritizes listening to Black life ethically and intentionally. Drawing on soundscape compositions made from collections at the American Folklife Center within the Library of Congress, I argue that activating a practice of sampling with critical intention disrupts a violent mishearing of Black people. Specifically, I engage a collection called “Voices Remembering Slavery” that features audio interviews from 22 formerly enslaved Black people in the United States. By sampling these interviews, I have created soundscape compositions from the collection, offering interventions that amplify the stories being told while bearing witness to the violence that surrounds them. With the rise of AI, deepfakes, misinformation, and the continued advancement in the manipulation of audio and video, this project offers sampling as a way to address contemporary and futuristic questions about what it means to engage archival sounds and silences. These rapid changes in technological possibility are directly harmful to Black people because of the continued manipulation of Black sounds and voices without consent. This paper works towards an intentional fabulation of the fullness of Black sonic life, engaging past collections to disrupt the future mishearing of Black people.

This paper foregrounds scale as a critical keyword for Black sound studies, illuminating the sonic fluidity and relationality of Blackness and Black life through various spatial formations. I introduce “Roots and Routes,” a sound installation that narrates multiple scenes of Black life in the Chicago Metropolitan Area known colloquially as Chicagoland, highlighting how Black Chicagolanders reproduce an urban-regional identity through the sounds of their everyday lives. As a geographic concept, scale denotes nested hierarchies; the level upon which we observe social phenomena and how it is represented geographically; as a facilitator of racial capitalism and how it transforms our environments; and as the in-between process from which a space becomes a place or political economic unit. Sonically, scale also has a variety of definitions, which, for this paper, tends to an arrangement of tones that form an identifiable sonic identity. I weave together geography and sound or what I term “geosonicology” to consider how scale illustrates the complexities of Black sonic life and its orientation to a medley of spaces that function as racialized soundmarks recognized by Black people in places marked as Black through the sonic racialization of urban-regional space. Black folks utilize geographic and sonic scale to take up space through sound and as a necessary component to Black placemaking that makes a place feel and sound Black. I argue for scale as a central concept in Black sound studies that reflects how the sonic interconnections of Black life function as both root and route across Black lifeworlds.

Timbral Tidepools and Tales of The Tidewater Trio is a listening session considering the craft of “timbre” and “orchestration” in the record production of N.E.R.D and The Neptunes. Each track from the fourth mixtape chapter of The Tidewater Trio Project (TTP) exists as a distinct sonic biome, a space where timbre and orchestration shape how histories are heard. The experience unfolds through interconnected narratives, tracing Southern Hip-hop’s Afro-Filipino musical connections, the resonance of production choices, and the way sampling operates as sonic fictive citation. In this listening session, I share sonic scenes and acts of listening to Black American and Filipino American diasporic life in Southeast Virginia. Telling tales of the Alternative Hip-hop band N.E.R.D and the production duo The Neptunes, I reveal a sonic lineage of Afro-Southeast Asian interracial musical connections while honoring ethnomusicological interventions in Black sound studies. Timbral Tidepools and Tales of the Tidewater Trio is an ethnomusicological encounter where record production is a method of inquiry, timbre is an archive, and orchestration becomes a historiographical tool. Moving through these sonic ecosystems, listeners are invited to immerse themselves, hear the histories embedded in sound, and consider where the currents of timbre may lead next.