Sound studies has only rarely engaged with metaphysics of sound beyond Western ontologies. This paper aims to outline an ethnotheory of sound in the cosmology of the Yorùbá people of West Africa. We suggest that sound acts as a sacred medium in which humans, non-human nature, divinities, and ancestors are mutually immersed, even when they dwell in otherwise separate realms. We examine how Yorùbá spiritual practice depends on the resonations of voices, musical instruments, and sounding ritual implements — artfully and authoritatively executed and consecrated with the spiritual force of efficacy (àṣẹ) to vibrate through this sacred medium — to enact communication and action in the human and spiritual realms. Drawing on references to sound in Yorùbá divination literature (Odù Ifá) and proverbs, Western and Yorùbá scholarship, and our participant-observation in the use of musical and non-musical sound in Yorùbá spiritual practice, we aim to demonstrate the complexity of Yorùbá theories of sound in three traditional registers: drums and bells, vocal incantations and imprecations, and the non-musical sound of Ifá implements during divination. We conclude with use of traditional sound cosmology in the writings on sound by the composer and intellectual Fẹlá Ṣówándé, as a road less traveled for sound studies in comparison with the work of Ṣówándé's near-contemporary Murray Schafer. Beyond the specific Yorùbá case, we hope to offer a model of collaborative intercultural research that takes seriously a non-Western knowledge system as a philosophical tradition.

Sound studies have increasingly turned to multisensorial thinking and “sensory constellations,” yet these conversations remain largely anchored in Western ontology. Building on the premise that Yorùbá spiritual practice depends on sound as a sacred medium through which humans, divinities, and ancestors communicate across otherwise separate realms, this paper examines how the criollo (creolized) practice of Ifá divination in Cuba, particularly in the provinces of La Habana and Matanzas, elaborates a complex theory of hearing, listening, and musical practice. Drawing on the Dice Ifá, the most widely circulated Afro-Cuban treatise of the Ifá literary corpus, and conversations with divination priests in Havana, I trace three dimensions of sound within oracular figures. First, I show how the corpus establishes hearing as foundational among the five senses and prescribes listening as the operative capacity of the divination priest, one who must first listen, then interpret, then apply. Second, I explore how hearing constitutes an ethical virtue tied to moral wealth, and consider the implications of non-listening, adapted in Afro-Cuban practice to address the Cuban state’s refusal to heed Afro-Cuban demands for social inclusion. Third, I examine the cosmological foundations of music: a deity’s pact with four Yorùbá gods of music, and a narrative in which a flautist’s rejection and transatlantic displacement dramatize a community’s failure to recognize musical and spiritual counsel. The paper proposes that Afro-Cuban Ifá oral literature constitutes an operative acoustemology, a way of knowing and being through sound in which listening and its refusal carry ethical, political, and historical force.

Cuban migration has been rising over the last several years. Political influences, both foreign and domestic, create a difficult situation for Cubans looking to leave the island. With many countries requiring special visas for Cuban nationals, Cuban musicians are among those who have a higher probability of leaving. International touring circuits have become stop off points with entire ensembles at a time defecting and legally or illegally immigrating. Mexico City has become one of the largest hub Cubans abroad, especially for Cuban folklorists. Afro-Cuban Santería ritual specialists–diviners, priests, drummers, singers, and dancers–have been received by the Mexican Santería community. Drawing on my field work in Mexico with Cuban immigrant communities of omó alañá (term in Santería to refer to those initiated into the cult of the drum, literally: child of the spirit of the drum), I ask: What is the role of Santería religious communities in the immigration process for these Cuban Immigrants in Mexico? How do these networks of Spiritual kinship both undermine and reinforce Mexican nationalist narratives about illegal immigration, blackness, and the “occult”? How do religious drumming ceremonies become sites of negotiation across race, nation, ones that simultaneously include and exclude members of shared spiritual kinship networks?

Among innumerable constellations of "sacred arts" traditions in the historical Afro-Atlantic, orisha music has become an especially prominent wellspring of inspiration for devotees, scholars, and artists alike. With roots in West Africa and iconic diasporas in the Americas, orisha songs have become a sort of Afro-centric lingua franca whose global prominence is especially notable, in light of both its prior centuries worth of transnational and multilingual history and its preoccupation with questions of origins, antecedents, and authenticity. This paper reflects on some of the novel, manifold ways that orisha music traditions have been mediated by a transformative century's worth of multimedia technology. In archives ranging from prestigious

institutions to often-motley, relatively-discreet, and sometimes-illicit private collections, the provenance of historical recordings of orisha music takes on a heightened significance. What do we make of the historically-novel repetition, performance, disembodied abstraction, and objectification that is necessarily inherent in the "documentary recording" of a ritual (musical) act? How do we make sense of the stability and change in a liturgical tradition saturated by recent, ever-changing audiovisual technologies? Three case studies illustrate diverse ways that historical recordings of orisha music, in both sacred and secular contexts, encompass an array of functions (intentional and otherwise). Taken together, the case studies become object lessons in the complex, fluid movements of Afro-Atlantic culture, ostensibly in real-time, between secular and ritual spaces, and in and out of collective memory.