In the past two decades, music scholars have explored the relationship between the human body and sound reproduction, analyzing the ways in which sound recording technologies shape ways of listening, singing, and speaking (Sterne 2003, Ochoa Gautier 2014), how they transform the relationship of the living to the dead (Stanyek and Piekut 2010), as well as how sound reproduction fosters appropriate rules of kinship behavior (Moreno 2019, Steingo 2019) and the reproduction of racialized social relations (Waltham-Smith 2021, Williams 2021). Studies such as these comprise an emerging disciplinary turn that asks how sound recording intersects with and transforms human bodies. However, this scholarship tends to privilege either twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound recording technologies or a form of “thing power,” that is, the circulation of print, instruments or media forms and the building of institutions and monuments.

My dissertation Embodied Memory: Reconfiguring Reproducibility in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Musical Performance instead argues for the centrality of embodied musical practices in cultural transmission by centering on performance, dance, rhythm, and oral histories of the Black Atlantic. The 1808 transfer of the Portuguese court to the colonial capital of Rio de Janeiro made Brazil a productive site for the study of musical and racial knowledges because it brought about what we might call a “metropolitan reversal.” From 1808, Brazil became a unique case in modern history insofar as the governance of a European empire took place from its colony and as an imperial bourgeoisie aspiring to liberal ideals lived directly alongside the chattel slave population. This setting suggests an inseparability of the lives and practices of the white imperial population and African and Afro-Brazilian men and women, the musics that took place in festive gatherings at slave quarters and in streets as well as song and dance performances in concert halls, songs that circulated through word of mouth, embodied performance, and bourgeois song collections.

I begin by interpolating the cultural labor of Afro-Brazilian musicians into our image of the social to foreground their agency in reproducing European musical canons. The dissertation’s central chapters discuss how portrayals of interracial relations in Luso-Brazilian dance-songs congealed representations of Black male and female bodies: in repeatedly manifesting a set of social relations, nineteenth-century dance-songs could at once enable the reproduction of racial violence and offer possibilities for the subversion of racial archetypes. I proceed to examine Luso-Afro-Brazilian dance-songs as “contagious” musics with “infectious” rhythms, centuries-old metaphors marshalled by white elites to refer to alluring African diasporic musics and dances that reproduced with extreme rapidity. This section of the dissertation contributes to the dissertation’s thesis by exploring the phenomena of contagion and virality long before the advent of viral media enabled by the Internet (see Harper 2019). Lastly, I turn to a present-day performance to imagine a palimpsestual music history that pays attention to a multiplicity of recurring events and repurposed previous iterations in the service of canonization and public memory.

Embodied Memory argues for the centrality of embodied performance in processes of social and cultural reproduction–over and above privileging twentieth-century sound reproduction technologies and material culture more broadly, ultimately showing that musical practice and performance can place in question the idea that Black Atlantic culture is inseparable from forms of cultural annihilation and social death.

This dissertation argues that a cinematic approach to music recording developed during the 1950s, modeling the recording process of movie producers in post-production studios. This approach to recorded sound constructed an imaginary listener consisting of a blank perceptual space, whose sonic-auditory experience could be controlled through electroacoustic devices. This history provides an audiovisual genealogy for electroacoustic sound that challenges histories of recording that have privileged Thomas Edison’s 1877 phonograph and the recording industry it generated. It is elucidated through a consideration of the use of electroacoustic technologies for music that centered in Hollywood and drew upon sound recording practices from the movie industry. This consideration is undertaken through research in three technologies that underwent significant development in the 1950s: the recording studio, the mixing board, and the synthesizer. The 1956 Capitol Records Studio in Hollywood was the first purpose-built recording studio to be modelled on sound stages from the neighboring film lots. The mixing board was the paradigmatic tool of the recording studio, a central interface from which to direct and shape sound. Finally, the electronic synthesizer offered the potential for total control over sonic timbre, as can be seen in the use of the Trautonium in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Together, these histories advance an understanding of recorded sound that de-centers the idea of reproduction, and emphasizes instead twentieth-century cybernetic ideals of influence, and, ultimately, control, through the recorded medium of sound.

Aerosol particles present in the atmosphere influence climate through their interactions with light and their effect on cloud formation, and negatively impact air quality with significant health implications. In the atmosphere, aerosol particles can undergo transformations through an array of processes, including evaporation and condensation of semi-volatile compounds, oxidation initiated by heterogeneous reactions, and photochemistry initiated by solar illumination. The evolution of particle composition influences its physical and optical properties, which need to be understood to fully assess their role in the environment. To study the physical and optical properties of aerosol particles, a linear quadrupole electrodynamic balance (LQ-EDB) was developed and used to levitate single aerosol particles using electric fields. This method allows for contactless probing of particle properties in controlled conditions that mimic the natural environment. To probe the size and optical properties of the particle, a broadband light source was integrated with the LQ-EDB to illuminate the particle, giving rise to morphology dependent resonances (MDRs) that were sampled in a back-scattered geometry with a spectrometer. The wavelength of the MDR’s was used to determine the droplet size, refractive index, and wavelength-dispersion parameters via Mie theory. These methods were initially benchmarked in measurements of the evaporation rates of semi-volatile organic particles and the refractive index of aqueous salt particles. These measurements identified the facility of the methods in exploring the optical properties of aerosol that regulate their interactions with incoming solar radiation. In general, aerosol particles in the atmosphere have a cooling effect due to the scattering of incoming solar radiation. However, particles containing light absorbing species contribute to a warming effect. Using the LQ-EDB, we explored the physical and optical properties of aerosol particles containing light absorbing brown carbon (BrC) chromophores, such as those generated by wildfires and biomass burning. We report the optical properties, hygroscopic growth, and phase behavior as a function of relative humidity for a surrogate BrC particle containing 4-nitrocatechol and ammonium sulfate, revealing complex phase behavior that has implications for the optical properties and chemical reactivity of BrC aerosol. Subsequently, a new LQ-EDB was developed that incorporated heating elements to study the vapor pressures and influence of phase state on the rate of evaporation of a series of linear dicarboxylic acids from 293 to 350 K. These measurements provide clear evidence that phase state, either crystalline or amorphous, is a controlling factor in the rate of evaporation and contribute to our broader understanding of liquid-vapor partitioning in organic aerosol, organic solvents, fuel mixtures, and semi-volatile household products.

Aerosol particles are ubiquitous in the Earth’s atmosphere and play an important role in climate, air quality and health. The chemical composition of aerosol particles is complex and primarily associated with their source of origin. Once in the atmosphere, the composition is continuously evolving as a result of photochemical and heterogeneous chemical reactions. Consequently, composition-dependent properties that define the physical state and optical properties are also continuously changing, with important consequences for the dynamics and impacts of aerosols in the atmosphere. Laboratory-based methods have allowed an extensive exploration of the microphysical properties and chemical transformations of atmospheric aerosols. Single particle levitation methods are used to measure the microphysical properties of particles and connect with their evolving chemical composition. Properties such as size, hygroscopicity, phase morphology, and composition can be precisely measured by coupling levitation methods with analytical tools, such as mass spectrometry.

This dissertation describes the development of a new experimental platform connecting a linear quadrupole electrodynamic balance (LQ-EDB) with mass spectrometry (MS) that is capable of interrogating single levitated particles undergoing atmospherically relevant transformations. Two sampling methods, paper spray (PS) and an open port sampling interface (OPSI), were developed to transfer and ionize chemical analytes from levitated particles to the MS for compositional analysis. Laboratory studies were carried out to understand both non-reactive transformations and heterogeneous oxidation of levitated particles by precisely measuring their physical and optical properties as a function of evolving chemical composition. Non-reactive transformations include the particle-to-gas partitioning of semi-volatile species, while heterogeneous oxidation includes ozonolysis measurements on oleic and elaidic acid particles to understand the influence of particle phases on transformation kinetics and product distribution.

A key objective of this dissertation is to gain molecular-level understanding of how aerosol particles evolve due to chemical transformations and provide size-resolved detailed knowledge of their characteristics. It is essential to link the microphysical properties, composition, and reaction timescales for particles to quantify these evolving properties. Ultimately, the developments and measurements reported in this dissertation provide a foundation for exploring the chemistry of aerosol particles of complex composition and morphology to better understand their role in the environment.

This dissertation examines select sounds made and heard in post-coup Myanmar, that is, sounds made and heard in Myanmar since February 2021. In the context of a near-total media blockade, and the internal displacement of an estimated 1.5 million people, the stakes of the dissertation are high. The dissertation shows how a vernacular politics of reproduction informs sonic activity—ranging from popular music to acts of sonic dissent. In Chapter One, “Between the Beats,” I draw on an archive of sources collected through virtual ethnography, including sound art, social media posts, journalistic sources, and fundraising materials, to show how solidarity can be made through and heard in thanbone hti, a practice of banging on metal pots, pans, buckets, and tins with metal utensils. Chapter Two, “Blood and Bonds,” focuses on the forms of relationality that 1988 copy thachin-as-protest-song “Kabar Ma Kyay Bu” and Rap Against Junta’s 2022 track, “Blood” produce, drawing on blood as a powerful rhetorical device that forges links between generations of activists, musical cover versions, and a global audience. Chapter Three, “Recording Disappearance,” marks a shift towards thinking about kinship in the wake of absence and loss. The tracks on Operation Hanoi Hannah’s (an anonymous activist collective) second album Redemption, present a history of violence through mothers’ and sons’ voices that speak of the visceral experience of separation. Chapter Four, “Participatory Audio Recording’s Potential,” finally, recounts my own ethnographic experience in developing and implementing a research protocol wherein participants’ audio collages, sound maps, and field recordings—and their explanations of that work—inform my own anthropological conceptions of disconnected kinship. The phrase “sonic kinship,” as per the dissertation’s title, refers to those kinds of meaningful relationships between beings and sounds that are produced through the acts of producing or perceiving sound. Sonic kinship arises in the act of apprehending sound together, the perception of shared material or substance within songs and sounds, and practices of care directed towards sonic products or performed through sonic actions, all of which build relationships between humans, sounds, music, the environment, and other beings. By thinking through the stakes of sound reproduction via these materials, this dissertation shows how, far from being ephemeral under post-coup conditions in Myanmar, sounds persist as a durable means for preserving and reproducing kin relations.