What does ‘loud’ mean anyway? 

One Song by Miet Warlop challenges the idea of “song” itself through repetition and ritual, as well as the sonic qualities that give “song” its artistic meaning in a (post)colonial world. These are themes we explore in the class I teach here at NYU called the Art of Listening. The goal of the course is for students to develop greater awareness of how sound places us in various times and spaces. We explore music as one facet of our interaction with sound and contextualize it within broader soundscapes.

In our exploration of what delineates “music” from other sounds and how we’ve arrived at such “modern” understandings through colonial violences, sometimes masquerading as aesthetics and beauty standards, we also interrogate the notion of “noise.” Often, noise is heard as the antithesis of music in Western understandings of sound. Music is structured, pleasant, filled with meaning, and dynamic in volume, while noise is loud, chaotic, bothersome, and devoid of signification. This dichotomy is racialized and imposed through structures and processes of colonialism and slavery.

For instance, the musical customs of African and Native peoples were/are highly surveilled by colonizers, clerics, and slave-owners. These notions persist today, as hip-hop, reggaetón (the main subject of my research), trap, and various Afro-diasporic and Afro-Indigenous musics are coded as “noisy” or “loud” and continue to be policed by governments and law enforcement, deemed unworthy of scholarly and artistic study in institutions of higher education, and are often illegible to what Jennifer Stoever calls the white “listening ear.” In the genres mentioned, themes of sex, youth, partying, frivolity, consumption, race, and class may be most identifiable to the dominant listening ear. What is often illegible to the dominant listening ear – but recognizable to others – is how these issues act as modes of resisting colonial regulations on music-making and the surveillance of Black and brown bodies, how these musics are remnants and remakings of ritual, how they are ceremonial, sacred, and resilient auditory archives of communal ancestries. These sonic literacies are not only related to lyrical content, but timbral and voluminous qualities of voice and instrumentation.

One Song has been praised for its “primal scream” by De Standaard and as “loud [and] preposterous” by the New York Times – descriptions which seem to set the “song” into the category of noise. These reviews prompt questions around the ways in which the audience might listen to the repetition of the “one song” over the course of the performance. What standards of sonic “beauty” we are seeing/hearing come undone through the sonic qualities of a “scream”? We might also ask: who has the privilege to be loud? Who is afforded space to be preposterous? Who is allowed to resist sonic standards of decency and artistry, and if that resistance is affirmed by powerful institutions, is it still resistive?

Cloe Gentile Reyes, PhD (she/her) is a Miami-born Boricua scholar, poet, and performer. Her writing explores how Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance.