Auditory Poverty and its Discontents – An Essay

Where sounding is understood as an exhibition of activity, vitality, and power, Nina Dragičević proposes that we analyse sonic phenomena in econo-political terms. In this essay—or is it perhaps a long love poem?—she dives into the sounding-listening dynamics and reveals them as class relations in which audibility is not an event following an occurrence of sound but a point in an intersectional class structure. With audibility, or rather the lack thereof, comes auditory poverty. And where there is poverty, there is discontent. And where there is discontent, there is potential for an uprising.