Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC

Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood change are observed. But what does gentrification sound like? In Intersectional Listening, author Allie Martin engages this question in Washington, DC, asking how Black people experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Drawing from music, interviews, soundscape recordings, and more, Martin argues that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others.

Martin employs a combination of methodologies from ethnomusicology, Black Studies, geography, and digital humanities to make audible the ways in which gentrification disrupts and disturbs community. Throughout, she centers Black feminist listening practices, thinking through digital modes of listening and imagining emancipatory soundscapes. Intersectional Listening benefits from an innovative combination of sources, from interviews and soundwalks to passive acoustic recording and machine learning. Martin shares compelling stories of music and sound in the nation’s capital, and in doing so shifts conversations about how we listen to Black life. By foregrounding how processes of gentrification systematically seek to devalue, mishear, and ultimately silence Black possibility, Intersectional Listening posits how we can challenge ourselves to refute the consistent mishearing of Black people in Washington, DC and beyond.

Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She is currently an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work is attuned to questions of race, sound, and power. Martin is the director of the Black Sound Lab at Dartmouth College, a research environment dedicated to amplifying Black life and decriminalizing Black sound through digital practice.