Sound is a vital aspect of the multisensory experience of sports. Sports environments are multilayered soundscapes comprised of numerous familiar and often iconic sounds. Athletes, equipment, and playing surfaces make noise; as do officials, fans, announcers, and stadium sound systems. Auditory cues influence athletic performance while shaping how spectators participate in sporting events and how media audiences consume sports content. Music is ubiquitous in sports contexts and there is a wide spectrum of music about sports.

Sounds animate and enhance cultural representations of sports but are also valuable ways of knowing sports and the moving body. Sound offers distinct ways to understand athlete abilities and movements while recognizing and embracing difference across these embodiments. Examining sound makes us attentive to the material world of sports as sounds reverberate, echo, and resonate between bodies, objects, and surfaces. Critical listening reveals how sports spaces and representations are manipulated to include or exclude specific sounds. Such analyses can help us comprehend how sonic characteristics shape how sports make us feel and why certain sounds provoke emotional, visceral, and collective responses to sports experiences.

Sports sounds – and sports songs – are intertwined with identities. Books such as Bateman and Bale’s Sporting Sounds and McLeod’s We are the Champions illustrate how sport and music are often bound together by cultural and ideological interconnections. The North American Society for the Sociology of Sport’s (NASSS) 2018 annual conference was organized around the theme of “Sport Soundtracks“, which explored how the symbiotic relationship between sport and music can “forge communities, imbue national pride, and promote cultural identities.” Beyond musical forms, sounds are similarly expressions of power in how they reflect and are used to control whose bodies, voices, and cultures are thought to belong in sport and whose are deemed out of place.

For people experiencing ongoing oppression and violence, sound and music manifest as history, politics, resistance, and – as Katherine McKittrick writes – ways of being in the social world that are inextricable from the struggle for liberation. New, unexpected, or unruly sounds can thus destabilize what’s supposed to be “normal” in sports and challenge the oppressive practices upholding sports’ power imbalances. These disruptive sounds force us to confront the assumptions and biases informing how we listen to sports. A critical listening positionality, as defined by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson, considers “how we might become better attuned to the particular filters of race, class, gender, and ability that actively select and frame the moment of contact between listening body and listened-to sound” (2020, p. 11). As Robinson explains, the unlearning of sensory perceptions shaped by settler colonialism, racism, capitalism, ableism, and sexism can defy and redefine unjust political orders.

Sound, Sport, and the Digital seeks to promote critical reflections on sound and listening that similarly support movements toward equity and justice in sports.

Reference List