Introduction

This special issue began with a casual meeting at a conference in 2018 and has continued through conversations about sound, politics, public assembly, and urban space with our collaborators in anthropology, music studies, and sound studies as well as Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Middle Eastern studies.One instructive moment along the way was a virtual meeting organized by the American Anthropological Association in 2020 called "Raising Our Voices."Invoking voice as a metaphor for political participation would not be noteworthy save for the fact that the event included little direct engagement with voice, sound, and music as political phenomena worthy of "raising our voices" about.While the 2020 conference had been scaled back in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is nevertheless telling that the roundtable we organized with many of the contributors to this issue was the only session on the program that dealt explicitly with music or sound.There is a tradition in anthropology of relegating sound to an epiphenomenal realm, as grounds for the study of language and culture, especially, but whose aesthetic, performative, and embodied dimensions only figure as "political" when bundled with explicitly political texts.Our work is part of a growing body of anthropological and ethnomusicological study that foregrounds sound as an analytic in and of itself, in relation to language and discourse but not as an afterthought.Engaging with the field of sound studies, and specifically the role of sound in "culture," we are concerned with what sounds do-sound as epistemology, as refusal, as history and liberation, as commoning and in common, the semiology of sound-and the many possibilities for politicizing the sonorous.The practices of making sound and listening to sound are theorized as manifestations of the political that are entwined with, but not reducible to, semantic content or metaphorical utility.Toward this end, we collectively draw inspiration from fields of study perennially invoked as supplemental to anthropology or marginalized for a supposed lack of analytical rigor, yet whose insights consistently yield fruitful transformations within the discipline (Allen and Jobson, 2016;Cattelino and Simpson, 2022; Chavéz and Pérez, 2022).The authors gathered here pursue how the politics of sound are enacted within and upon aggrieved communities in urban spaces across North America: Latinxs in Chicago, Black New Orleanians, Indigenous Americans in Vancouver, and alliances between Asians, Latinx, diasporic Africans, and Muslims in Los Angeles.At a dance club, a performance site, or in a funeral procession, sound has the potential to draw individuals into assembly, to create spaces of belonging or mobilize various forms of political action and collective witness, whether influencing formal politics, kindling alternative civil societies, or simply making social life in opposition to the biopolitics of individualization and atomization.We proceed from Jacques Rancière's ([2001] 2010, 36) overarching fusion of the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics, wherein "the police-principle at the core of statist practices" is "the dividing-up of the world and of people," while aesthetic practices have the potential to create "dissensus," a disruption of the police-principle that points toward a "redistribution of the sensible," namely equality (see also, Moreno and Steingo, 2012).To voice, to pick up the mic, to make some noise, and to be heard are metaphors for political participation that have a basis in the materiality of sonic practice.Because sonic and bodily enactments of assembly hold emancipatory potential, they are then made targets of dislocation and fragmentation-divide and conquer-with comparable metaphors of silencing, muffling, or voicelessness.The authors witness courtroom hearings where sound technologies are deployed to stifle dissent and visit museum galleries where sound objects are "incarcerated" in silence.The unifying theme of our collaboration is amplify.The Oxford English Dictionary defines "amplify" first as "To make large; in space, amount, capacity, importance, or representation," and second as "To augment in volume or amount."In strict materialist terms, amplification moves the needle, literally, increasing decibels so that a signal is stronger and thus more readily audible by a wider audience.Amplify's meanings extend from this physical augmentation of sound to include metaphors of intensifying circulation ("turn up the volume") and enlarging spheres of influence ("lift up her voice") (Weidman, 2014).To amplify is to address with some degree of intent who is heard and who is drowned out, which platforms grow followers and which fail to resonate with audiences.Speeches, chants, musical rhythms, and other sonic formations can be effective mechanisms for

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