Sounds of Gentrification, Sounds of Care: Prof. Martin Interviewed by VPR & SIRG

Assistant Professor Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist, a Black sound studies expert, a digital humanities whiz. At heart, though, her work is about "listening to Black people, in whatever way that may be," she says in a recent interview with the Sonic Insurgency Research Group, published in the journal MARCH. So far her scholarly energies have focused, with unflinching incisiveness, on gentrification in Washington, D.C.—or, more specifically, what gentrification sounds like to the Black communities whose lives it impedes. Forthcoming is the result of that research: Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, D.C., Prof. Martin's first monograph.

But while much of her attention is tuned to the sonic dimensions of urban displacement and oppression, she has an ear to another facet of Black life as founder and director of Dartmouth's Black Sound Lab. Currently, Prof. Martin and her team of researchers are nearing the completion of Black COVID Care, a digital testament to sounds and stories of pandemic-era care and mutual aid among Black communities. The Black COVID Care website, slated to launch later this year, will offer a Hubble-style glimpse of "the infinite galaxies of Black care," says Prof. Martin in an interview with Lexi Krupp for Vermont Public Radio which aired on Monday.

You can read both interviews with Prof. Martin online:

• Conversations on Sound and Power: Allie Martin interviewed by the Sonic Insurgency Research Group
• A music professor wants to represent what Black care sounds like, 'as infinite, as vast': Allie Martin interviewed for Vermont Public Radio