Allie Martin Receives Library of Congress Residency

Assistant Professor Allie Martin has been named an Artist/Scholar-in-Residence for the 2024 cohort of the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative at the Library of Congress. 

From the Library's announcement: 

Dr. Allie Martin, ethnomusicologist and sound artist, will work on Sampling Black Life: Soundscapes and Critical Intention, a soundscape and community engagement project, during her CCDI residency. Sampling Black Life will utilize Library of Congress digital collections to create soundscape compositions—short sonic vignettes that layer sounds from the Library's digital collections with field recordings and composed music—that explore the sounds of Black life in depth. During her residency, Martin will develop and codify a methodology, "sampling with critical intention," to create soundscape compositions with items from the Voices Remembering Slavery, Chicago Ethnic Arts Project, and Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals collections. This methodology argues that recordings of Black life should be approached with critical attention to their context, provenance, and the historical and contemporary significance of working with them. Sampling Black Life will culminate in several community listening sessions, where Martin will unpack the soundscape composition layers and invite conversation about how we can listen more fully to Black life. As hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2023, Martin's work will utilize sampling, a hip-hop technique and technology that reverberates across a range of musical genres, to encourage critical reflection on the contents of the Library's digital collections as well as imaginative uses of their sounds.

"I'm honored to receive this award and work with the CCDI team. I'm excited to spend time with these digital collections and to engage with the communities from which they come," Martin is quoted in the announcement.