Nil Basdurak is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. She is writing an interdisciplinary dissertation about sound studies, urban public space, the acoustemology of neoliberal Islam, and violence against women, children, ethnic minorities, and refugees in contemporary Turkey. Nil’s first article, “The Soundscape of Islamic Populism: Auditory Publics, Silences and the Myth of Democracy,” was published in The Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience in 2020. Nil enjoys serving as the project manager of the Canadian Golha Orchestra—an Iranian orchestral music initiative based in Toronto (@canadian_golha_orchestra)

Born in Fairbanks in central Alaska, Kat Bernhardt is an avid traveler, writer, historian, and vocalist who is fascinated by the diverse intricacies of the world, its languages and cultures. Kat is an Advancement Associate at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and she holds a Master of Arts Degree in Education and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature and Music. Her current writing projects include a book about her great-grandmother, the celebrated sun painting artist, Pansy Stockton.

Joella Bitter is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Eastman School of Music, working across anthropologies of sound and music, critical urban environmental studies, intersectional feminist thought, and Afrodiasporic studies. She has published a digital sonic ethnography, Gulu SoundTracks, together with music producer colleagues in Uganda and is currently working on a book about the ordinary aural politics of city-making.

Sound Braid is an exploration of collaborative listening and sonic conversations, a convergence of events that hop on and off the web platform with the hopes of sparking discussion, remixing, and moving through and with bodies in various ways. Sound braid is a non-institutionally sanctioned space and side-project meant for collaboration, inhabitation, and disruption. 

A mutable platform subject to change and revision, the sound braid website invites sounds that move, simmer, or ignite discussions. It aims to engage with experimental forms and to create rather than reproduce, to shape ecologies rather than libraries. This site may include or prompt non-performed or unexceptional sounds, dedramatized silences, quotidian dins, or failures. soundbraid.org

Hannah M. Brown is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Toronto. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Queen’s University and a Master of Information and a Master of Arts in musicology from the University of Toronto. Hannah’s research examines various intersections between technology, labour, gender, and sexuality in electronic and computer music through theories and methodologies from feminist and queer technology studies. Her work also considers issues of the preservation and accessibility of electronic and early digital media. Her doctoral work focuses on the gendered and classed division of artistic and technical labour in electronic and early computer music in post-World War II Europe and argues that musical machines and software are artistic works in their own right, not merely tools for creating art. A portion of her MA research on Daphne Oram’s work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop will be published by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology’s Reprising the Real World of Technology working group in their What Would Ursula Franklin Say?collection in 2021.

Wes Brunson is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on intimacy, ethnographic writing, knowledge production, and ethics. He has conducted 21 months of fieldwork in Barcelona among queer and housing activists. In addition to this fieldwork, Wes also writes about Canadian and American literature, with a focus on queer memoirs, essays, and poetry, and about whiteness, masculinity, and family in the American Midwest. Wes has received awards from Anthropology & Humanism for his ethnopoetry. His writing can be found in Anthropology & Humanism and in the international anthology, A Day Is A Struggle.

Laura Carvalho is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is currently one of the coordinators at Ethnolab/UofT. Originally from Brazil, she is passionate about bread and fermentation. Her current research takes her to Brazil, where she explores rivers and archives.

Miriam A. Kolar, MFA & PhD, is Managing Editor of the School for Advanced Research (SAR) Press in Santa Fe, NM. Miriam’s cultural acoustics research (www.culturalacoustics.org) integrates acoustics and auditory science in prehistoric archaeology. Since 2008, Miriam has led archaeoacoustics and music archaeology research at the 3,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Centre Chavín de Huántar, Perú, with a second Andean project on Inca sonics. In 2021-2022, she coordinated the first archaeoacoustical studies of Chauvet Cave and Marsoulas Cave, French sites with extraordinary Upper Paleolithic paintings and transmodal evidence for interspecies interactions. Her current projects include auralization research and the development of multimodal interfaces for archaeological engagement.

Alexandra Lippman is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Pomona College. She is completing her first book project, Funk Power: Citizenship, Race, and Sonic Sovereignty in Rio de Janeiro. She is the co-founder of the music label Discos Rolas, the host of a monthly radio show, “Sound Study,” on Dublab, and founded the Sound Ethnography Project in 2010. alexandralippman.com.

Natalie Marshall is a PhD student in linguistic anthropology at UCLA. Her current research explores how people share information about food and urban agriculture in Los Angeles, including how these narratives produce or resist dominant ideologies surrounding land relations, food justice, and environmental stewardship. Her work uses traditional ethnographic methods in combination with experimental Super 8 film and sound art.

Sonic Anthropology Radio program director Tom Miller (CUNY Brooklyn College) has curated sound and media installations for the American Museum of Natural History (New York), Linden State Museum of Ethnology (Germany), American Anthropological Association and Ethnographic Terminalia. He has been a radio producer for WGXC, WFMU, Pulse of the Planet, Society for Ethnomusicology Sounding Board, WKCR and KRAB-FM (Seattle). He is a member of the Radio & Decolonization collective (National Endowment for the Humanities); a participant in the Radio Preservation Task Force (Library of Congress) and Arctic Horizons Workshops (National Science Foundation); a longtime field recordist (Cities & Memory, Wesleyan World Music Archive); and an award-winning composer and sound artist (Wave Farm, National Endowment for the Arts). He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University.

David Novak is associate professor and director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (2013) and co-editor of Keywords in Sound (2015). His current book project, Diggers: A Global Counterhistory of Popular Music, theorizes popular music history through informal networks of record and cassette collectors, labels, archives, and digital preservation projects. www.japanoise.com.

Marina Peterson is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work attends to elemental forces and shifting modalities of matter, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles, engages mobilizations around airport noise to address ways in which noise amplifies modes of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. She has co-edited two books on anthropology and art, Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art and Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader and is a founding director of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography.

The Kensington Market Soundscape Study is a community- and arts-based ethnographic team research project led by Farzaneh Hemmasi, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Toronto. Based in the historic downtown Toronto immigrant neighborhood of Kensington Market, we use qualitative research to better understand the complex interplay of desires, histories, and regulations, and to observe and aid multiple parties in the community in finding means to manage the neighbourhood’s “soundscape.” In partnership with the KM Business Improvement Area, we have helped produce and document the Pedestrian Sundays street festival; charted community experiences with sound and noise; supported community organizations’ efforts to oppose City of Toronto plans for the neighborhood’s permanent pedestrianization; and more. The current installation was created from KMSS’s sound recordings, field notes, interviews, and survey data and created by KMSS team members Nil Basdurak, Wesley Brunson, Hannah Brown, and Farzaneh Hemmasi. https://kensingtonmarket.music.utoronto.ca/

Doğa Tekin is a multimedia artist and PhD student in linguistic anthropology at UCLA. Her work uses multisensory methods to understand the material-semiotic processes through which colonial ideologies about land and interspecies relations are reinforced or disrupted. In her dissertation research, she focuses on the semiotic mechanisms of decolonization in the Indigenous-led grassroots organization People of Color Fungi Community’s work with the fungus huitlacoche. Her Master’s research examined Big Sur travel vlogs and information boards in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park to understand how settler colonial environmental ideologies are discursively produced, constructing racialized and classed imaginaries of who interacts with nature and how. Over the past three years, Doğa has been working on developing methods and pedagogical tools within anthropology and urban humanities using spatially-oriented sonic production. She is on the editorial board of the Digital Salon podcast, and produces ambient electronic music under the artist name wood ear.