Addison Cox doesn’t believe listening is passive. A cafe’s background music, the chime of the Green Line, the song of the lark – what you hear changes how you see.

“Even just when you’re walking out in life, there are politics happening in your ears all the time, shaping the way you view the world,” Cox said.

Cox is a Phillips Fellow at the Givens Collection of African American Literature and Life, and recently she’s been studying how sound shapes identity. How does it change the ways people perceive us, how we perceive ourselves, and chiefly, what does it mean to “sound” Black?

Cox collected her findings into a new exhibit at Elmer L. Andersen Library, “Listening for Blackness.” The exhibit shows how Black sound and songs emerged, how it was represented and discussed, and how it was used both to strengthen Black community and to maintain racist ideals.

“Listening for Blackness,” curated by Cox and designed by Darren Terpstra, is on display in the vitrine at the entrance to the Givens Collection, on the second floor of Andersen Library, and open during regular library hours.

What does it mean to “sound Black”?

Cox, a second-year doctoral student in the University of Minnesota’s English Department, became interested in sound while reading and researching “The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.”

She noticed how often the text mentions Truth’s musical performances, like when she sings to a group of white men at a religious camp.

“The sound of her voice is so enrapturing that they just completely stop what they’re doing and come surround her, and beg her to sing to them again, and beg her to preach and listen to the word of God because her voice is so powerful,” Cox said.

In firsthand descriptions of Truth, people repeatedly mentioned the timbre of her voice, that it was deep, intense, and mesmerizing. Olive Gilbert, who recorded and filtered Truth’s narrative, admits that she could never truly describe how Truth sounds.

From there, Cox noticed sound everywhere, how Black authors often write about sorrow songs and spirituals, and how they incorporate African-American Vernacular English into their works. Cox calls this American literary soundscape “sonic Blackness.”

Writers create sonic Blackness when they say certain sounds, songs, or types of music “sound Black” or represent Blackness, Cox said. This includes music made by Black artists, as well as music about Blackness.

Cox began researching how people created sonic Blackness, and then how they commodified it, turning it into something people can use. White artists like Elvis, for example, borrow and profit from elements of Black music and repackage them for white audiences, while Black artists like Kendrick Lamar use music to make revolutionary and liberational statements about what it means to be Black.

Three views on Black sound

“Listening for Blackness” is a culmination of Cox’s archival research at the Givens Collection and her academic research in the English Department.

The exhibit walks through three approaches to Black sound – an aesthetic and spiritual viewpoint, an analytical viewpoint, and the dominant white culture’s perspective – and how those ideas appeared in sheet music, all published around the 1920s.

During this era, America was fascinated with Black music like negro spirituals, blues, and jazz, she said. In response, writers published books and sheet music collections to shine a light on Black culture.

One of the those writers was James Weldon Johnson, a civil rights activist from Jacksonville, Florida, and author of the poem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” today known as the “Negro National Anthem.”

Johnson believed that Black music was born through struggle, and in that process, became noble, beautiful, and deeply spiritual. In 1925, he published “The Book of American Negro Spirituals.” The book was intended not only as a celebration of spirituals and its unknown authors, but as a means of elevating Black music.

Black music also caught the attention of scholars, including Henry Edward Krehbiel, an American music critic and musicologist. While much of the academic world focused on classical and romantic music in Europe, Krehbiel was also interested in American folk music.

In 1914 he published “Afro-American folksongs: a study in racial and national music,” one of the first music history books on African-American spirituals. Taking a scientific, music theory approach, Krehbiel analyzed common melodies and scales, meter and rhythm, and harmonies and variations, found in Black music.

But generally, white audiences viewed Black music as quaint and primitive. Dorothy Scarborough, who grew up near her grandfather’s plantation in Texas, took a more paternalistic attitude in her book, “On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs,” released in 1925.

The book is rife with white, Antebellum nostalgia, interlaced with racist assumptions about Black people, Cox said. Scarborough reminisces on songs from her youth, collected from white plantation owners and formerly enslaved people. For her, these songs represent how things should be: Black bodies working, singing, and happy.

Listening for Blackness

Cox started researching and curating the exhibit last summer, and it took around six months to complete. Working with Davu Seru, curator of the Givens Collection, has been “really excellent,” in part because Seru was once a Givens Fellow himself.

“It’s one of those experiences where I don’t know where else I would’ve been able to do that,” Cox said.

Seru is also a musician, which was not only helpful for digitizing and transcribing sheet music, but also for her dissertation research. He recommended books and peer-reviewed articles related to her work.

“It’s really, really fruitful, and just the space of the office is super collaborative and super generative,” she said.

Creating the exhibit also gave her ideas about how to present her research for classes and conferences in new ways.

“Getting to see what my research physically looks like in its rawest form was really, really fascinating,” Cox said. “I’d never organized my scholarship in that way … Seeing it all come together was so much fun.”

This is what it sounds like

One morning when she was young, Cox and her sister were woken up by her stepdad “to listen to some real music.” That’s when she heard “When Doves Cry,” from Prince’s chef d’oeuvre, “Purple Rain.”

In the opening track, “Let’s Go Crazy,” Prince stands solitary as a preacher, but by the eponymous track, his voice is one of many in the gospel choir. Here, Prince draws on decades of Black music, sung throughout the country as anthems of resilience and unity.

When visitors see “Listening for Blackness,” Cox hopes it’ll encourage people to pay attention to the history behind sound, and to question the things they hear, whether it’s commercials, movies and TV shows, radio and news broadcasts.

Sound is not an uncontested space, she said. It’s mediated by politics and history, it’s curated and crafted, especially when we don’t think much about it.

“What do we think when we hear how someone talks? And why do we have those assumptions? Where do they come from? What do they do for us, and how do we use them as well?” Cox said. “Think about the ways people prey on these assumptions of sound and utilize that to their benefit.”