ABSTRACT
One afternoon in late 1930s New York City, Ralph Ellison stumbled into the kind of acoustic scene that perks up the ears of sound and race scholars. Ellison recounts that he was circulating a petition in the African American neighborhood of San Juan Hill when he strode down a dark basement hallway and heard “male Afro-American voices, raised in violent argument” behind a closed door (Ellison 1978: 45). The tenement building’s physical form governed what Ellison could see and hear—the door a visual barrier occluding the speaking bodies from sight, the hallway an acoustic chamber resonating with the sound of disembodied voices. “Sounding out the lay of the land,” Ellison approached the door and played the part of aural sleuth, noting that “the language was profane, the style of speech a southern idiomatic vernacular such as was spoken by formally uneducated Afro-American workingmen” (Ellison 1978: 45). Vocabulary and syntax were not all that conveyed a sense of who these men were; the sonic qualities of the voices—volume, cadence, timbre, and vocal pitch—conjured a precise image of the men in Ellison’s mind, as did the location. Ellison paused to assess the situation while his ear gathered more information.
