ABSTRACT
During the first lockdown period in the Czech Republic and Slovakia region, new types of public sound performances and private listening practices emerged as a result of new anxieties, solidarity calls, and disciplinary measures that disproportionately targeted marginalised populations. The auditory reactions to these changes have shaped an embodied public discourse that relates to a particular type of national or other identity-defined subjects and their position in national hegemony. This chapter discusses the public auditory response to the pandemic challenges in the cases of technology-mediated sound performances manifesting a resilient nation, and the Roma minority’s seemingly less coordinated sounds in a highly surveilled public space. How were these performances documented, and how should they be compartmentalised to establish a basis for nuanced acoustic histories of the pandemic times? Drawing on theoretical accounts of cultural intimacy, cultural politics of emotion, and the involvement of sound in the production of collective memory, this chapter will comment on the subtle acoustic occurrences of the lockdown period, like the deeply intimate forms of listening in a quarantined housing block or the politically articulated sound performances of pandemic togetherness, ultimately making a call to remember these experiences with the original distinctions and paradoxes.
