Show Notes
My guest today is Dr. Amy Skjerseth, Assistant Professor of Popular Music at UC Riverside. Amy is one of the most prolific and prodigious thinkers I know, and she provides us with an entire reading list throughout the course of this episode. From Tina Turner to anti-ICE whistles, we’re talking sound, media, technology, and disciplinarity. Get hip!
Timestamps:
00:00: Intro
1:13: Guest Intro and Popular Music Studies
9:39: Sound Studies
16:39: Preprogrammed
36:01: Yoko Ono and the Feminist Wall of Sound
50:17: Host’s training and the question of interdisciplinarity
58:38 What’s making guest cry
References
Alexander, Neta. 2025. Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies. Duke University Press.
Atkinson, Niall. 2016. The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life. Penn State University Press.
Corbin, Alain. 1998. Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. Columbia University Press.
Echols, Alice. 2010. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. W. W. Norton and Company.
Field, Allyson Nadia. 2026. Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History. University of California Press.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. 2010. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Duke University Press.
Ono, Yoko. 2000. Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono. Simon & Schuster.
Spiers, Aurore. 2026. Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978. University of California Press.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press, 2003.
Thompson, Emily. 2004. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. MIT Press.
Wilson, Carl. 2014. Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. Bloomsbury.
