Sound Study will follow unexpected resonances, feedback, and musical migration around the world. Tune in for situated listening, original field recordings, and occasional interviews with guest DJs, artists, and scholars.

This month’s episode features guest Alex Blue V.

Alex Blue V is a musical jack of all trades, enjoying his life as a performer, writer, arranger, producer, educator, adjudicator, researcher, and more. He is Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Media and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. His research examines the intersections of race, sound, space, and place, often employing heavily ethnographic methods to demonstrate the influence of race on sound, and the influence of sound on race. Blue is currently working on two book projects. The first, titled A Matter of Death and Life, is a “necrographic” study of the narratives of death and dying in contemporary Detroit hip-hop, and how artists employ various forms of death as praxis in music making. The second, which he is co-authoring with Dr. Kyle DeCoste (Tulane University), is an ethnographic study of country rap, also known as “hick hop,” that examines issues of race, gender, class, nationalism, and identity, primarily (but not entirely) in the southern United States.

Prior to his PhD in Ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara, Blue had an extensive background as a performer, having received his bachelor’s in Trombone Performance and his master’s in Jazz Studies from Texas Tech University and University of North Texas, respectively. He was the Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, and a Predoctoral Fellow in Music at Ithaca College.