Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/symposium-on-sound-and-hate-tickets-1984826445328
UCLA School of Music: https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/event/symposium-on-sound-and-hate-studies/
Join us Friday, April 10th for a half-day symposium on sound and hate, presented in collaboration with the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. This symposium explores what hate sounds like—how we hear it in everyday life. From TikTok audio trends and pop music to online subcultures and global conflict, sound plays a powerful role in shaping how hostility is expressed, shared, and felt. This symposium brings together scholars working across music, media, and cultural studies to explore how sound doesn’t just reflect hate—it helps produce, circulate, and sometimes challenge it.
The program opens with a series of short presentations that spotlight how sound operates in very different contexts:
- Amalia Mora (UCLA Initiative to Study Hate/Bedari Kindness Institute): examines the soundtracks of online incel communities, asking how music and shared listening cultures reinforce narratives of male victimhood and normalize misogyny. Her work connects these digital soundscapes to longer histories of gendered violence and cultural ideas about masculinity.
- Allie Kelly (UCLA Graduate Student, Musicology): explores how music circulates across digital platforms, focusing on how familiar songs—often detached from their original meaning—are reused in online spaces to signal identity, build community, or subtly reinforce harmful stereotypes. Her work highlights how even seemingly benign or popular audio can take on new meanings in platform culture.
- Kathryn Agnes Huether (UCLA Initiative to Study Hate and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate-Antisemitism Studies): turns to social media platforms, where short audio clips—songs, chants, and viral sounds (think trending TikTok audio or repurposed pop tracks)—circulate rapidly and often lose their original context. Her work examines how these sounds carry affect, signal belonging, and sometimes normalize antisemitism and other forms of hate. She also asks whether practices like “radical listening” are even possible in today’s algorithm-driven media environments.
- Shayna M. Silverstein (Northwestern University-Associate Professor, Performance Studies): challenges familiar assumptions about hate by looking beyond Euro-American frameworks. Drawing on her work in the Middle East, she asks what hate sounds like in contexts where race is not the primary organizing category, and how everyday sonic practices—voice, music, and public sound—can generate and sustain forms of social division such as sectarianism.
The symposium continues with an open conversation among participants, followed by a keynote address from Shayna Silverstein, and concludes with a reception.
Together, the event invites audiences to think differently about listening—not as passive, but as something deeply tied to how hate is produced, experienced, and potentially challenged.
RSVP here.
