Listening to Hate: Framing a Symposium on Sound and Social Harm
Friday, April 10, 2026 1-5 pm | Lani Hall – Schoenberg Music Building | RSVP Here
This Friday, the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, in collaboration with the Herb Alpert School of Music will host a half-day symposium that explores what hate sounds like—and just as importantly, when do we fail to hear it?
Hate is often imagined as loud, explicit, and easily identifiable: shouted slogans, violent threats, unmistakable declarations. But much of its contemporary force operates otherwise. It circulates through irony, humor, aesthetic pleasure, and repetition. It embeds itself in familiar sounds, in ambient media environments, in the textures of everyday listening. In these forms, hate does not always announce itself—it resonates, accumulates, and, at times, passes unnoticed.
This symposium begins from that tension. If hate is not always audible as hate, then what does it mean to listen for it? And what are the limits of that listening?
Bringing together scholars across sound studies, ethnomusicology, media studies, and antisemitism studies, this half-day event explores how sound participates in the propagation, normalization, and contestation of social animosities. Rather than treating sound as secondary to image or text, the symposium takes seriously the ways auditory experience shapes how hate is felt, interpreted, and lived.
Across the program (see summary of panel topics below) several tensions guide the conversation:
- If sound can intensify hate, can it also diffuse or disguise it?
- When does humor or irony function as critique—and when does it become a vehicle for harm?
- How do platforms structure not just what we hear, but how we listen—and with what expectations?
- What happens when harmful meanings are carried not through explicit speech, but through sonic association, repetition, or affect?
- And what might it mean to practice a form of listening that does not simply detect hate, but interrogates the conditions that make it audible—or inaudible—in the first place?
Our keynote speaker, Shayna M. Silverstein (Northwestern University), brings a perspective grounded in performance studies and ethnomusicology, examining how sound and movement mediate political life, embodiment, and power. Her work underscores a central premise of this symposium: that sound is never neutral, but always entangled with social, cultural, and political dynamics.
At stake in this conversation is not only how we identify hate, but how we come to recognize it at all. If listening is shaped by habit, by platform, by training, and by expectation, then the question is not simply what hate sounds like—but what kinds of listening make it perceptible, and for whom.
We invite you to join us in thinking through these questions together.
Summary of panel topics:
- 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.
This symposium is curated by Kathryn Huether (Postdoctoral Research Associate-Antisemitism Studies, UCLA Initiative to Study Hate and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies) and co-sponsored by ISH and UCLA’s Center for Musical Humanities.
