“A Hungry Sonic Color Line: Toward a Musicology of Settler Listening in Canada”
I believe there is a productive space between two neologisms from the past decade of musicology and sound studies—“hungry listening” and the “sonic color line”—that suggests a framework for understanding the politics of listening in Canada, and perhaps beyond. The term “hungry listening,” which I draw on from Dylan Robinson’s 2020 book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, derives from the Halq’eméylem word shxwelítemelh, describing settler or white methods/things, and xwélalà:m, referring to settler ways of listening. Hungry listening, as Robinson uses it, is a critique of the settler’s desire to “understand” or “include” Indigenous music through Western frameworks, often without meaningful engagement. In a similar vein, Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s 2016 book The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening theorizes different approaches for listening historically to race and to the impact that sound and systemic racism have had on one another in the United States. Stoever’s term “the sonic color line” refers to the racialized boundaries and hierarchies that shape the perception, production, and reception of Black sound in America.
While covering different marginalized groups in different parts of North America, both works challenge what it means to listen critically, historically, and thoughtfully, in an attempt to break free from what they describe as Western colonial ways of listening. They seek to dismantle Western norms of listening so that “settlers”—an imprecise term that correlates with the equally imprecise phrase “white people” but also, for Robinson, an Indigenous translation, “starving person”—may move beyond tropes of consumption. Although both works share a similar political urgency, Stoever and Robinson employ markedly different methodologies. Stoever grounds her theory in historical case studies, looking at figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Lead Belly, whose sonic presence unsettled dominant narratives of race and class. In contrast, Robinson’s approach is more conceptual, rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. While he references specific musical collaborations and performances, his emphasis is on developing a theoretical framework that resists settler imposition and focuses on Indigenous sovereignty. This divergence in methodology shapes how each author invites readers to engage. Stoever’s use of tangible historical examples offers readers pathways for self-reflection and change; Robinson, meanwhile, resists providing such pathways, and instead challenges readers—particularly those who are unfamiliar with music’s colonial histories—to do the difficult work of learning how to listen differently. Taken together, these two different approaches remind us that the responsibility for addressing the aural aftermath of enslavement and colonization lies squarely with readers who are used to listening “hungrily.”
In this essay, I propose a “hungry sonic color line,” which synthesizes Robinson’s critique of settler-colonial listening practices with Stoever’s analysis of racialized sonic hierarchies. It aims to offer Canadians—particularly those who hold power and privilege in Canadian society—a way to understand how sound has contributed to colonial oppression throughout Canada’s history and to begin transforming their own listening practices in line with reconciliation efforts in Canada. Despite their different methodologies, these scholars share many similarities in their findings about dominant listening habits in the United States and Canada. Adapting Stoever’s sonic color line to confront colonial listening practices beyond her historical coverage of listening and race in the United States is one way of putting these works in dialogue, allowing us to acknowledge and challenge Robinson’s critique of settler listeners in Canada
While the histories these authors explore are distinct, both challenge a broader transnational pattern: a dominant colonial listening culture that marginalizes racialized ways of sounding and being. A hungry sonic color line, then, acknowledges this shared structure of oppression while attending to the specificities of the Canadian context. To be sure, the history of slavery in the United States has created country-specific racial barriers that continue through to this day, much as the residential school system in Canada has created very specific barriers to entry for Indigenous peoples participating in Canadian society. I acknowledge that anti-Black racism has always been and continues to be a relevant problem in Canada, just as Indigenous oppression persists in the United States. This proposed framework does not seek to reduce these histories, nor to gloss over the differences between Stoever’s and Robinson’s works, but rather to explore what emerges when we place them in dialogue. Although I use categories such as “Black” and “settler” drawn from Stoever and Robinson in this essay, I also worry along with both authors about the way these categories tend to replicate colonial notions of racial purity even while they seek to resist and dismantle them. For the time being, I use such terms as a stopgap measure, but encourage readers to look beyond them. And, of course, these are issues that many other authors have also broached, ranging from Jessica Bisset Perea to Matthew D. Morrison, among others. Their works resonate with this project as I continuously search for more nuanced approaches that move beyond rigid racial categories toward more relational and decolonial understandings of sound, identity, and power, and I encourage my readers to do so as well.
Within the framework of the sonic color line, Stoever proposes the “listening ear” as a way to understand how and why listening practices change, conform to, or break from dominant cultural expectations throughout history. For Stoever, the listening ear drives the sonic color line as the dominant form of listening in the United States. Stoever’s identification of the listening ear also challenges Americans to listen from different perspectives and acknowledge their aural biases. Similarly, Robinson makes use of the “tin ear” as a way of acknowledging and defining listening habits associated with “settler” histories. Robinson asserts that many “settlers” have worn tin ears—in other words, hearing through Westernized ears and judging by those same standards—all their lives and are unaware that they have placed hierarchical value on Western listening practices. Like the listening ear, the tin ear drives a hungry sonic color line that carves out Western settler-colonialism as the dominant culture in Canada. As Robinson states, settler-colonialism in relation to Indigenous listening does not literally mean to settle or occupy a sonic space (although in many instances it does), but rather to assimilate minority groups into the settled, Western way of hearing and listening that has long dominated Canadian society.
This intersection of Robinson’s and Stoever’s ideas can be heard in the music of Tanya Tagaq (pictured above), an Inuk artist who fuses traditional throat singing with experimental and contemporary pop genres. Tagaq’s work resists the listening ear, which often demands that Indigenous sound conform to Western standards of musicality or cultural legibility. Her often visceral, confrontational performances instead challenge audiences to re-evaluate their sonic expectations and confront the discomfort that comes from hearing Indigenous voices unfiltered. Through Stoever’s perspective, we can understand how racialized listening practices continue to shape the reception of Tagaq’s work: critics and audiences alike often frame her voice as “wild and primal,” reproducing colonial and racial tropes that mark Indigenous sound as “other.” Yet in refusing the expectations of sonic civility demanded by the listening ear, Tagaq destabilizes these hierarchies, confronting listeners with the discomfort and intensity of sound that cannot be assimilated into Western categories of genre or aesthetics. Listening to Tagaq also requires the kind of relational accountability Robinson talks about; it is not enough to appreciate her sound as exotic or avant-garde. Ethical listening in this sense requires settler audiences to recognize the power dynamics that shape their hearing, to resist aestheticizing Indigenous sound as symbolic reconciliation, and to accept that some meanings will remain opaque. As a mixed-race musician often performing throat singing solo (as opposed to the traditional practice of performing in pairs) and through Western popular music genres, she both reinforces and resists colonial labels and demands more than passive listening from her audience. Tagaq’s music models how decolonial listening might sound in practice—how a listener might move from passive appreciation to relational awareness, from tin-eared hearing to an engaged, transformative encounter.
In cases like this, I want the hungry sonic color line to be a practical tool in addition to a conceptual one. I invite settler Canadians to interrogate how they hear Indigenous sound and to recognize how their own listening practices may perpetuate colonial power structures. I hope this hungry sonic color line offers a path—however provisional—toward transforming colonial listening practices into a more reciprocal, decolonial way of being. This framework calls for deep engagement, not mere inclusion. It demands a rejection of tin-eared listening and a commitment to listening with care, humility, and a willingness to be transformed. It offers yet another avenue for settler Canadians to work toward true reconciliation. That said, this framework remains largely conceptual, and further research is needed to explore how it might be meaningfully applied in educational, cultural, or community-based contexts. While I aim to foster critical awareness, I worry that this proposal risks replicating the very extractive tendencies Robinson critiques by attempting to integrate Indigenous epistemologies into settler conceptual frameworks. Care must be taken to ensure that this proposal does not co-opt Indigenous knowledge systems, but rather centers them with accountability and respect. Any such application must be done in partnership with Indigenous communities to ensure relational accountability and avoid imposing settler interpretations.
Robinson touches on the many different ways Indigenous scholars are disrupting Western music and academia more generally, but within a larger context of racialized sound and sonic color lines, widespread implementation of decolonial listening practices remain to be seen (or perhaps heard). With a hungry sonic color line, I aim to shine a light on the othering of Indigenous peoples in Canada as a result of sonic racialization, silencing, and listening with tin ears. Ultimately, a hungry sonic color line offers a way to listen toward reconciliation, not as a final destination but as an ongoing process of relational repair. This framework therefore asks Canadians to consider works like Stoever and Robinson and examine the colonial assumptions embedded in their everyday listening, ultimately to take active responsibility for reshaping these habits into practices of ethical and reciprocal listening in Canada and beyond.
