Growing out of the inaugural Music and Sound Studies working group at the Cultural Studies Association of 2022, this special issue of American Music Perspectives explores how music and sound relate to the sociopolitical valences of our current crisis conditions. Though diverse in method and subject, each article in this issue takes up everyday crisis vis-à-vis sound, using various affective approaches to show how sonic processes help us navigate, resist, apprehend, or make space within our conditions as a function of their complex affective force, irreducible to any one aspect of music performance, artistic intention, or literal subject-matter. In our view, bringing theories of affect into conversation with multidisciplinary perspectives across music and sound studies opens up exciting new paths for research in both directions. Thinking music and affect together expands the possibilities of ethnographic and semiotic methods, while from the other side of the equation, sound and music’s uniquely...

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