Sounds beyond our reach.

Threshold’s Year of Sound Journal

Episode III: The Sounds of Protest

Sound is our business. Our work asks us to listen and to remove obstacles preventing us from hearing each other. 

Most of this work involves designing spaces so that gatherings of the many may hear messages from the few. In recent months, though, it's the many who have delivered messages to those in power. 

Some, like the right to breathe, demand that we acknowledge our role in creating an unjust society and to do our part in correcting it. Others, like the resistance to camouflaged men in white vans, remind us that citizens sometimes must draw boundaries around the powerful.

We invite you to listen to the Cities and Memory archive sounds of protest, demonstration, and political activism compiled by the story network.

“These sounds, more than any other, are coming to define the age in which we’re living, and are uniting people, communities and entire countries around the world.”

Find in them honor, passion, anguish, mischief, and sometimes violence. Hear the remarkable variety of protests in different cultures for different causes when the many gather to inform the few. Ponder with us when it is necessary and good to raise our own voices.

We will keep listening from the stage and from the crowd. As our practice demands, we will work to dismantle the obstacles that keep us from hearing each other.

We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement.