Defense Talk
Two weeks ago today, on March 27th, I defended my dissertation and (finally) became a doctor. It still feels extremely surreal to write that, to have three more letters at the end of my email signature, to try to figure out what, if anything, it means to have accomplished such a milestone. Below is the talk I gave at my defense, it chronicles the intellectual gestation of this project and what I plan to do in the future. I’ll write more soon about what life has looked like post-defense (some of the busiest weeks of my life) and what’s on the horizon now that I am done being a student.
Defense Talk
Jay Jolles
Good afternoon.
Friends, family, colleagues, and probably some mortal enemies: I warmly welcome you to the defense of my doctoral dissertation, “Man, Music, and Machine: Towards a Theory of 21st Century Listening.”
I am proud and, if I’m being honest, a bit anxious to share this part of the journey with you.
I owe a debt of gratitude to all who supported me along the way. There are too many people to thank, too many hands that, whether they knew it or not, reached out, steadied me, and pushed me forward. Consider my gratitude expansive, and my debt to you incalculable–there are so many of you to name and not enough time to do so.
I would like to offer a special thank you to my committee, Liz Losh, Charlie McGovern and Simon Stow who have accompanied me on this PhD journey since the very beginning. Additionally, I extend my sincerest thanks to my external reader, Dr. Amy Skjerseth, who is joining us virtually from the left coast, where it is still quite early. Thank you all for being here.
During this talk, I’ll lead you through the major contours and arguments of my dissertation, explore its individual chapters, position its work within American Studies and its allied subfields, and offer a few thoughts on where this project–and my intellectual journey–might head next.
But first, I’d like to offer a brief narrative of how I arrived at this project in the first place.
Intellectual Autobiography - “A Semi-Coherent Narrative of a Semi-Coherent Intellectual Journey”
For years I believed that my intellectual wanderings were scattered threads, each following its own unpredictable course. In many ways, these meanderings have proven to be a blessing, opening doors that have allowed me to write on topics as varied as lo-fi beats relationship with neoliberalism to Peloton’s role as a modern DJ, and the evolution of the marriage plot as reflected in the work of Taylor Swift. At other times, however, I have felt intellectually adrift, questioning if a singular, unifying theme truly anchors my work, whether there’s some elusive ‘thing’ I’m after, if there’s any there there at all. As I near the end of this chapter, a hidden, insistent refrain emerges: most of my inquiries invariably orbit around how traumatic events are mediated, memorialized, and absorbed into American media forms.
My undergraduate thesis examined the post-memorial power of images in post-9/11 and post-Holocaust novels, interrogating how visual evidence of catastrophe informs and reshapes narrative meaning. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, I dissected the dialectical relationship between mourning and melancholia, arguing that these images function as both sites of productive grief work and as melancholic anchors that defy closure. In doing so, I set the stage for my enduring fascination with the representation and reinterpretation of traumatic pasts.
This early focus on visual representation naturally expanded into digital domains through my MA thesis, which examined the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and the broader cultural memory of Hurricane Katrina as experienced specifically by New Orleanians. By analyzing this participatory digital archive, I traced how the disaster’s commemoration took shape in virtual space, revealing the persistent tensions between institutional narratives and the lived experiences they seek to chronicle. This exploration of digital commemoration naturally segued into the earliest stages of my doctoral work, where I investigated vernacular practices of commemoration–writing extensively about the X-Codes used by search and rescue teams, monument culture, and the development of living memorial museums in New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward.
Ultimately, what emerged from that work were two projects that took me in different but complementary directions, guiding me toward my current interest in sonic culture. The first examined the sounds of second-line parades, articulating the relationship between sonic repetition and recuperative memory practices in post-Katrina New Orleans. The other explored the pivotal role of independent record stores as crucial sites for post-traumatic memory-making–spaces where sonic memories could be preserved, shared, and recontextualized in the broader narrative of the city’s recovery. And though both of these projects went on to have lives of their own (as an article and a book chapter, respectively), they also articulated a realization that now forms the conceptual cornerstone of my dissertation: that sound emerges as a powerful mediator of trauma.
My dissertation project thus crystallizes years of inquiry into a single, unifying argument: sound, ephemeral, yet profoundly visceral, offers a unique lens through which to examine collective trauma. Without leaving a tangible mark, sound imprints itself indelibly on memory, a paradox that digital technologies only intensify by capturing, manipulating, and dispersing sonic experiences. This work is the culmination of a journey that began with photographs and has evolved across media forms—all while maintaining a steadfast commitment to exploring how mediation, memory, and cultural transformation interact.
Taken together, these projects forge a dynamic inquiry into the cultural metabolism of trauma, a process where visual, digital, sonic, and textual media do far more than merely represent; they actively transform the raw aftermath of tragedy into an enduring archive of collective memory. What once appeared to me as a scattered array of intellectual pursuits now converges into a singular, rigorous meditation on how American sonic culture digests tragedy. In this synthesis, my work not only unifies disparate threads into a cohesive narrative, it also challenges us to reconsider the very means by which we mediate, memorialize, and metamorphose the past in the ever-evolving conditions of the present.
Project Overview
Many years ago, an advisor told me that a theoretical project’s essence could be revealed in its title or first sentence. By breaking down these elements and reading them closely, she assured me, one would eventually discern what the project is actually about. I’ve taken this to heart with my own title, which, before the colon, offers a triangulation - “Man, Music, and Machine” - which maps the collision course among human experience, cultural form, and technological infrastructure.
My inquiry begins in the fractured soundscape of post-9/11 America, a moment when national tragedy recalibrated not just what Americans were listening to, but how they listened to it. In the quiet aftermath of the towers’ collapse, silence was not inert, it was charged with political intent. The soundscape quickly morphed into a contested space where music served both as a tool for forging national unity and as a mechanism of ideological control. This duality was illustrated starkly by the case of The Chicks, whose censorship and industry exile did more than punish dissent: it recalibrated the conditions of audibility. My first chapter thus examines how female country artists navigated the intersection of patriotic expression, gendered expectations, and artistic authenticity. Through public statements, performances, and songs, I reveal how the post-9/11 country music industry trained audiences to hear patriotism in specific ways–delineating the boundaries of acceptable sound and enforcing a form of sonic discipline that shaped a generation of musicians.
Trading the unpredictable communion of public listening for the comfort of individualized, controllable soundscapes, Americans sought refuge in the privacy of their headphones. Today, the evidence is everywhere–public [SLIDE] spaces crowded with individuals ensconced within their personal auditory bubbles. My second chapter traces this transformation, from the early history of the headphone’s development at Nathaniel Baldwin’s kitchen table in Utah, to the iconic white corded earbuds of the early iPod era, culminating with today’s ubiquitous AirPods -a gleaming emblem of acoustic detachment. These devices emerge from a global web of resource extraction–one that silences indigenous voices and scars natural landscapes–embodying a form of double enclosure that often goes unnoticed. This technological shift, forged in the anxious aftermath of 9/11 and sustained by extractive economies, hasn’t just altered how we listen but has redefined the nature of our acoustic subjectivity.
This extended mechanization of listening goes beyond headphones and into the systems that deliver music itself. Algorithms, for example, do more than simply deliver music, they actively shape our tastes, preferences, and practices of cultural consumption. In my third chapter, I contend that music streaming platforms like Spotify do not offer users an experience of serendipitous exploration but rather a carefully calibrated system of containment. In this framework, the modern listener becomes a human-algorithm hybrid, a subject whose tastes, preferences, identity, and affects are continuously reconfigured by machine logic. More crucially, I argue that platforms like Spotify extend the surveillance culture that surged in the early days after 9/11, functioning in ways that are unique in the context of music. With every playlist, skip, and replay feeding into an architecture of and for social surveillance that monitors, categorizes, and ultimately re-shapes our listening behavior, I contend that this system is embedded in the act of cultural consumption, turning our musical choices into data points in a digital panopticon that is both subtle and pervasive.
If Spotify reshapes how we listen, TikTok continues to reshape how music itself is structured. Songs are no longer experienced as cohesive compositions but as viral fragments —fifteen-second affective explosions engineered for maximum shareability. When Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” resurged on the Billboard Charts following a viral moment in 2021, it was not a revival of an artist’s sonic vision, but a testament to the success of algorithmic serendipity. Increasingly, we listen in abbreviated bursts, sacrificing the slow-burn of an aesthetic journey on the altar of immediate emotional gratification. As a result, the attention span of the average American listener hasn’t just been shortened, it’s been restructured around the logic of platform-based listening.
Yet, these transformations in listening are not just technological, they are intertwined with shifting notions of identity. In post-9/11 America, masculinity and whiteness found new conditions for sonic expression. The wounded, reactionary hypermasculinity that emerged in the wake of national tragedy found its voice in the sonic textures of country and rap–genres that, in different ways, became battlegrounds for articulating patriotism, defiance, and belonging. Simultaneously, whiteness was reconfigured through sound, retreating into nostalgic frontier mythologies to assert a kind of heartland authenticity, or appropriating the sonic qualities of cultural resistance while stripping them of political urgency. These were not just aesthetic choices, however. They were negotiations of identity carried out through rhythm, timbre, and tempo.
At the same time, a new figure emerged in the post-9/11 musical landscape: the white rapper who embodied a distinctly different mode of gendered and racial performance. Unlike the bombastic bravado of pre-9/11 white rap figures, the post-Eminem wave of white rappers traded aggression for self-effacement, swagger for a studied nebbishness. In an era of national vulnerability, this softer, more self-conscious white masculinity offered an alternative mode of cultural authority—one that acknowledged fragility while still commanding space in hip-hop’s sonic and visual lexicon.
As these identity negotiations continue to unfold, the very structures that once shaped musical categorization–genres that defined record stores, radio formats, and consumer identities–are rapidly dissolving. Once central to both marketing and meaning-making, genre distinctions now struggle to keep pace with contemporary listening habits. Headlines like “Is Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Redefining Country Music?”, “How Lorde Became America’s New Pop Queen,” “Why Every Song of Summer Now Has a Dembow Beat,” and “Bad Bunny: The World’s Biggest Artist Transcends Genre,” reflect a broader cultural shift, one where genre is secondary to the feeling a song evokes. Even as the industry attempts to cling to outdated genre-based distinctions, listening itself has already moved beyond them.
In the coda I suggest that today’s highly mechanized listening ecosystem has redefined musical organization. Playlists have supplanted albums and ‘vibes’ have become the primary organizing principle of musical experience. Put differently: Spotify doesn’t care if a song is technically indie or bedroom pop, they prioritize whether a track fits curated mood–be it a “chill afternoon study session” or some other atmosphere. As the industry continues to consolidate, auditory aesthetics are increasingly dictated by market-driven formulas rather than artistic intent.
What emerges from this landscape is a practice of entangled listening, one in which the human ear, the cultural artifact, and the technological medium are inextricably linked. Contemporary listening is a dynamic practice, one that shapes individual and collective experiences within specific constraints. Ultimately, how we listen reflects how we experience ourselves, each other, and the world in times of technological mediation and political uncertainty. In this dissertation, I have worked to propose a theory of 21st century listening that recognizes the profound ways our auditory world has been transformed by the interplay of man, music, and machine. Mapping this transformation allows us to listen more critically–to attune ourselves to the forces shaping our sonic world and reclaim a sense of agency within the mechanized soundscapes that define our age.
Contribution to American Studies
My project contributes to American Studies in several distinct yet interconnected ways that reflect the field’s evolution in the 21st century.
First, while American Studies has traditionally conceived of itself as an interdisciplinary field, my work moves beyond conventional cross-disciplinary borrowing. Rather than importing concepts from media studies, literary studies, sound studies, science and technology studies, and musicology, I harness the productive tensions among these fields to forge new methodological possibilities. This approach enables me to examine post-9/11 sonic culture not merely as a container of/for particular cultural artifacts, but as a complex ecosystem where technology, politics, aesthetics, and lived experience converge.
Building on these methodological considerations, the project also illuminates blind spots in existing American Studies scholarship by centering sound as a critical but often overlooked dimension of cultural analysis. While visual culture has dominated post-9/11 scholarship - and in fact scholarship more broadly - my research demonstrates how sonic experiences, from the literal sound of the towers’ collapse to the weaponization of music in Guantanamo Bay, offer crucial insights into how national trauma becomes embedded in cultural infrastructure. By focusing on sound, I reveal how technological transformations shape not only what Americans hear, but how they listen and who controls that listening, exposing the co-constitutive nature of listening as an inherently political, reciprocal phenomenon.
Furthermore, my research challenges the conventional chronologies of American cultural history by interrogating the convergence of 9/11 and the digital revolution, which together generated ruptures and continuities in sonic culture. This temporal complexity demands methodological innovation that transcends disciplinary boundaries while remaining attentive to historical specificity. In resisting both technological determinism and cultural essentialism, I show how technologies and cultural practices co-constitute each other within specific contexts. As a theorist–not a historian–I employ my theoretical training and the frameworks that emerge from it to extract insights that conventional historical methods might overlook. Put differently, my theoretical training enables me to make use of history, analyzing historical elements through distinctive conceptual lenses, revealing patterns and connections that enrich our understanding of cultural transformations, but ultimately moves beyond the limitations of descriptive historical documentation in order to produce new conceptual frameworks that illuminate the complex interplay between cultural meaning-making and technological innovation.
In addition, the theoretical and methodological hybridity of my project directly addresses critiques from adjacent fields that have characterized American Studies as methodologically impoverished, intellectually cursory, and conceptually incoherent. Rather than retreating to the protection of a disciplinary silo afforded by a field like literature or history or political science, I leverage American Studies’ inherent liminality as its fundamental strength, producing analyses that are culturally nuanced, technologically informed, and historically grounded.
Perhaps most significantly, my project reframes approaches to power and resistance in digital culture. By analyzing how popular music and popular culture simultaneously reflect cultural trauma while being co-opted by institutional power structures, I demonstrate the ambivalent position of cultural production in contemporary America. This insistence on ambivalence, I believe, is not a methodological weakness of this project, but rather a necessary reflection of the complex reality that American Studies must engage with to remain relevant in the digital age.
In sum, my project doesn't merely add sound to existing American Studies paradigms; it fundamentally reconfigures how we understand the relationship among cultural trauma, technological change, and national identity in post-9/11 America through sound. In doing so, it advances the field’s capacity to analyze the complex dynamics between human agency and technological systems that increasingly define contemporary American experience.
Future Plans
As I come to the end of this talk, and to the end of my time as a graduate student here at William and Mary, I want to offer some brief thoughts on how I hope to develop this project into a book. Beyond refining its arguments, I see this next phase as an opportunity to enhance its scholarly contributions and broaden its reach.
First, I plan to restructure the chapters to foreground distinct modes of listening, creating a more intuitive framework that traces how post-9/11 digital technologies have reshaped sonic experience. To sharpen my argument, I will condense the project, cutting select chapters to emphasize a central claim: that the convergence of national security imperatives and digital innovation has fundamentally altered listening, producing new forms of sonic attention that are at once intimate and surveilled, personal and mechanized.
As I refine the structure in advance of developing my book proposal, I have been thinking about models that can guide this project’s evolution. S.A. Gurd’s Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (2016), for example, demonstrates how form can mirror methodology, creating a structural coherence that reflects a project’s subject matter. Similarly, Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (2020) employs resonance as both a thematic and structural principle, demonstrating how disparate ideas can be linked without imposing analytical hierarchies–ultimately challenging conventional academic assumptions about causality, linearity, and teleology.
Alternatively, books like Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019) and Tanya Clement’s Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives (2024) connect the technical dimensions of sound recording and playback to larger systems of extraction and consumption, linking personal listening practices to broader technological and environmental contexts, a move that aligns with my project’s broader aims.
Beyond questions of structure and publishing, one critique of my dissertation has been the prominence of my own voice–something that doesn’t always align with traditional academic conventions. Yet in sound studies, where experience and perception are central, I believe an embodied, authorial presence isn’t just a stylistic flourish but a methodological necessity. Understanding how and why these sonic phenomena coalesce into distinct modes of listening requires attention to how one hears, how one listens, inherently subjective and situated processes. As I rework this material, I plan to lean into that dimension, using it to enhance rather than obscure my arguments. Adapting this project for a general readership would require some conceptual and methodological shifts, but I believe that its core argument–about the ways post-9/11 digital technologies have transformed listening practices–remains relevant.
Beyond This Book
Looking beyond this dissertation, I am in the earliest stages of developing what I hope will become my second book project: Wired Narratives: Digital Technologies and the Contemporary Novel. Wired Narratives considers how fiction reimagines and critiques the structures of digital life. I aim to illuminate not just how we write about the internet, but how we think and live through it. If my dissertation interrogates how digital technologies shape sonic experience, this project asks how they structure narrative form.
In addition to this book project, I am also developing an article-length study on war murals from Operations Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom, and Enduring Sentinel, revisiting my initial intellectual interest in vernacular art and commemorative practices. Painted by both soldiers and civilians on military bases, blast walls, and ruins, these murals create a fragmented yet profoundly expressive visual archive of twenty-first-century warfare, offering insight into the lived experience of conflict. They mark territory, mourn losses, and assert identity in landscapes shaped by conflict. Yet they are also impermanent--fading in the desert sun, destroyed in continued bombings, or erased as control of space shifts hands.
Together, these future directions demonstrate how the theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches I've developed in this dissertation project and indeed throughout graduate school more broadly can be productively applied across diverse cultural phenomena, from literary texts to visual media. At their core, all of these projects grapple with the same fundamental question: how technologies – broadly construed – mediate our experiences of the world. Whether through sound, narrative, or image, they ask what it means to remember, to interpret, and to feel within increasingly digitized landscapes.
I want to thank you all once again for being here today and for sharing in this celebration of my work. This journey has been humbling, challenging, surprising, and deeply rewarding, though rarely in ways I could predict, and never quite in the order I expected. I am immensely grateful for the paths that happened to converge with mine, the voices that challenged me, and the laughter that reminded me not to take any of it too seriously. This project carries the imprint of so many conversations, so much generous engagement and thoughtful provocation, so many moments of unrelenting doubt met with equally unassailable reassurance, and the memory of many people I love.
And now, I look forward to whatever might come next –
Thank you.