Considers key socio-political moments and figures that highlight the enduring relationship between music, sound, and sport The collisions of music and sport are so ubiquitous that they often go unnoticed as cultural phenomena. Yet the integration of sound into sport has become inseparable from the experience itself - from walk-up songs and seventh-inning sing-alongs in Major League Baseball to the halftime spectacle of the Super Bowl, the "California Sound" of surfing culture, and the percussive traditions of Brazilian Capoeira. The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society explores these intersections through close examinations of key moments, figures, spaces, and events that reveal the deep socio-cultural significance and historical reverberations of music and sport. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners -filmmakers, journalists, and cultural critics-the volume investigates how sound shapes the ways sport is performed, experienced, and understood across diverse contexts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Across eighteen chapters organized into four thematic sections, The Sound of Victory positions the links between music, sound, and sport as a generative lens for exploring questions of power, identity, and belonging. Spanning media, technology, politics, and popular culture, contributors trace how the music, sound, and sporting industries have evolved in dialogue with one another. Together, they illuminate an enduring relationship that continues to define the affective and communal power of modern sport.
Courtney M. Cox (Editor) Courtney Cox is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her upcoming book project is titled Double Crossover: Gender, Politics, and Performance in Basketball, and her work has appeared in InMedia: The French Journal of Media Studies, Journal of Homosexuality, and International Journal of Communication. She is also co-director (with Dr. Perry B. Johnson) of The Sound of Victory, a multi-platform digital humanities project located at the intersection of music, sound, and sport. She previously worked for ESPN, Longhorn Network, NPR-affiliate KPCC, and the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks. Perry B. Johnson (Editor) Perry B. Johnson, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the co-director (with Dr. Courtney M. Cox) of The Sound of Victory, an interdisciplinary, multi-platform initiative dedicated to investigating the historical relationship between music/sound and sport, and producer/co-host of Sounding Off, a podcast that highlights the voices of athletes, artists and public intellectuals working at this intersection.
"What does innovative scholarship sound like? First, you take two emerging academic stars -- Perry B. Johnson and Courtney Cox -- and ask them to assemble a broad array of new scholarly voices from sports studies, critical race theory, sound studies, fandom studies, cultural geography and beyond to focus their attention on a historically unexplored topic, the sounds of sports. The result is music to the ears -- an expansive collection that asks fundamental questions about the relationship of sports to race, gender, the body, affect, social change, and commerce."-- "Henry Jenkins, coeditor of Popular Culture and The Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change"
