Alejandro L. Madrid on The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening

Professor Alejandro Luis Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. Among other honors, he has received the Humboldt Research Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and awards from the American Musicological Society, the Latin American Studies Association, ASCAP, IASPM, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Professor Madrid is sought after as an expert commentator by national and international media outlets, including Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, the BBC, Public Radio International, and Radio Uruguay (SODRE). He acted as music advisor to Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose movie, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, is set in early 1930s Mexico.

In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, The Archive and the Aural City. Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening (Duke University Press, 2025) where he examines sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn. 

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These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.