A Review of The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening

The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening by Alejandro L. Madrid (Duke University Press, 2025, 384 pages)

Madrid explains that he, too, was forced to think in new ways over the course of the ten years he worked on his book. In his introduction, he writes,

That period has afforded me time to think, question my ideas, and rethink my conclusions many times. It has also allowed me to cross paths and share my work with many scholars… Needless to say, the concepts in the final book bear little resemblance to the ideas I had when I started writing it. 

His book sets the stage for a reader’s intellectual exploration of sound by referring to Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama’s theory of the Lettered City (Ciudad Letrada) and his own proposal for the Aural City (Ciudad Aural). Neither the Lettered City nor the Aural City are actual metropolises, but rather “metaphor[s] for an urban intellectual elite.” Rama developed the concept of the Lettered City by examining relationships between literacy and power in Latin America’s urban spaces. Madrid explains that, just as there are networks of literary works and creators, there are growing networks of sound archives made possible by modern technology. The Archive and the Aural City, he says, explores “the context of archives that store sound and the particular types of mediation that inform the production and circulation of knowledge in and about Mexico and Latin America.” The world he focuses on was made possible by recording technologies emerging at the end of the 19th century and beyond that “motivated the development of an Aural City (Ciudad  Aural), an urban intellectual elite that seeks to reevaluate prevalent visuo-centric and logocentric ideas about understanding and representing the world from a locus provided by sound and listening as a type of epistemic labor.”

Early recordings

The archives he mentions are familiar to me, having personally known both Henrietta Yurchenco (1916-2007) and Thomas Stanford (1929-2018), U.S. ethnomusicologists who recorded Indigenous and traditional music in Mexico from the 1940s and 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century. However, he says little about them—I wish there had been a bit more. On the other hand, he gives a serious (and decidedly negative) critique of the work of an earlier collector of Indigenous Mexican music, Prussian ethnologist and linguist Konrad Theodor Preuss (1869-1938). The Preuss Collection was created under artificial conditions, with informants dictating chant fragments and then singing them for Preuss’s recording machine. Noting that he focused on Preuss’s 1905-07 expedition to Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental, Madrid writes,

Preuss’s field trip [to the Náayeri (Cora) and Wixárika (Huichol) territories] was conducted precisely within the historical context of the German colonial and empire-building projects that color contemporary debates about the Humboldt Forum. I am interested in the implications of looking at this archive as a collection of sound recordings that triggers a fetishizing fantasy about the past and its presence in the present while concealing the simulacrum-like character of the mediation processes that inform its production.

He concludes that, “Preuss understood what his episteme allowed him to understand; heard what he was trained to hear, in the way he was trained to hear it; and was able to capture only what his technology allowed him to capture.”

Despite flaws in his methods, Preuss’s wax cylinder recordings archived in Germany and the Soviet Union until recently “became an object of desire among Latin America scholars” at the beginning of the 21st century, according to Madrid.

The microtonal Sonido 13

This book about sound also devotes a full chapter—with photographs, musical scores, diagrams and a cartoon—to the Sonido 13 piano created to produce music based on the microtonal scale invented by Mexican composer Julián Carrillo at the beginning of the 20th century. Although created a century ago, Sonido 13 is appreciated in today’s avant-garde Aural City.

Conspiracy theories arose that attempted to explain Carrillo’s marginalization from Mexico’s cultural history as a conscious attempt by individuals in governmental institutions and members of the Lettered City to render his legacy invisible. These types of representations and the aura of hidden alternative knowledge that accompanies them form the allure that has made Sonido 13 and the Carrillo Pianos into objects of desire for the Mexican Aural City at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Two chapters later, Madrid suggests the Carrillo pianos can be considered “metaphorical and literal open-source archive(s)” and writes that “Although these instruments were designed with specific musical goals in mind, they have the anarchist potential of becoming sources of new sounds and creative processes in line with the sonic affordances stored in the instruments’ materiality.”

Today’s creators of the Aural City 

While Madrid’s work touches on official archives at the Fonoteca Nacional and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the author’s excitement is clear when he writes about a freewheeling Aural City. Examples of cutting-edge, non-traditional independent archives fill the pages of chapters 5 (“Mexican Rarities, Disco pirata, and the Promise of a Sound Archive of Postnational Memory”) and 7 (“In Search of the Aural City: Collective Action and the Invisible Sound Archive”).

Disco pirata, a 2016 project by French sound artist Félix Blume who recorded quotidian sounds of Mexico City, became a source for Mexico’s film industry after being featured as part of a Fonoteca Nacional sound installation. The Fonoteca event was designed to give Mexico City residents new ways to perceive the sounds around them.

Mexican Rarities, another archival project Madrid says is of “postnational inspiration,” emerged during the Covid-19 shutdown. The creators of this physical and online archive_—music collector Arturo Castillo, digital artist Alfredo Martínez, underground musician and visual artist Víctor Garay and sound artist Juan Pablo Villegas—had been known previously for their interest in “unearthing little-known music and sound projects that escape the commercial logic of the Mexico music industry.”

As infinite as Borges’ Library of Babel

Madrid compares the archives of the Aural City to Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel (Biblioteca de Babel). In that short story, Madrid wrote, the Argentine writer “imagined an ‘unlimited and periodic library’ made of ‘an indefinite number, maybe even infinite, of hexagonal galleries’ that ‘is so enormous that any reduction to human origins is infinitesimal.’”

While Madrid’s book provides a taste of what wild, innovative sound archives existed at the time of publication, it’s inevitable that the field will continue to expand just like the infinite and ever-expanding bookshelves of Borges’ Biblioteca.

If locating the semiprivate personal archives of sound artists who wish to stay away from mainstream commercial networks is a difficult task, identifying, arranging, and delineating a larger, exhaustive archive of the alternative music, sound art, and experimental practices of artists and researchers equally weary of the mainstream, even if circumscribed to a single country or a particular cultural region, is even more of an almost impossibly utopian project.

I suppose readers captivated by the sometimes-interconnected sound archives Madrid introduces could use his book as a launching pad for future exploration of the sounds around them and the archives they may find and/or create. It certainly broadened my understanding and piqued my curiosity about archives available on the Internet today and places like El Chopo, an alternative cultural neighborhood that I didn’t visit often enough when I lived in Mexico.

Lindajoy Fenley is host of Crossing Borders, a world music program on KRCB, Sonoma County California’s NPR station. She lived in Mexico City for 18 years where she worked as a journalist and as the founding director of Dos Tradiciones, a non-profit promoting traditional music and cultural exchange. She also produced music programs at the Instituto Mexicano de la Radio (IMER).

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