Q: What does an anthropologist of sound “hear” at a baseball stadium that the rest of us might miss?
A: Among the sounds I was paying attention to were the various renditions of the national anthem, for example. And the vendors were interesting, their regional accent variations and also the different linguistic strategies they use to call attention to themselves. Sound in a baseball stadium also has a kind of community-building effect. There you are with thousands of strangers, but the cheering and the yells of outrage and the cries of surprise make you feel like you’re all in this together.

Q: How did you become interested in sound as a field of inquiry?
A: I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t interested in sound. My early childhood was spent in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My father was on the faculty at the University of Michigan, and my mother was finishing a PhD in American literature. We lived about a mile away from the football stadium. I remember Saturday afternoons there’d be a game on TV or on the radio, and I’d be listening to it, and every time Michigan would score a touchdown or get an interception or something like that, I would run outside my house and wait for the roar of the crowd to catch up with me in my neighborhood. I remember being very curious about what that delay was all about. I can hear it on the radio, I can see it on the TV, but it doesn’t show up at my house until I’ve had enough time to run out into the front yard and actually wait for it — that’s really cool! The first time it probably happened by accident. My parents probably shouted for me to come outside to do something, and I was like — wait a second…what’s this I’m hearing now? And then it became a game.

Then we moved down to Arizona when I was around 10 years old to a place near Tucson that was reasonably far out in the desert. A lot of my teenage years were about exploring the emptiness of the desert and really kind of liking the solitude and that environment. It was very different from Ann Arbor, much hotter to put it mildly. But as I think backwards to how is it that I became so fascinated with sound, a big part of it is that the desert has these amazing layers of sound inside of it, the continuous drone of insects on really hot days in the summer. It was just a very lush auditory environment. I was probably really attuned to it because pretty much from when I was old enough to sit up, I was taking music lessons of one sort or another. I started with the piano, and then by the time I was in elementary school, I chose the flute because it was the easiest thing to carry home from school. It was a long walk, about a mile through the desert, which of course as a kid feels like four or five miles, and I didn’t want to carry a trombone or something. And then later on in middle school and high school, I got diverted into playing oboe and teaching myself to play bass and guitar and things like that. So music was always part of my childhood, and I think that helped tune me into sound a little bit more than I otherwise might have been, although it just kind of feels like who I am. I had a professor in grad school who said one day that he was just amazed to discover that there are people who walk around with music in their heads all the time! I remember thinking with equal amazement that I couldn’t believe there are people who don’t walk around with music in their heads all the time.

Q: Where did you do your undergraduate work?
A: I went to the University of Arizona, my hometown school, principally because I didn’t really know what I wanted to study for sure, and I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school in whatever it was I was going to pick, so it made sense financially. Also one of best known oboists in the U.S. for some odd reason lived in Tucson, and I’d been studying with him for a while in high school. I started in college on a music performance scholarship, which in the end I decided not to keep, but he was a very good person to be studying with. In the end, I found that I didn’t really like the way the music school was getting me to think about what music was. It just became work. In order to keep enjoying being a musician, I decided not do it professionally. I was in bands, playing in bars — that was good enough for me.

Very accidentally, I sort of stumbled into a linguistic anthropology course as a way to fulfill the social science requirement, for terrible reasons — I had a crush on somebody who was an anthropology major. The class was taught by a very, very charismatic teacher. But even without that, half way into the semester I realized that this is the way I think about the world! Not necessarily that I’m always hyper-focused on language, although I guess I am in a lot of ways, but just the methods that linguistic anthropologists use, the way that they think about language, not just as a system of meaning but as a vehicle for experiencing the world. It all just resonated with me.

Q: Did you major in anthropology?
A: I didn’t wind up majoring in anthropology as an undergraduate. I did what would be the equivalent of an independent major at Vassar. I took a lot of anthropology but also did a lot of work in communications theory and French. And then I did one year of graduate work at the University of Michigan in historical romance linguistics, with a particular focus on comparative French and Italian historical linguistics, and part way through the year I realized that it was a way of thinking about language where you never had to think about people, and I didn’t want to study language without studying how people use it and interact with it and make meaning from it. So after that year, I left and started an MA/PhD program at the University of Texas in anthropology.