Sawt, Bodies, Species

Introduction

VI.

BETWEEN COLONIAL AND ETHICAL NOISE The French Speech Archives, rwais sound, and aural mediation

LISTEN, THAT'S US!

Responses from Tafraout to the Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collection (959)

SALAM GODZILLA The 3960 Agadir earthquake, technocratic listening, and the plural unsound field

A WASTED BREATH INSIDE A BALLOON Popular Sufi healing, postcolonial bodies, and sonic pluralism

STONESOUND Living with stones, lithic af ect, and aural co-domestication

ATLANTIC RAGAGAR Seaweed, pollution, and the voice of the sea

Acknowledgments

Video and Sound Works

Bibliography

Image Index

— INT RODUCTION - E

This book emerged from a series of encounters and exchanges in, through, and about sound in Morocco between 20 2 and 20 P. | initially engaged in this project through an invitation as a sound artist to create a piece on the 959 Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collection for an exhibition. I traveled to Tangier to access digital copies of the recordings made by Bowles fifty-three years earlier, covering various genres of ethnic music. My first encounter with ‘Moroccan sound" was thus doubly mediated: by technological reproduction, and at the same time by Paul Bowles's own sensitivity and ideas on music and Moroccan culture. Listening to these recordings with people from Tafraout revealed a multiplicity of positions from which they could be interpreted today: as musical examples of an initiative in cultural preservation; as an aural souvenir of deceased family members and acquaintances; as objects of aesthetic contemplation; as signs of a past idealized in the name of contested cultural politics; as a case of western cultural appropriation calling for restitution; and as digital cultural artifacts that could be easily circulated in a participative art project. Although each of these positions were equally valid, they were nevertheless all enabled by the sound recordings themselves, likely reproducing a story in which the West is the main protagonist of a local sound modernity.

The concept of “modern sound" (Thompson 20 B) was introduced by European colonizers in North Africa via imported audio technology in the early twentieth century. Sustained by an ideology of technical innovation and social progress, sound was part of a narrative of modernity which naturalized and justified the West's material domination of local populations. The colonized were turned into “passive and docile" participants in this narrative, removed from the production of an effective history of sonic modernity (Bhabha 1994). Sound's coloniality is per petuated today in Morocco through dispositives of power and knowledge inherited from French occupation, nationalized and Islamized after independence in 3956. Continuities can be observed between the Zechz0cra£zc modes of listening of the French colonial administration and those of the current neoliberal regime supported by the Moroccan state. Other continuities surface in the state's cultural policy, in technical and administrative infrastructures, communication technologies, and state-owned media, as well as in research and education programs. Postcolonial bodies, too, bear traces of colonial inscriptions of power and control, as *historical artifacts of

1 Islamic scholarship assigns various meanings to the term “sawt,” including “sound,” “voice,” and “song” (Shiloah 1995).

the Moroccan experience with French colonialism and an emblem of the Islamic postcolonial condition" (Amster 20 B). The Moroccan body is ‘fragmented,” marked as “un-modern,” while at the same time ‘contaminated by modernity and colonialism.” As I will argue, postcolonial aurality echoes this fragmentation. People's listening and sounding practices express competing notions

of embodiment and subjectivity, which can be traced back to locally significant epistemologies and dichotomies. Human-environmental interactions, equally, are marked by a century of colonial overexploitation of land, water, minerals, and biodiversity, per petuated today through state-sponsored neoliberal extractivism. Locally, however, ecological voices point to a more complex history of ‘co-domestication” (Losey et al. 20 B) between people and their environment, revealing the possibility of extra-human agencies.

In Sawt, Bodies, Species, | of er an account on sound and listening in Morocco across a wide domain of activities, including musical expression, art, sound archives, urban planning, building techniques, seismology, healing practices, industrial extractivism, and ecology. As the book's title suggests, my approach supports a pluralist perspective on aurality and ecology, which seeks to establish connections between historically separated fields of sonic knowledge, including ethnomusicology, sound studies, phenomenology, sound art history, acoustic ecology, and North African studies. Sound translates as saw: in Arabic, which literally means “voice” (Shi loah 1M95).* Sound in Morocco thus never quite corresponds with its modern western understanding as a concept and phenomenon separable from the other senses, which can be technologically measured, reproduced, and com modified. As a manifestation of human

or extra-human voice, sawt intimately relates to the body. If embodiment in the Arabo-Islamic tradition expresses a unity between matter and spirituality (tawhid) (Dieste 20 B), this divine unity came to clash with the notion of the biological body supported by colonial medicine during French occupation. Rather than seeing the post-colonial body as ‘incomplete or failed modernity,” Amster (20 B) suggests to understand it as an ‘embodiment-as-pr ocess,” manifesting the ‘work of subjectivity making itself.” Postcolonial embodiment thus of ers an alternative perspective on both modernity and aurality simultaneously. Such an embodied, processual, and relational understanding of sound and listening certainly drives my project, and it does so for

several reasons.

In addressing the relationship between music and sound, ethnomusicological scholarship has interpreted “music” primarily as a dimension of cultural identity and territorial belonging, often without considering “sound” as a social and symbolic practice operating in concrete, material environments (Frishkopf and Spinetti 20 B). On the opposite, the materially and technologically inclined field of sound studies has remained largely Eurocentric so far, arguably sustaining universal categories of listening subjects (secular, white, and middle-class), of urban spaces characterized by shar p divisions between public and private space (the global city), and of notions of sound itself (Steingo and Sykes 20 9). Despite a growing interest in "indigenous" and ‘ethnic” knowledge and expression, institutional sound art equally seems reluctant to question the coloniality of its modernist canon, sustained by a number of "invisible" aesthetic conventions (Groth 2020).

As Dylan Robinson (2020) puts it, the structure of western aesthetics might be enriched by ozZer sights and sounds, but without unsettling the worldview it supports. In the field of political ecology, finally, calls for a radical departure from anthropocentric, naturalist worldviews in the face of climate change frequently remain abstract and speculative. Redistributing intentionality and responsibility across more-than-human 'assemblages" may quickly lead to a depoliticizing of dif erences in positions between humans themselves, when doing so from arelatively privileged position (Schulz 20 7). The necessary re-mapping of aural knowledge and practices across these disciplines implies not only a questioning of abstractions such as “modern sound,” “Space,” and “technology.” It also involves a deeper re-examination of western concepts inherited from the Enlightenment period, including “subjectivity,” “embodiment,” ‘the human," and “hature.” As the Moroccan poet and activist Abdellatif Laábi (1966) aptly remarked, *colonial science cannot be accepted, nor rejected;" therefore it must be ‘digested,” and from there it can be re-evaluated. My research in Morocco is an attempt to participate in this conversation from my position as an artist and sound scholar.

SONIC PLURALISM

Each of the six chapters of the book discusses a particular aural field from which I engage in a reflection on the coloniality of sound, knowledge,

and power in Morocco. These fields do not refer individually to a single point in place and time and they can be better described as heterogeneous assemblages of signs, materials, af ects, and narratives, linked together across time and space through a dense web of relations. These assemblages progressively emerged through exchanges, conversations, and interventions with a number of local artists, musicians, scientists, and other people— mostly in rural and peripheral regions of Morocco. Listening was always

a central modality of these exchanges. To speak with Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth (20 1), | was ‘interested in exploring what listening can do,” as it takes place in individual and collective processes concerned with

the possibility of social, political, and ecological change. This experience gave me a sense of what I call ‘Sonic pluralism,” that is a capacity to combine conceptually distinct notions of sound. In a strict sense, sonic pluralism refers to a kind of aural »77c7e£2572, that is an amalgamation of dif erent epistemologies manifested through aural practices. Sonic pluralism thus simultaneously refers to the constitutive plurality of the postcolonial aural field 2774 to people's ability to act upon their own listening in order to find new meanings in aural experience. Although sonic pluralism may af ord

in principle endless possibilities of positioning oneself in relation to sound, these possibilities appear, however, constrained in practice by the particular historical position of listening subjects. My examples attests to people's concrete ef orts to emancipate from perceptual and epistemological schemes which are often felt as oppressive. Sonic pluralism therefore refers to people's ways of questioning the limits of what can be perceived from one's particular position, in order to sometimes better circumvent these limits.

This questioning may take dif erent forms, as the examples from my case studies demonstrate.

On a sound epistemological level, sonic pluralism in my study pertains to examples of direct engagement with recording technology and colonial music archives. Local initiatives open up new perspectives on colonial sound epistemology, raising questions about the “erasure ef ects” of ethnographic recording, about racist ideas and misrepresentation of ‘native cultures," and about sound itself as a modern western technological concept. By drawing on multiple epistemologies, sonic pluralism participates in attempts to re-pur pose sonic knowledge for local needs; this entails a negotiation about the relationship between musical expression, knowledge, technology, and history (Chapters I and II). At a subjective and experiential level, sonic pluralism informs people's personal experimentation with listening and sounding; this frequently involves liminal aural experience, which in my examples is manifested in transcultural sound encounters (Chapter 11), in popular Sufi healing practices (Chapter IV), and in sound artistic experiments at the limits of audition (Chapter V and VI). As such, sonic pluralism involves processes of subjective redrawing and self-for mation; the body appears as a site from which the perceived fragmentedness of the self can be reworked, by drawing on locally relevant knowledge, spiritual practices, or artistic strategies. In the domain of ecology, sonic pluralism pertains to processes of co-for mation between people and their environment. In rural areas in particular, environmental listening mirrors locally significant symbolic representations of space, which occasionally conflict with technocratic modes of land management (Chapter III and V) and with industrial extraction of ‘natural resources" (Chapter VI).

By highlighting the situated, embodied, epistemic, agentive, and ecological dimensions of aurality, sonic pluralism corresponds with a number of existing concepts in the field of sound studies: with Feld's (20 7) notion of “acoustemology ;” with Ochoa Gautier's (20 M) discussion of ‘aurality;” with Kapchan's (20 5) definition of the “sound body;" with Pettman's (20 7) ‘Sonic intimacy," as well as with Goodman's (2010) “unsound,”to name a few. My research equally draws on recent contributions 04%/sZde of sound and music studies in Morocco, which highlight additional local dimensions of pluralism:

“medical pluralism" can be observed in people's combining of traditional healing and biomedicine (Amster 20 B); architectural pluralism is expressed in the mix of traditional and industrial building techniques in vernacular architecture (González Sancho 2077); ontological pluralism is expressed in the polysemic status of trees (Delplancke and Aumeer uddy-Thomas 20 1), and of stones (Simenel et al. 2055).

Sonic pluralism reveals alter native genealogies of sound and listening, which in my examples can be traced back to Islamic scholarship, Sufi practices, Berber-Amazigh cosmologies, along with other locally significant knowledges. This more-than-sonic approach of ers a new perspective on aurality in Morocco, also informing alternate narratives on sonic modernity in North Africa. Sonic pluralism, ultimately, refers to the ever-changing ontological status of sound 2z5eZf. Sound's material, symbolic, af ective, and aesthetic dimensions are reworked by people through listening and sounding practices. As a result, sound in Morocco is continuously becoming ozz of itself; if bodies carry histories of embodiment within themselves, so too does sound. Sound, as “sawt; is thus always a ‘Sound body.” Sound 'in-itself," as an autonomous phenomenon that can be obser ved from the outside, is de-centered in my study; it appears even more as a particular product of modern western subjectivity, despite its persistence in contemporary discourses.

PERIPHERAL AURAL FIELDS

My research covers three main geographical and socio-linguistic areas

of Morocco: the Berber-Tashlhit speaking Sow.ss region between Agadir and the Anti-Atlas mountains in the Southwest; the Arabized and rural Jþala land of the Pre-Rif region in the North; and the industrial western Atlantic coast between Safi and El Jadida. The three regions are geographically and culturally distinct from one another; however, they share a comparable *peripheral" status within a geography of neoliberal “uneven development" of the last thirty years in Morocco (Bogaert 20 5). By prioritizing metropolitan growth, along with tourism, real estate development, of shore activities, and mega projects in the northern urban centers, governmental strategies have increased the divide between town and country, between coastal cities

and inland cities, and between dif erent regions in Morocco. This trend can be traced back to the policies of the French Protectorate and the distinction between a “Maroc utile"(useful Morocco) and a "Maroc inutile"(useless Morocco). As Bogaert (20 5) notes, this figurative image was called into existence

by the first Resident-General of the French Protectorate, H ubert Lyautey:

In order to extract the main wealth of Morocco, comprising mainly minerals such as phosphate and agricultural products, colonial planning anticipated the creation

of entirely new urban areas (villes nouvelles) and the install ment of industrial complexes (eg. the port of Casablanca). In addition, the French developed road and railroad networks to improve the transportation of goods and create an "Atlantic axis" between Kenitra and Safi with Casablanca as economic centre, This part of Morocco is what Lyautey called le Maroc utile, which connected the newly developed coastal cities and the surrounding fertile Atlantic plains (Abu Lughod 1980).

Maroc inutile represented those areas that were not of economic interest and actually resisted French colonialism until the “pacification” ended in the 930s.

Whilst rural and mountainous areas have been systematically neglected by the colonial authorities and later by the Moroccan state, cities such

as Safi and Agadir have seen their initial "useful" status decline as a result of structural adjustment since the 2000s. Neoliberal management and technological automatization have led to a massive reduction of the workforce, leading to a rise in unemploy ment af ecting the younger generations especially2 This tendency was accompanied by

a gradual and continuous retreat of public authoririties from the provision of health, education, and cultural infrastructures (Boudarbat and Ajbilou 2009). The marginalization of economically less utilizable regions has led to an increase of “small town protests" (Bogaert 20 5) in the last twenty years, often brutally repressed by the authorities.

2 Amongst other causes explaining this boom in youth unemployment, Boudarbat and Ajbilou (2009) mention a disproportional growth of youth population over the past thirty years, as well as an unequal education system.

These events manifest a growing dissent with the state, signaling a failure by King Mohammed VI to implement significant changes in state policy since the beginning of his reign in 999. Living conditions have continued to deteriorate despite Morocco's increasing economic growth. The democratic transition process remains slow and cases of corruption and abuse in the field of human rights are regularly reported. On 20 February 201, 550,000 to 200,000 Moroccans marched the streets demanding justice and democracy in the wake of the 'Arab Spring" protests (Maghraoui 20 B). However, this popular movement neither led to a regime change, nor did

it fundamentally alter the relationship between the state and its citizens. The activists of the “February 20 "democratic movement did not succeed

in actively involving large parts of the working-classes and the rural and urban poor as a group, despite the fact that some of their demands coincided. Whereas H amouchene (20 9) denounces a lack of political consciousness

in many of the working-class protesters, Bogaert (20 B) suggests that it is actually capitalist uneven development that has encouraged and deepened such a binary relationship.

MUSICAL EXPRESSION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN MOROCCO

My research is informed by the current socio-economic and political situation in Morocco, and by the continuities which can be observed between colonial and neoliberal state policies and institutions. In the field of cultural politics, a number of recent contributions focus on music as an expression

of ‘cultural identity"in relation to particular power configurations articulated locally and transnationally (Goodman 2005; Boum 2007). This includes

a constant negotiation between independent cultural actors and the state which holds considerable power over the development of the cultural scene. Identity politics also surface in ‘hybridization processes" (Boum 2007) between 'traditional" forms of musical expression and foreign music styles, including modern western and Middle Eastern popular music. Several important phases are highlighted in the evolution of these processes since the country's independence in 956. The state's cultural agenda of the

early postcolonial years clearly emphasized the Arabo-Islamic "roots" of

the new nation, sidestepping ethnic and rural forms of cultural expression

(Goodman 2005). This early phase was followed by a “New Song” movement in the 1970s, combining vernacular elements with a modern western sound, and politically oriented lyrics (Simour 20%). Tradition was literally “re-invented” as part of the modernizing project in which the new singers were engaged, thus per petuating *colonial stereoty pes" about oral cultures (Goodman 2005). The repressive "Years of Lead" of Hassan II's regime in the D80s led to the emergence of a largely ‘de-politicized” fusion music scene in the mid-B90s (Simour 20 5). Stimulated by a booming “world music" market, musicians were experimenting further with formal hybridizations, celebrating “multiculturalist visions, coexistence, and tolerance."

King Mohammed VI's enthronement in B99 marked the beginning of a re-orientation by the state of its nationalist agenda toward a “multicultural” national identity, promoted in state-funded media and music festi vals (Boum 2007; Kapchan 2008). Because this new ideological construction only brought superficial improvements in the field of democratic rights and expression, music remains an important site of social contestation in contemporary Morocco.

This manifests in rap music in particular (Almeida 20 Z7), and in protest songs to a lesser extent (Granci 20 B). Political content in the public sphere remains however highly monitored by the authorities, and cases of people arrested for criticizing the monarchy or stately institutions are frequent? The ef ects of the continuous ideological re-invention of past traditions as part of contested identity politics were omnipresent in my attempts to engage with historical music recordings through listening sessions in Morocco.

3 Even though most reported cases concern jour nalists and activists, they also include musicians and people posting critical song lyrics. (https//w w w.amnesty.org/ en/latest/news/20 W9/1/moroccorapper-sentenced-2)

As aresult, old songs were often reduced to signs of an idealized past, making it dif cult to discuss them as actual music practices. In a sense, sonic pluralism responds to the superficiality of state multiculturalism by foregrounding alternate modes of sovereignty, as manifested through specific practices of listening and sounding.

COLLABORATIVE ARTISTIC RESEARCH

As a far-reaching methodological concept for the co-production and mediation of knowledge in anthropological and artistic research, “collaboration” has been key to my project since the beginning (Marcus 2006; Papaster giadis

20 2). Each of the aural fields discussed in the chapters have emerged

from observations, conversations, and experiments carried out with local artists, musicians, scientists, and other people. In most cases, these partnerships were based on an initial agreement to engage with specific places and situations, without knowing in advance what exactly would define the terms of our collaboration. We were obviously aware of each other's practice

and interests, and sound was not always the starting point of our interactions. The subject matter was often defined by my collaborators current focus:

the archival research initiated by the Agadiri musician Ali Faiq on the French Speech Archives informed our exchanges on colonial sound epistemology, leading to additional sound experiments and recordings (Chapters I and III); Ramia Beladel's engagement as a performing artist with popular Sufism provided a starting point for our joint research on healing practices in

the Jbala region (Chapter IV); Abdeljalil Saouli's art practice and experience with vernacular building techniques triggered our experiments in stone sounding (Chapter V); Younes Boundir's scientific observations on seaweed and pollution informed our collaboration on the western Atlantic coast (Chapter VI). By being responsive to my partners’ needs and interests, and by aligning in part my own research to their projects, collaboration between us turned into a ‘co-creative” process of mutual learning (Ferguson et al. 205; Alexandra 20 17). Later on, some of these projects came to include more people through participatory modes of intervention, involving music and dance groups in Ait Milk and Tafraout, art communities in Marrakech and Moulay Bouchta, and a group of seaweed-har vesting women in Sidi Bouzid.

DIMENSIONS OF SONIC PLURALISM

Sonic pluralism recapitulates my attempts to think sound and aurality together with the terms of modernity and coloniality in Morocco. On the level of social agency, sonic pluralism amounts to a form of negotiation and mediation between opposing tendencies in society, and between conflicting knowledges. As a dimension of subjective formation and embodiment, sonic pluralism participates in individual and collective processes of sel f-for mation and governance. Sonic pluralism is particularly indebted to Walter Mignolos (20 1) pedagogical principle of ‘border epistemology.” If being appears irremediably entangled with the ‘colonial matrix of power and knowledge,” the body of ers a site from which it becomes possible to re-work the borders of these entanglements. Sonic pluralism is concerned with such processes and translates them into the aural domain. | also draw on the notion

of “performativity,” amply discussed in gender studies (Butler 3990) and in artistic research (Bolt 2036). The transformative power of sonic pluralism

is expressed in people's “acts” of listening and sounding, aimed at questioning and shifting social conventions. The principles of agency, border epistemology, and performativity generally inform my interpretation of aural practices as sonic pluralism. In the following, | provide a number of examples from my case studies to support this interpretation. For the sake of clarity, | have grouped these examples according to four dimensions of sonic pluralism: aural mediation, self-governance, aural co-domestication, and aesthetics.

SONIC PLURALISM AS AURAL MEDIATION

The notion of "mediation" in sonic pluralism pertains to local modes of engagement with sound technology, as well as to processes of negotiation between dif erent epistemologies of sound and listening. Early postcolonial anthropological studies of technology have already stressed how colonial subjects understood and “indigenized” foreign technologies in their own conceptual schema. Franz Fanon (1959) provides a remarkable example with his account on the use of the radio by the Algerian resistance during the war of independence. Radio as a foreign technology was culturally ‘digested” in connection with the national struggle, he notes, turned into a fighting instrument for the people and a protective organ against anxiety.

un >?

By recognizing a certain agency in local sound technological practices, recent contributions in African sound studies succeeded to deeply complicate earlier sound narratives on the continent. In his study on media technologies in Nigeria, Brian Larkin (2008) pays particular attention to “unintended consequences” and the “autonomous power" of technological objects themselves, which create technical and social potentials outside their sponsors control. Domestication processes of technologies as objects that have meaning reveal new social agency, as well as the 777727. of that agency. Charles Hirschkind (2006) used a similar approach in his study of taped Islamic sermons in the popular quarters of Cairo in the W90s. With the increasing popularity of such tapes, taped sermons have become more independent from the mosque performances that they reproduced. They constitute a new ‘Signifying practice," one oriented to an emergent ethical and political community being forged by the Islamic Revival. These new forms of “ethical” listening feature in the formation of an aural ‘counter-history,” which questions modernist formations of politics and religion and the ideologies that sustain and legitimate them. Overall, these accounts simultaneously confirm and contradict the western ideals of modern sound and listening: technologically mediated listening acquires social meaning in linear flows

of information, as much as in technical noise, fragmentation, and inef ciency (Larkin 2008); audio media are consumed privately as part of neoliberal markets, whereas local understandings of ‘privacy” are deeply entangled with notions of collectivity and specific forms of associational life, community, and authority (Hirschkind 2006); the af ective and sensory dimensions of listening pertain to secular rationalities, as much as to moral and religious sensibilities. All of these aspects informed my own research on sonic pluralism. Sonic pluralism, therefore, is not just about combining multiple sound epistemologies, but more fundamentally about creating socially relevant continuities between them.

In Chapter I, aural mediation is foregrounded in my study on itinerant rwais music, a poetic genre of oral expression characteristic of early modernity in Morocco. If rwais musicians had no or little control over technologies of sound reproduction in the early days of the music industry, examples show that they soon began to take advantage of the social and technological transformations brought by modernity under French occupation. | consider how man-machine relationships were consciously reflected in rwais songs, as part of wider changes taking place in Moroccan society in the early twentieth century. Through their particular social position as itinerant bards, the rwais often acted as mediators between various groups of populations and between various instances of knowledge and authority (Schuyler 379). I discuss these aspects through the lens of sonic pluralism, arguing that rwais 'Sound" was characterized by social, moral, and epistemological mediation. If rwais expression appears in decline today, its spirit of mediation continues to animate local initiatives of cultural transmission. This interpretation is supported by my repeated exchanges with the Agadiri singer Ali Faiq about a set of rwais songs recorded for the French Speech Archives in the 7920s. By studying the archive through ‘close-listening” and by analyzing its metadata, Ali Faiq became progressively more familiar with French colonial sound epistemology. H is engagement amounts to a form of sonic pluralism, where potentially oppressive knowledge is acquired in order to be critically re-pur posed for dif erent needs. By showing that a whole field of rwais expression existed outside of the music recording industry, Ali Faiq managed to regain agency in history making for his own community. Beyond a mere re-appropriation of cultural artifacts, sonic pluralism entails the re-appropriation of knowledge—in this case on sound recording, archival techniques, and historiography, as well as their circulation through cultural mediation.

In Chapter II, sonic pluralism surfaces in listening sessions with people in Tafraout, a Berber town visited in 959 by Paul Bowles (9D- 7999) in order to record a village music performance. Our conversations highlight a plurality of perspectives on the Bowles recordings, revealing colonial continuities in the celebration of past 'Berber-Amazigh traditions" through revivalist tendencies.’ If traditional music practice has lost in social significance on a local level, it of ers a new visibility to Berber culture on the “world stage” (Goodman 2005). In the case of female musicians especially, transnational mobility provides them with increased social agency and financial autonomy. Whereas local “sound” essentially serves as a currency on the world music market, listening appears less likely to be commodified in the process. Our exchanges foregrounded the active role of the audience in local village music, whose presence is integral to the perfor mance. Despite significant changes in society, listening plays an important part in the aural (and oral) transmission of locally significant symbolic representations, which mediate between people and virtual realms of being.

4 The term "Berber "today

in Morocco applies to Berberophone populations, who represent approximately 40 percent of the total inhabitants. This includes dialects spoken principally in the mountainous regions of the Rif and the Middle Atlas in the North and center, and the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas mountains, as well as the Souss Valley in the South. Berber populations generally define themselves through Indigeneity and language.

Theterm 'Amazigh"translates into ‘free men," and was progressively introduced by Berber nationalist leaders as an indigenous term of self-referral. They claimed also that the various Berber dialects had once constituted a single, pan-Maghrebi language called Tamazight (Goodman 2005).

Chapter III examines the plurality of aural responses generated by the earthquake that destroyed the city of Agadir in 3960.1 draw a comparison between the modes of zechzocratzc listening mobilized by the scientific experts in charge of the city's reconstruction, and the analogical listening that surfaces in Ibn Ighil's poetic account of the disaster. Through the notion of ‘Seismic risk” (Williford 20 17), experts in Agadir attempted to anticipate /viure seismic vibrations through a mix of scientific and bureaucratic practices. For the local administration, this meant the possibility to expropriate people living in the city center and to seize their land in the name of the “public interest.” The poet, on the other hand, relied on locally significant analogies in order to virtually re-enact the af ect caused by destruction, facilitating thus an af ective reconfiguration process by the listeners. These examples highlight opposing notions of sonic virtuality: a scientific one expressed in statistical risk prediction, and a perfor mative one expressed in the poet's versifying practice. This brings me to a discussion of Steve Goodman's (20D) “unsound” as an expression of 'future sound" and 'Sonic virtuality." While Goodman argues that unsound transcends the culturality of audition by relying on “universal” phenomena connecting material vibration to human af ect, my examples suggest, on the contrary, that the virtual can be equally colonized by oppressive forces and reclaimed by postcolonial subjects. Overall, my study confirms some of Larkin's and Hirschkind's observations on the mediating function of sound technologies in (North) Africa. My examples also extend these obser vations to other modes of engagement with “modern,” “material,” and “virtual” sound, calling for a reconsideration of the terms that define technology in the first place. If 1 am less inclined to foreground the “autonomous power" of technological objects ¿hemselves, it is to better highlight peoples agency in mediating between dif erent notions of sound and technology.