Introduction

This chapter offers an introduction to the framing and movement of Sound Research in Troubling Times: Hope in Crisis. The chapter begins with an exploration of “hope in crisis” as it is developed through the various contributions to the book, where this formulation takes on (at least) two valences. In the first instance, “hope in crisis” offers a provocation for exploring how hope might be rethought and resituated as a practice that takes seriously today’s convergence of crises. In a time marked by ongoing hot and cold wars, waves of pandemic fatigue, the pressing weight of ecological grief, and a range of increasingly damaging socio-political injustices, hopeful melodies have been blasted—turned up full volume—drowning out all sorts of other potentially transmuting frequencies and resonances. The chapters introduced here investigate, each in their own way, what happens when hope is detached from its habitual refrains and clichéd melodies and revealed as inextricably linked to affective tonalities of exhaustion, suffering, and inequity. In the second instance, the formulation of “hope in crisis” refers to how this collection positions hope itself as being in crisis, necessitating experimental approaches, such as those enabled by “sound research.” Referring to modes and methods of research that deploy sound in some way, but also research that has been deemed legitimate, reliable, trustworthy, and thus sound, “sound research” is introduced here as a site to grapple with how present conditions, including conditions for research, are always contingent—always already in trouble—and thus also subject to change both conceptually and materially.