This issue theorizes what questions of value might contribute to our understanding of sound and music. Divesting sound and music from notions of intrinsic value, the contributors follow various avenues through which sound and music produce value in and as history, politics, ethics, epistemology, and ontology. As a result, the very question of what sound and music are—what constitutes them, as well as what they constitute—is at stake. Contributors examine the politics of music and crowds, the metaphysics of sensation, the ecological turn in music studies, and the political resistance inherent to sound; connect Karl Marx to black music and slave labor; look at Marx, the Marx Brothers, and fetishism; and explore the tension between the voice of the Worker who confronts Capital head-on and the voices of actual workers.

Contributors: Amy Cimini, Bill Dietz, Jairo Moreno, Rosalind Morris, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Ronald Radano, Gavin Steingo, Peter Szendy, Gary Tomlinson, Naomi Waltham-Smith