The collisions of music and sport are so ubiquitous that they often go unnoticed as cultural phenomena. Yet the integration of sound into sport has become inseparable from the experience itself—from walk-up songs and seventh-inning sing-alongs in Major League Baseball to the halftime spectacle of the Super Bowl, the “California Sound” of surfing culture, and the percussive traditions of Brazilian Capoeira.
The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society explores these intersections through close examinations of key moments, figures, spaces, and events that reveal the deep socio-cultural significance and historical reverberations of music and sport. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners—filmmakers, journalists, and cultural critics—the volume investigates how sound shapes the ways sport is performed, experienced, and understood across diverse contexts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
Across eighteen chapters organized into four thematic sections, The Sound of Victory positions the links between music, sound, and sport as a generative lens for exploring questions of power, identity, and belonging. Spanning media, technology, politics, and popular culture, contributors trace how the music, sound, and sporting industries have evolved in dialogue with one another. Together, they illuminate an enduring relationship that continues to define the affective and communal power of modern sport.
Praise for The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society
"What does innovative scholarship sound like? First, you take two emerging academic stars — Perry B. Johnson and Courtney Cox — and ask them to assemble a broad array of new scholarly voices from sports studies, critical race theory, sound studies, fandom studies, cultural geography and beyond to focus their attention on a historically unexplored topic, the sounds of sports. The result is music to the ears — an expansive collection that asks fundamental questions about the relationship of sports to race, gender, the body, affect, social change, and commerce."
- Henry Jenkins, co-editor of Popular Culture and The Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change
"This deeply researched and beautifully immersive book takes a brilliantly unique angle when looking into modes of fandom, seamlessly weaving in sound, and song. It is an achievement as both an academic text, but also, a massive achievement in storytelling and world-building."
- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
"With The Sound of Victory, Cox and Johnson have done a great service to sports fans and listeners alike. Surrounded by a cast of astute listeners, they give us the breadth and depth of how music and sound shape the modern sport experience— from 100db arena hip hop blasts during time-outs to tennis grunts, MLB sing-a-longs, soccer chants, and even the acoustic design of stadiums. With sound and music more baked into sport than ever before, this is a timely and enlightening volume"
