In Powers of Sound: Policies, Listening, and Identities, edited by José Cláudio S. Castanheira, Dulce Mazer, Pedro Silva Marra, Marcelo Bergamin Conter, Cássio de Borba Lucas, Mario Arruda, 73–92. Florianópolis, SC: Insular Livros.
(Published as “MAIS ALTO!” “FAÇA ALGUM BARULHO!” “DE PÉ!” in PODERES DO SOM: POLÍTICAS, ESCUTAS E IDENTIDADES)
This chapter presents a critical ethnomusicological examination of sound, power, and resistance in Canadian professional sports contexts, specifically focusing on football supporters’ culture at Ottawa’s TD Place Stadium between 2013 and 2016. Drawing on four years of fieldwork, participant observation, and thirty-three hours of in-stadium recordings, the study interrogates the “sonic diktat” of professional sport—the electronically mediated, command-driven soundscape typical of North American sporting venues (“GET LOUD!” “MAKE SOME NOISE!” “ON YOUR FEET!”)—and explores how supporters’ groups negotiate, resist, and reclaim acoustic space.
The research centres on two supporters’ groups for the Ottawa Fury FC: the Stony Monday Riot (SMR) and the Bytown Boys Supporters Club (BBSC), examining how these communities successfully convinced stadium operators to eliminate piped-in popular music during matches, creating an acoustic environment dominated by grassroots, unmediated musical performance. Through detailed ethnographic vignettes, the chapter analyzes the tensions between commercial entertainment interests (the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group) and supporters’ autonomous music-making practices, revealing how sound functions as both resistance technology and imperial force.
Theoretically, the work engages with “sonorities research” (Marra and Trotta 2019), phenomenological listening (Ihde 2007), soundscape studies (Schafer 1994), and acoustemology (Feld 2015) to conceptualize sound as “stuff” and music as technology with material affordances. The analysis demonstrates how supporters strategically deploy sonic techniques—chanting, drumming, singing, improvisation—to perform identity, claim territory, generate collective energy, and contest institutional authority. The chapter explores intra-group differences between the SMR and BBSC regarding leadership structures (capo versus leaderless improvisation), spatial positioning, and musical repertoire, revealing how sonic practices encode political alignments and community boundaries.
The study contributes to scholarship on expressive culture, sport studies, and the politics of sound by examining the contradictions inherent in supporters’ resistance: even as grassroots musical performance challenges commercial sportscape conventions, it remains complicit in broader structures of power, tradition, and belonging in settler-colonial Canada.
Keywords: sonorities, soundscape, sports and music, ethnomusicology, resistance, sonic diktat, football supporters, Ottawa, power, acoustemology