In this article, I analyse the implications of autoplaying video as a driver of ‘audile techniques’ in the 2010s digital ecosystem – in particular, techniques that respond to the realities of the separability of image and sound, even in media that contain both elements. I then examine a number of strategies through which this audio/visual split has been negotiated, monetized, and creatively bridged by consumers, creators, and corporate personnel – from the creation of new audiovisual genres and aesthetics, to the rise of particular platform pricing models, to the adoption (and, potentially, exploitation) of accessibility features. Ultimately, I seek to show how negotiations of sound and listening factor deeply into contemporary attempts to harness and monetize ‘attention’ as a commodity in a digital economy of platforms, advertisements, and data.

This article explores the strategies employed by user-creators as they listen to, sense, make, and share digital audiovisual memes of musicking non-human animals on social media. Memes, reels, and other forms of audiovisual social media posts are a form of cultural expression that reveals the varied ways humans relate to, connect with, and represent non-human animals – especially their pets – through sound, music, and the moving image. By listening to the plurality of musicking animals circulating on social media platforms and networks, I argue that user-creators conspicuously use music and performance to express alternative ideas of what it means to be musical, to feel closer to and connect with the important animals in their lives, and to explore the ways they can represent non-human animals using sound and music to explore musical concepts. Using a varied selection of viral musicking animal memes shared across social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, I frame musicking animal participatory media as a creative space for exploring different approaches to listening, performing with, and scoring sound and music to the behaviour, movement, and acoustic communication of the non-human animal. Non-human animal musicking takes a variety of forms across this particular kind of participatory media making by online user-creators.

In 2011, Alex Heitlinger, a senior at New England Conservatory, uploaded the video ‘The Lick’ to YouTube. The 1′34″ compilation excerpted a range of performances that each deployed the same seven-note ‘lick’. This article explores the digital dissemination of videos and memes that feature the Lick, suggesting its function as a mimetic device users can deploy to signal their belonging and individuality within a larger jazz community. The Lick, in its formulaic deployment within these ‘insider’ spaces, moves away from improvisation and becomes a calling card for performers and listeners alike to determine a legitimate participant, on and offline. The Lick's online proliferation becomes a gimmick through its repetition, pointing to its hyper-presence and complaints about the excessive posts of the Lick becoming recycled into over-repeated jokes. I argue the Lick serves as the basis for a study of humour and gimmickry in jazz identity formation.

For many Cubans, the internet remains an inaccessible destination. The residents of repartimiento districts – Black Cuban residents from outlying districts across Havana – manage the situation through custom solutions that bridge gaps of technological precarity. Utilizing USB drives to share content with one another, artists and music fans have constructed a complex, alternative internet that allows for the peer-to-peer trade of movies, music, and other media. Pirate digital networks such as el paquete semanal and Zapya, for instance, circulate music across the island without the need to rely on costly and unreliable internet infrastructure. Utilizing interviews, physical and digital ethnographies, and theories of viral musicking, I argue that Black Cuban artists and music fans, despite internet scarcity, use alternative networks to generate viral events. In particular, Cubans in 2021 joined in a transnational expression of sonic protest through the popularity of the politically subversive song ‘Patria y vida’, a song that circulated widely through underground, USB-based networks. In this article, I discuss the song's construction, circulation, and role in sounding the J-11 Cuban protests to demonstrate how Black Cuban artists and fans share music through USB-based networks not only to solve gaps in technologically precarious situations, but also to generate powerful moments of viral musicking.