Cincinnati Sounds: Exploring a City’s Spaces, Places, and Sounds
Cincinnati Sounds presents a double feature film screening of directors’ cuts of the documentaries Cincinnati Sounds: Exploring a Musical City’s Spaces, Places, and Sounds directed by Melissa Godoy and co-produced with Davison Black at CCM Recording Productions and King of Them All: The Story of King Records by Yemi Oyediran and co-produced with JP Leong. This community engagement event hosted by Cincinnati World Cinema includes a moderated public talkback and storytelling.
Cincinnati, particularly its West End, is a significant American cultural marker as Black Americans traversed US southern and northern geographical, political, and racial borders during the Great Migration. Cincinnati Sounds documents our community-based week-long exploration of American musics, sounds, geographies, and landmarks––some carefully preserved and curated, others remaining only in public memory. It weaves together workshop highlights and autoethnographic reflections of a newly-formed community including interdisciplinary scholars from across the US and internationally in anthropology, English, ethnomusicology, folklore, geography, musicology, performance, urban community planning, Cincinnati artists, and local ambassadors. Community members detail experiences that weave multivalent narratives of urban cultures, histories, practices, and values.
Sounds and musics of American historical and cultural landmarks notably King Records––the Regal Theater, Seven Hills Neighborhood House, Issac M. Wise Temple, River Queen steamboat, Newtown United Methodist Church, Music Hall, Black Music Walk of Fame, Underground Railroad Freedom Center, King Records, Public Library’s “Panorama of Progress,” West End archive, and Miami University musicologist Dr. Tammy Kernodle’s keynote address on Cincinnati’s modern brush arbors and sacrality serve as cultural touchstones that connect diverse people and invites new members to share stories about American life.
About the presenters
Project director Kristy Swift is Assistant Professor of Music Studies at the University of Cincinnati (UC), Director of the Bachelor of Arts in Music program, musicologist, and organist who studies sound, music, and trauma, historiography, opera, musicology pedagogy, and music and moving images.
Discussion leaders are Melissa Godoy, documentary filmmaker and instructor in the Media Production Division at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and Yemi Oyediran a Nigerian American filmmaker, music producer, and educator whose work spans interdisciplinary research with a focus on preserving and reexamining the cultural foundations of American music.
Panel members are Davison Black, a CCM Media Production graduate who films and edits promos, musical performances, and documentaries and contributed to the Ohio Valley Emmy Award-winning short documentary “The Making of Sweet Charity”; Tammy L. Kernodle, Distinguished Professor of Musicology at Miami University and author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams; Eric R. Jackson, professor of history and black studies in the Department of History and Geography at Northern Kentucky University; Joshua Adewole Kerobo, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studying sociopolitical implications of Black Atlantic music cultures among youth communities, Black music development in Cincinnati, and African popular music; and Alexandra Kori Hill, 2025-2026 Provostal Post-Doctoral Fellow in Musicology at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music who is the current chair of the Cincinnati Symphony’s Multi-Cultural Awareness Council, serves as assistant editor and communications associate for I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, the in-house publication of American Composers Forum, and whose first book, The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price, is out now from Cambridge University Press.