As an ethnographer, Whitney studies the nexus of music, sound, technology, and culture through the profession of sound engineering at live music concerts.  Live sound engineers mediate the musical sound between musicians on the stage and listeners in the audience.  Engineers intend their work to be “transparent,” or undetectable, to the audience during sound reinforcement.  However, the inherent vicissitudes within the live sound profession—constantly changing venues, working for different artists, amplifying music for different audiences—greatly challenge engineers’ transparency ideal and force the concept into a dynamic state that social actors regulate through complex negotiation.  Whitney describes this negotiation of sonic transparency through a phenomenology of “signal flow”: a confluence of technological and social processes between the material realms of architecture and electronics and the social construction of identity and hegemonic discourse among musicians and sound engineers.