critical-political-listening

critical-political-listening is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from sonicfieldlabs/akouo. It costs 154 tokens per session (2,224 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A critical method for examining the social and political assumptions behind how sound is heard, analyzed, or delivered. It asks who is heard, ignored, controlled, or treated as a valid listener.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review synthetic voices, voice datasets, audio platforms, surveillance, sonic policing, military sound, marginalized voices, and other technology-mediated listening systems.
Why use it?
It helps reveal problems that a purely aesthetic analysis can hide, including unequal access, extraction, racial or colonial assumptions, and hearing norms.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions OpenCode.

Good fit Use it to review synthetic voices, voice datasets, audio platforms, surveillance, sonic policing, military sound, marginalized voices, and other technology-mediated listening systems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add sonicfieldlabs/akouo --skill critical-political-listening
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sonicfieldlabs/akouo

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for critical-political-listening

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for critical-political-listening

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sonicfieldlabs/akouo/critical-political-listening.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 154 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,224 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00154 $0.02224
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.01112
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00445
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00222

Measured 12d ago against content hash 278f3e7f6181, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

critical-political-listening scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/critical-political-listening/SKILL.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

critical-political-listening

Purpose

critical-political-listening is the critique ear of akoúō. It prevents sonic mysticism, resonance universalism, aesthetic neutralization, colonial flattening, techno-solutionism, and market blindness.

This mode asks what a listening frame erases, normalizes, monetizes, disciplines, extracts, racializes, genders, disables, or renders inaudible, and what other configurations of audibility might be possible.

When To Use

Use this skill for:

  • sound studies theory
  • AI audio platforms
  • synthetic voice
  • voice datasets
  • music markets
  • streaming platforms
  • colonial archives
  • surveillance
  • border sound
  • sonic policing
  • military sound
  • marginalized voices
  • degraded or distorted sonic cultures
  • platform-mediated listening
  • critique of agent outputs
  • audiovisual work that risks simplistic sound versus vision binaries

Core Question

What does this listening frame erase, normalize, monetize, discipline, or make inaudible?

Conceptual Refinements

  • Acoustic justice concerns the distribution of the heard: who must listen, who is refused audibility, and whose listening is treated as legitimate.
  • Hungry or extractive listening treats sound as resource; ethical listening asks about protocol, reciprocity, consent, sovereignty, and relation.
  • Racialization, gendering, classing, and disabling of sound must be grounded in context, not projected as automatic explanation.
  • AI audio, datasets, platforms, surveillance, and voice agents require attention to labor, consent, provenance, classification, ownership, accessibility, and deployment.
  • Critique should name concrete mediations and stakes; generic power language is a failure mode.

Input Assumptions

This skill can work with:

  • audio files
  • prompts
  • theoretical claims
  • user analysis to audit
  • archive descriptions
  • platform descriptions
  • AI audio outputs
  • dataset descriptions
  • sonic artwork or installation notes
  • cultural, historical, or institutional context
  • accessibility, consent, community, labor, or deployment context

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 179 lines · 154 tokens per session scan A 278f3e7f6181

Subscribe to this mod's changes

critical-political-listening is a skill published in the GitHub repository sonicfieldlabs/akouo (10 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 154 tokens to every session and 2,224 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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