Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is a socially engaged scholar-activist who researches radical arts interventions in conflict regions of Africa. She is a professor in the Music Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Yole!Africa cultural center in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. She holds a BM in filmscoring from the Berklee College of Music, an MA in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in African Studies from Harvard University.

Co-winner of the 2018 Kwabena Nketia Book Award, awarded by the African Music Section
Winner of the Alan P Merriam Book of the Year Award

"Necessary Noise is a timely ethnographic work that brings the east of Congo into the scholarship on African music. As it engages music textual and filmic analysis for further insight into how art functions as a tool for social engagement and change, it would benefit music and film enthusiasts as well as those engaged in anthropological work, Development studies and African studies. The author leaves no stone unturned in fleshing out critical points relating to film, music, voice, social engagement and power among other aspects. The heavy critique of international NGOs may on the surface appear as one-sided; however, it should be lauded as the willingness of one scholar to tell the naked truth." -- Mumbua Kioko, Volume! The French journal of popular music studies

"This book is a necessary read for anyone interested in current politics and art in the DRC. It also is valuable in its analyses of the relationship between African NGOs and international organizations. Necessary Noise draws from a range of critical theoretical insights and skillfully presents them in forthright, clear prose no mean feat. Upper division undergraduates, graduate students, and general readers alike will learn a great deal from Rivers Ndaliko s methods and her presentation." --African Studies Quarterly

"Necessary Noise by Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is a refreshing addition to the liter-ature on Eastern Congo for one particular reason. It does what no other study has done before, which is to focus on something besides the conflict minerals that have wreaked havoc in the Kivus ... Instead, this well-wrought study, while not eschewing Congo's mineral conflict altogether, shatters the single narrative of war and conflict that has eclipsed so many other topics, from cultural activism through art, to the imaginary, and the quotidian demand for celebration and empowerment." -- Ch. Didier Gondola