A central topic of modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean has been different modes of understanding the human and non-human. Sound has been a key arena for playing out the contested politics of life that have coalesced around such differences. Modernity in the region is characterized by a colonial history of massive genocide and conquest, the reconstitution of indigenous socialities, layered histories of forced and voluntary migrations, and, in some regions, intense biological mixture. This has been a fertile ground for generating contrasting understandings of acoustic phenomena according to different notions of nature and culture, the cosmological and anthropological. This paper explores different modes of defining acoustic categories such as music, sound, voice and silence, according to the ways of conceptualizing the relation between the human and non-human. It particularly explores the significance of such differences concerning disputes about the politics of life.