In studies of Southeastern Europe, historiographies of nation-building long privileged printed text as a key technology for developing national consciousness during the late Ottoman period. In guiding Ottoman subjects toward national citizenship, nationalists standardized dialects, chose scripts and regularized orthographies, founded newspapers, and wrote exhortations to national sentiment. This broad overview holds especially true for twentieth-century Albanian studies. Crafted within modernist paradigms presuming a stark break between a premodern past, characterized by oppression under “the Turkish yoke,” and a modern present, initiated by Albania’s declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, such works foregrounded the printed word. And embedded within such narratives is a powerful, if unmarked, story of what I term national agency: the imagining of a Nation empowered to act. But text-centric narratives obscure how non-elite agents experienced the transition from empire to nation. And by obscuring the experiences of non-elites, this style of historiography has imposed strict conceptual limits on what national belonging could mean in the post-Ottoman ecumene. To reevaluate this issue, my presentation historicizes the role of sound in the emergence of national consciousness among Albanian-speaking economic migrants in New England from the 1880s to the 1910s. The Boston-centered diaspora served as an incubator for the Albanian national movement, and several of its leaders would later play leading roles in government and civil society on their return to the homeland after 1920. Yet on arrival to the United States, most migrants could not read and few felt themselves to belong to an Albanian “nation.” I examine how these men developed an auditory national culture in diaspora, reading between the lines of contemporary newspaper accounts in order to reconstitute the richer sensorium in which they worked and lived. For migrants, nation-building occurred along a spectrum from private to public, as men read aloud to one another at night in the konak, or workers’ lodge, founded a national church, and attended parades and picnics in New England towns. Suspended between Ottoman, American, and national regimes of subjectivity, these migrants played important, though previously under-examined, roles in shaping the borders of an imagined Albanian nation. By examining the wider sensorial dimensions of nation-building in Albania, as well as Southeastern Europe more generally, this paper aims to reconsider and critique local narratives about the transition from Ottoman Empire to national sovereignty.