In his watershed book, "How Musical is Man?" (1973), John Blacking proffered a new definition of ‘music’ that has become bedrock substrate for ethnomusicological discourse: “humanly organized sound.” However dated his terminology, Blacking hoped to destabilize Eurocentric and exclusionary frameworks in favor of culturally-relative, contextual, and relational definitions. Taking up his project in a new light, this talk presents a new approach to ethnomusicological teaching about music of the Arab world or music in the MENA region. Drawing on Sound Studies, Linguistics, and Linguistic Anthropology, this new paradigm centers around ‘sound,’ rather than ‘music,’ as the nexus of music, language, voiced religious expression, and everyday life. How do different cultural groups organize sound differently from each other or across time and place? Within a shared cultural area, what are the recurring themes or tensions across different types of organized sound (i.e. music, language, ritual oral/aural expression)? Though this model may be useful in teaching about many musico-cultural worlds, I explore several reasons why the ‘sonic nexus’ lends itself especially to the study of the Arabic-speaking world. These include: (1) the centrality of the human voice; (2) the importance of orality in Qur’anic recitation and religious commentary and in the oral arts of poetry, storytelling, and music; (3) the emphasis on the value of listening as a site of knowledge transmission and production, and (4) the significant parallels between regional linguistic dialects and musical diversity. While it is logical to concentrate on the Arabic language and the musical idioms of Arabic-speaking people, the ‘sonic nexus’ affords pedagogical inroads into the study of the musics and languages of other groups of the MENA region including, but not limited to Indigenous peoples (e.g. Imazighen, Tuareg, Bedouin groups), minority religious communities (e.g. Jews, Christians, Copts, Zoroastrians, Bahai.), and minority racial and ethnic groups including (e.g. Peoples of Sub-Saharan descent, Druze, Maronites). The ‘sonic nexus’ framework also opens up discussion of the soundscapes of violence, war, and political protest and is a generative platform from which to examine the various ways that ‘music’ is/has been conceptualized and the legality of music-making and listening in Islamic and Jewish Law. In conclusion, I argue that opening up music teaching to include the study of language enriches student understanding of the inextricable connections between music and language in Arab creative expression, cultural practices, history, and politics.