In the early 20th century, Western travelers to Tangier often designated the North African port city as the place “where Europe ends and Africa begins.” Accordingly, their accounts were filled with descriptions of the intense sights, smells, and above all, noises that greeted their border-crossing arrival: yelling crowds, praying beggars, and the clacking castanets of so-called “Gnawi” or Black street performers mixed with the piano emanating from European buildings. Some also heard threats to European hegemony, including Jewish songs in Tangier’s cafes that lamented Moroccan Muslim deaths at the hands of the French; one writer concluded that the French would need to more violently administer their new Protectorate in the face of such shared Muslim-Jewish antipathy. What drove Western visitors to treat Tangier as a metonym for Morocco; and further, how did sound and music serve to formulate these impressions most strongly? This paper will analyze the soundscapes of early 20th-century Tangier, and specifically how race, empire, and resistance were narratively mapped in the city through sound. Using Euro-American accounts of Tangier’s political, physical, and racial landscape between 1900 and 1923 and drawing on both sound studies and histories of race and colonialism in North Africa, it will consider how in the years leading up to the International Zone the city was constructed as both civilizational crossroads and transgressive racialized space, via descriptions of its sound and music. By considering this sensory history of Europeans and Americans encountering Tangier—and behind it, Morocco, the Orient, and Africa—I argue that the broader colonial encounter is brought into sharper focus, and in particular the role of race and ethnicity in Western colonial interventions in North Africa. These themes would gain even greater significance with the development of French and Spanish colonialism in Morocco, as race became a site of strategic intervention and colonial control for both Protectorates, namely in musical and musicological initiatives. This paper will demonstrate how Tangier’s extraordinary status and its unique clamor rendered it an unusually legible site from which to read the colonial racialization of Morocco.