Electronic music and the problem of electricity / Making infrastructures audible : An introduction / Gavin Steingo. Rivers, gatherings, and infrastructures / Will Straw ; Making music, building roads : A reflection on sound, materiality, and social transformation / Penny Harvey -- Resources and production. Glittery : Unearthed histories of music, mica, and work / Alejandra Bronfman ; Timber to timbre : Fiji mahogany plantations and Gibson Guitars / José E. Martínez-Reyes ; The infrastructure and environmental consequences of live music / Matt Brennan -- Circulation and transmission. Street net and electronic music in Cuba / Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier ; Sonopolis : Activist infrastructures and sonic citizenship in Athens / Tom Western ; Shadows of black and white : Materialities and medialities in May Irwin's "Frog song" / Leslie C. Gay Jr. -- Failure and waste. Another side of shellac : Cultural and natural cycles of the gramophone disc / Elodie A. Roy ; The sounds of zombie media : Waste and the sustainable afterlives of repurposed technologies / Lauren Flood ; Electronic music and the problem of electricity / Gavin Steingo.
Summary:
"Music is typically encountered as a cultural surface. Songs emanate instantaneously and almost magically from our computers and phones. Tools for playing and making music, such as recordings and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase with no assembly required. And when we're done with this stuff, we can kick it to the curb, where it disappears effortlessly and without a trace. Day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. But it isn't. This book digs beneath such surface-level encounters to reveal the infrastructural dimensions of music and listening. It takes nothing for granted about the manufacture, delivery, or disposal of music's material and human bases. These infrastructural phenomena encompass the interrelated material, organizational, and ideological systems that facilitate three main phases in the social life and social death of musical commodities: (1) resources and production, (2) circulation and transmission, (3) failure and waste. The book asks how these three phases influence and respond to aesthetic conventions, material-environmental realities, and political-economic conditions in both industrializing and industrialized parts of the world. Although sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles may seem peripheral to musical culture, Audible Infrastructures shows that all these humble things and their ordinary people are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Undertaking a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures is thus a means of understanding society and of knowing ourselves-and it is a step toward the reorientation of our musical cultures"-- Provided by publisher
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.