Audible Infrastructures

Our day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. Songs instantly emanate from our computers and phones, at any time of day. The tools for playing and making music, such as records and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase and use. And when we no longer need them, we can leave them at the curb, where they disappear effortlessly and without a trace. These casual engagements often conceal the complex infrastructures that make our musical cultures possible. Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities DL resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste DL this book provides a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures. As contributors reveal the material-environmental realities and political-economic conditions of music and listening, they open our eyes to the hidden dimensions of how music is made, delivered, and disposed of. In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.

Kyle Devine, Associate Professor, Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Norway, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Canada Kyle Devine is Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, which won a Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as well as the IASPM Canada Book Prize. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is the author of Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anthropologica. She directed the film Golden Scars, partially funded by the National Film Board of Canada, and codirected the films Guardians of the Night, Fabrik Funk, and The Eagle.