Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Music Ethnomusicology

Audible Infrastructures

Music, Sound, Media

edited by Kyle Devine & Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Initial publish date
Feb 2021
Category
Ethnomusicology
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780190932633
    Publish Date
    Feb 2021
    List Price
    $154.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780190932640
    Publish Date
    Jan 2021
    List Price
    $43.95

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

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 - resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste - 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.

About the authors

Kyle Devine's profile page

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria.

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier's profile page

Other titles by