Sounding History

What price does the planet pay for music? Where has the material presence of music gone now that it comes to consumers mostly in the form of data on portable devices? What is the environmental price of the way we live musically today? The music scholar Kyle Devine has written a provocative book that sets out to answer these questions. This week, in the final episode of our first season, we talk about Devine’s sometimes surprising arguments, consider what they mean for our own projects, and turn towards music from a more-than-human future: AI jazz.

It’s hard to map a sound. Soundwaves don’t care about borders drawn on maps, even if these involve high fences, unless they are being jammed by censorius regimes. And even then short wave radio often bounces through. Sound, perhaps even more than people’s physical bodies, finds a way. This week we consider soundworlds on the border, in the in-between, in the hope of thinking more clearly about how people shape their sense of place sonically.

Sound travels. That’s a truism, but as you will hear in our conversation today, the practice of following sound, sound technologies, and musical styles around the world can really change the way we perceive words that we think mean the same thing everywhere: seemingly-simple words like “jazz” and “blues.”

Does music stand apart from the “real world”? We don’t think so. Take, for example, the operas of Jean Baptiste Lully for the court of Louis XIV. More than works of art, these were spectacles of pure politics. They shared the quality with the dramatic musical genres of many empires near and far, including that of Mansa Muso in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This week we visit places “on the edge,” where different musics meet. The first is on the Silk Road, the land route from China to Europe through Central Asia. In the early seventeenth century CE, in Xi’an in Western China, Chinese officials found a stone inscribed in the Chinese and Syriac languages (the Nestorian Stele) that dated back to the Tang Dynasty a thousand years before. This discovery, which soon made its way to Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, triggered a bizarre misunderstanding (“whacked out” is the word we use!) in Europe about the “musical” nature of the Chinese language. Our second “postcard” takes us to the Pacific Ocean and the cosmopolitan world of the whaling ship, a floating factory where people, cetaceans, death, extraction, and music came together in a special soundscape.

Canals are built waterways dug into the ground which historically have carried water, people, energy, goods–and information. By analogy computers, networks of digital connection linked via the World Wide Web, carry information the same way. The travel and collision of disparate sounds on the early canals of the young United States shaped its music history. We can think the same way about the earliest history of music on computers.

What does music history have to do with the concept of the Anthropocene, the period of geologic time marked by human impact on the Earth's climate? We begin with the intersections of music and economics, “troubling” our view of 18th century European musical life and its dependence–in part–upon profits from the slave trade. These challenging connections can be heard, in the mind’s historical ear, resonating in spaces from concert halls in Haydn’s London to the dance halls of contemporaneous colonized Jamaica.

Tom and Chris in the Rose Garden, or: how two music historians, with a shared 1990s history in radio but very different academic journeys since, found their way to the cafe of a British heritage site, brainstorming a global history of empires, culture, labor, energy, and data – and then a podcast to go with it.