classroom deck Flashcards
example of climate - music and protest
climate protesters song at Shell shareholder meeting
subverting functions of space
effective form of passive protest
music organising people
Alice Coltrane, World Galaxy (1972)
Imagination of space.
Galaxy around Olodumare
Track from album.
Imagining galaxy space.
Time warp within piece.
Large sound – filling the space.
Sounds moving in and out from each other.
A lot of the music recorded and given titles after.
Cosmic expanse.
Religion and mystical beliefs.
Ideas moving in a unique way.
Roger Payne – Songs of the Humpback Whale (1971)
US military hearing whales through under-water listening devices.
Massively popular album.
Sea not silent.
Sonograms.
Visualisations of audio.
Trying to structure the songs – composition.
US military devices through under-water listening
Luc Ferrari, Presque rien no 1 (Le lever du jour au bord de la mer) (1970, 21’)
sounding like the sea
additions of other audio sounds from c.30 sounds
sounds of the sea and nature disrupted by electronic sounds and voices
sounds and images colliding and overlapping
‘See what three degrees of global warming looks like’ (2021, The Economist)
climate migration - affecting the poorest people
more natural disasters
adaptation and migration to fix
Andrew Chung, ‘Songs of the New World and the Breath of the Planet at the Orbis Spike, 1610: Toward a Decolonial Musicology of the Anthropocene’ (2023)
1610 dip in CO2 in atmosphere causing depopulation in Americas
land re-wilding, new forests
seen as start of Anthropocene
human activity having distinct impact on the environment
land changing due to human impact
Purcell’s The Indian Queen (1664) as imposed European hierarchy and ‘musical representation’ of Indigeneity through western lens
climate change impacts the most those who contributed least
planetary listening
Listening to the world around us.
Relationship of human listening to environment.
Against traditional anthropocentric musicological ideas.
Moving away from human engagement with sound.
Human mediation always there – listening and interpretation.
Directional – us listening to planet.
Inter-communication between animals e.g whale song.
Human engagement with animal sounds – Feld Kaluli bird.
decolonising
Examining the legacy of colonialism in how we think today.
Looking at subjects with new thought patterns.
Re-consideration of knowledge.
Epistemic violence.
Mixing of decolonising and ecology.
interactions of cultures and their own environments
clashes between environmental and human impact
climate imposing power
idea of globalisation
more than clear separation of first and third world
Holly Watkins, Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music (2018), Introduction and ch.6
music as ‘the art of enlivening sound’ and being felt in the body
biotic aesthetics - music interacting with and shaping life
vitality - music as active force for engagement and catalyst for change
natural imagery in 19th c. European music and aesthetic discourse - impact of non-human on imagination
listening to birdsong
listening to sounds themselves as a more inclusive approach to sonic experience
John Luther Adams
evoking bird song in Songbird Songs (1974-79)
Earth and the Great Weather (1993) - combined Native languages of two Indigenous groups with drumming inspired by their dance and music for strings by Aeolian harp and natural sound recordings
with ‘sonic geography’ and ‘music that is landscape’
connections to indigenous song
reference to the natural world throughout music
overt use of Indigenous language and concepts
music contributing to our awakening ecological understanding - network of patterns and interconnections
composing musical landscapes working from recordings of natural sound
Richard Wagner, ‘Prelude’, Das Rheingold (1854, ca. 5’)
Beginning sounding like a sunrise – starting from quiet drone notes and building with major arpeggio sound on brass almost like a sunrise.
organicism - gradually building and growing
Fanny Gribenski, ‘Nature’s “Disturbing Influence”: Sound and Temperature in the Age of Empire’ (2021)
argument that the standardisation of pitch was made difficult by varying temperatures and conditions across the world and that this was further intertwined with European colonising missions as they attempted to exert standardisation across the globe but were hence unsure of their own practices
temperature influencing pitch standardisation and instrument building
expansion of empire and European colonising mission
points not explored well and in-depth - focus on military bands
Alexander Rehding, ‘Music Theory’s Other Nature: Reflections on Gaia, Humans, and Music in the Anthropocene’
Reorientating humans in nature.
Aeolian harp and defying sound – at the time not knowing how sound was created.
Gaia hypothesis - agency of humans and objects joined
linking Aeolian harp and Anthropocene
sound in dialogue with nature - he doesn’t mention human mediation within this
Cage 4’33’’ (1947-8)
Experienced outside.
Sound of nature – wind in trees, voices of punters, aeroplanes etc.
Entirely participatory?
Choice of time length – E-ching to determine , chance.
Often spoken about as autonomous.
Boundary of feeling and hearing.
New meanings in new context.
Birdsong – organised pitch and rhythm.
Challenging as group – having to count.
Cage idssmissing Beethoven but Oliveros accepting.
Visual aspect of performance.
Cage’s Water Walk.
First performance in the Woodstock concert hall – open back and seats outside.
Piece is what you make of it.
Annea Lockwood – ‘Bayou-borne’ (2016)
Piece for Oliveros.
Rivers different tributaries converging.
Over 20 minutes.
Experienced outside.
Difficult to converge.
Hard to take seriously at times.
Would it be different if each one was interpreted by one person not a group?
Ideas moving back and forth between.
Physical aspects of a river embodied.
Human understanding of nature.
Rivers moving into the sea.
Humans in embodied space.
Think on this piece.
Human interaction with nature.
Is the piece site specific?
Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum, ‘Walking as Fieldwork Method in Ethnomusicology’ (2021)
Walking exposing us to the world and forming relationships with others
Mapping the land and transcending boundaries
learning lessons, songs and skills
patterns of history and locality in the sharing of footsteps
cultural context of space
Wunderlich three kinds of walking
purposive walking - necessary, destination bound, fast
discursive walking - spontaneous, varying
conceptual walking - reflective, interpreting space
Viv Corringham (2013) ‘shadow-walking’
With others
Environmental sounds
Improvising singing
walking with locals in areas of meaning - recording conversation and environment then walking alone to re-imagine it
Schafer (1994) - listening vs sound walk
Listening walk – concentrating on listening.
Soundwalk – orientation, dialogue, composition.
notated through sonography
doesn’t discuss the privileging of certain sounds (e.g wind)
Angela Impey, Song Walking: Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland, ch. 1, ‘Paths toward a Hearing’ (2018)
Austrian mouth harps remembered by some of the community from the past.
Unlocking memories through music.
rhythmic memory
multisensory nature of songs
colonial music making practice holding new importance in cultural memory creation
Andra McCartney, ‘Soundwalking: Creating Moving Environmental Sound Narratives’ (2014)
soundwalking bringing attention to ignored events and practices
relationship to sonic environment
exclusiveness of walking
Schafer - World Soundscape Project 1970s
International research project.
Studying acoustic ecology.
Balanced soundscape between human and environment.
Increasing public walks.
Began in Canada.
focus on recovering natural sounds lost to industrialisation
Kubisch - electrical walks
wave outside human hearing - special headphones
electromagnetic fields creating sounds
somewhat rhythmic - less natural
guided listening - making buildings heard
Hildegard Westekamp, Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989)
Narrating her walk on the beach – describing in metaphorical and descriptive manner.
City outside of the natural sounds.
Changing volume of the soundscape as shock.
Listening to tiny sounds in more detail makes city seem louder.
industrial city occupying sonic landscape
view alongside sound
focus on natural sounds - her edit
ecology
notion of space and environment extending beyond one organism and one entity
soundwalk exploring ecology of sound (Schafer)
Gaia hypothesis: James Lovelovk (chemistry) and Lynn Margulis (biologist) 1970s
Organisms evolve together with their non-living environment.
De-centring the human.
Drawing on ancient Greek myth of Gaia as personification of Earth (also word for Earth in many texts).
Organisms evolve together.
agency of humans and objects together
Schafer quotes (1994)
‘The soundscape of the world is changing.’
Noise pollution influencing soundscape.
‘we may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape.’
‘A soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen.’
‘acoustic ecology’
Feld Acoustemology - 2015
Joining ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’ – sound as a way of knowing.
knowing through relations
Wilbourne and Cusick (2021)
sounds conveying information about space and place
power of sound to move the body
vulnerability and subjectivity in listening
modes of interpreting and living in sound
examples of the use of natural sounds in pieces
Blanca Rego, ‘Rain…’ - recording of rain, coming in floods
Cathy Lane, ‘Sweet Airs’ - from Hebrides sweet, recordings of natural soundscape and human - Scottish reading, sounds of wind and rain
Feld Voices of the Rainforest (1991)
conventional musical structure - sounds isolated and bought forwards
transitions of sounds
human vs birds
Experience of the rainforest Bosavi in Papua New Guinea and indigenous Kaluli people that inhabit it.
Sonic landscape of the rainforest and musical practices of Kaluli people.
gamelan concert and ecomusicology
gamelan and lit screen shadow puppetry
multimedia
traditional stories - Hindu epics
performing story that had ecological themes
forest setting
moving puppets
environmental storytelling
ecocriticism
ecocritical roots in literature and forms of writing
literary and cultural criticism
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Scientific research background.
Early movements in ecological science.
Exploring the use of DDT and other synthetic pesticides on plants in mid-C20th.
One of first major works of environmental science, and major impetus for the environmental movement.
Important critique of chemical industry’s mis/disinformation campaigns.
Existential political identity of America and production.
Argues that without concerted effort, humans would face a ‘silent spring’ (i.e a spring where no birds sing).
Broadly: questioning of narrative of scientific progress.
Aaron and Dawe (2015) - What is ecomusicology
Environmental studies plus music/sound studies equal ecomusicology.
Field rather than discipline – multiple ways of looking at it.
Prevention of disciplinary boundaries.
Gautier (2016) – Acoustic Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature of Music in Ecomusicology.
music/sound have no given value, but rather that value is constructed historically
distinction between nature and culture
bringing together ecocriticism and all of music studies
the meaning of sound depends on animal that produces and animal that hears.
Ecocriticism and Traditional English Folk Music – David Ingram
folk tradition in English
Edwardian folk revival as narrower idea of what constituted folk music
pastoral idealized escape
nostalgia in English culture
Marxist critique of English folk music ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ pastoral
radical nostalgia in English folk song - attachment to place, political dimension in resistance to development
New Directions: Ecological Imaginations, Soundscapes, and Italian Opera – Aaron S. Allen
explores current ecomusicological scholarship in the context of writings about nineteenth century Italian opera. Allen reveals how the focus of Italian musical periodicals at this time on opera also showed interest in writings on the connections between music, culture and nature. He argues that these authors can be traced to be the beginnings of an early ecomusicological community that have contributed to current scholarship.
The Audible Anthropocene: Sustainable Bridging of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences Scholarship through Sound – John E Quinn, Michele Speitz, Omar Carmenates, Matthew Burtner (2023)
Sound in any form shared by many disciplines.
Anthropocene reflecting shift that is audible at both local and global extents.
‘Sound represents a possible boundary object across disciplines’.
Boundary object as idea, object, product or tool enabling communication between disciplines.
of ecocriticism, ecology and music to birdsong - Avian Telemetry as transdisciplinary composition (Burtner, 2018)
Central Australian Women’s Traditional Songs: Keeping Yawulyu/Awelye Strong – Linda Barwick and Myfany Turpin
Traditional ritual performance of yawulya/awelye ceremonial genre performed by women in various country-based groups in Australia.
clan identity
singing and dancing
learning through performance and repetition
paying attention and participating
displaying group identity - part of ownership over land
ties to place
trying to continue
Bellingham’s Dana Lyons: The Artful Activist (2016)
Combining successful music career with activism for the environment.
Touring and Top 40 hit, music reached beyond activist audiences.
Each tour bringing awareness to environmental issue.
Hit song ‘Cows with Guns’
Performing in environmentally threated sites that others avoid.
Music(ology)
Thinking in music and musicology.
Differentiating the academic field and what has been done in practice.
hierarchy of attention in soundscape
Different sounds standing out.
Soundscape not neutral.
Value laden hierarchy.
Wind amplified and creating other sounds.
Guido Adler’s ‘The Scope, Method, and Aim of musicology’ (1885)
Partly coining term musicology.
Music and science.
Evolutionary language to describe music.
organicism in writings
classical music environment examples
French song and French melody - Debussy, Faure, Ravel.
Vivaldi – Flute Concerto ‘Il Gardino’ - Mimicking bird sound.
Handel’s Giulio Cesare - Act II. No.18 Aria. Text informing music.
Messiaen bird song- Ouisseau
Recording and transcribing birdsong and compose off it.
Smetana Vltava
Earth Rot – David Axelrod (1970)
Lots of different styles.
Spoken word.
Cyclical quality to use of voices and technology.
Instrumental and choral sections.
Popular styles and jazz examples.
Taylor Swift ‘Clean’
Environment metaphor
intersections with ecocritical attention to music
fan dying in the heat at Rio Stadium 2023
her shows boosting communities such as Thailand
private jet flying
environmental justice
harm to the climate affects people around the world in varying manners
class divide, north/south divide, land distribution etc
the most vulnerable are those the contribute the least and are impacted the most
People of Color Environmental Leadership Sumit (1991 – USA)
300 Black, Native, Pacific Islander, Asian American and other minority activists gathered in Washinigton to discuss environmental injustices for the first time.
Discussed issues such as: Black communities forced to relocate due to high pollution. Farmworkers forced to live in home on chemical dump sites. Indigenous groups fighting against mining and nuclear testing.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021), ‘Conjoined Histories’
Europe built on unquestioned myths such as universal human experience.
problems with incompatible time scales - history of the Earth, history of human evolution, history of industrial civilisation
Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell collapse of humanist distinction between natural and human history.
the idea of the ‘rifts’ in discussions of climate change - dissonances or tensions such as regimes of probability in everyday lives, divided human lives putting the human first and making room for the non-human at the forefront
need to imagine humans in harmony with other species
humans exploiting world around them magnified by capitalism
arts, aesthetics and climate justice
level of crisis and demand
not experiencing the level of time that the environment will - thinking about temporal notions through music such as Cage’s ‘As Slow as Possible’
music as cultural practice
materiality and consumption
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, ‘Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth’
music descentering human to link into aesthetics of the Earth
Examining how literary texts, visual arts and cultural productions represent the natural world and human interactions.
Not depicting landscapes but also conveying complex ecological relationships and environmental histories.
Interconnectedness of human and non-human worlds.
Agency and significance of the non-human.
Cultural representations reflecting unequal access to resources, environmental degradation and struggles for sustainability.
political ecology to connect with aesthetics of the earth
Environment as nonhuman witness to violence of colonialism
Glissant aesthetics of the earth
More than human relationality.
The Earth is not just a human based network.
Inclusion of non-human sources.
Human construction of what the non-human is thinking?
Beaty of nature in the wake of colonial violence.
Attention towards beauty of the Earth.
De-centring human experience.
aesthetics of the earth other thoughts
Aesthetics of the Earth lamenting desolation and loss of vibrance through loss of soundscape?
attention to natural imagery obscuring colonial past
Doesn’t accept pain and cruelty of nature that don’t align with human values.
Moral standards we have that we may subconsciously apply to the aesthetics of the earth.
Brian Massumi and Emre Sünter, ‘Interview with Brian Massumi: From the Ecology of Powers to an Aesthetics of the Earth’ 2022
Inventing an aesthetics of the earth as a call for a more-than-human relational ethics.
Co-composition with the earth
COVID pandemic limiting space movement
a premium on existence
pushing past static notions of the human and resituating in evolution
Guattari ‘three ecologies’ 2000
cousin to aesthetics of the earth
intrication of social, conceptual/psychic/subjective and envrionmental to escape crisis on an era and reinvent envrionment
Jem Finer Longplayer - Trinity Buoy Wharf until 2999
1st floor Tibetan bowls
playing by itself for many years to come
the continuation of sound in space
From the postcolonial to the Indigenous (Ghosh)
roots and dynamics of climate change rooted not just in capitalism but colonialism
colonialism linked to extraction and extermination
for Indigenous communities the earth is alive
music carrying cultural memory
Indigenous
unification of human community
cultures placing weight on unification of human and the environment
social connections to ancestral lands
Tanya Tagaq
Inuk throat singing
highly personlised solo style
2004 Bjork ‘Ancestors’
2006 collaborations with Kronos Quartet
2014 Polaris Prize gala performance took the stage in red, wrists bound in traditional seal-skin cuffs. Focused attention on missing and murdered indigenous women
against PETA for their animal rights on seals - part of Indigenous culture and practice
Throat singing (Katajjaq) as cultural and aural link between place and tradition, repertory of sounds evoking culture and soundscape.
mimesis
representation of the real world in art
Halluci Nation (aka A Tribe Called Red)
First nation members
electronic music, hip-hop, reggae, dubstep influence
starts to celebrate their community and ended up becoming political
Halluci Nation Stadium PowWow
blending electronics with First Nations music, particularly chanting and drumming
drum representing heart beat of Mother Earth
creation of electric powwow as genre and bringing to clubs
powwow
powwow as gathering with dances held by many Native American and First Nations communities
Stand Up/Stand N Rock - Taboo
2016 protesters against Dakota Access Pipeline
standing with Indigenous people
music video generating attention
Dakota pipeline transporting crude oil, invasion of sace using force and violence
violated land treaty by building
damaging water supply and sacred land
still in use - under review
Prolific The Rapper x A Tribe Called Red - Black Snakes
as another protest song about lack of clean water and assault from the police on unarmed standing rock community
plays phone call to police about assault of the police on community
‘if the Earth is not your mother are you from Mars?’
Caroline Shaw - partita for 8 voices
contemporary choral music including part sounding like Inuit throat singing.
Tanya Tagaq called it appropriation.
Shaw wrote in collaboration with indigenous teachers and singers learnt technique
salvage ethnography
practice of documenting Native American music and culture by Anthropologists in 19th century
Tanya Tagaq - Retribution
naturalistic and industrial in musical and visual elements
throat singing and other practices
performativity in movement and costume
Female Indigenous body as microcosm of land - exploited and abused
‘our mother grows angry, retribution will be swift’
environmental violence and violence on Indigenous culture
Galloway (2020) and Tanya Tagaq
Inuk throat singer using live performance and audiovisuals to engage themes of climate change and voice environmental violence.
Diversifies the discourse of environmentalism to include voices and trauma experienced by marginalised people.
Tagaq demands that we listen beyond the human.
Focused attention on missing and murdered indigenous women
Highlighting Indigenous timescales in relation to the environment.
‘improvised from a personal sound archive of sonic markers of place.’
Retribution as concept album of slow toxic environmental violence – erasure of Indigenous consent and resulting cultural and environmental violence
Galloway (2020) and ecomusicology field negatives
Ecomusicology field as homogenous and exclusionary and needs engagement with how soundscapes and environments are heard by different communities.
Anthropocene complex and fraught term among Indigenous people – factors that define it are settler-colonial focused.
Lewis and Maslin (2015) start of the Anthropocene
Columbian Exchange at 1610
Orbis Spike implies that colonialism, global trade and coal bought about the Anthropocene.
Dylan Robinson Hungry Listening (2020)
settler colonialism - going beyond travelling and taking
song and belonging to place
musical distribution of information
mediations on places
oral literature (orature)
not listening through whiteness
listening as act of ‘entering into a sound territory’
difference in conceptions of song
reclaiming through a hunger for tradition
listening in redress - appreciating Indigenous sound
Art music that includes Indigenous performers – inclusion to redress history of appropriation but doesn’t always address structural inequalities or politics of aesthetic.
Decolonising music studies by examining listener privilege in settler colonial listening positionality.
Taylor (1987) - Tin Ear
inabiliy to refusal to hear Gitsan song as Indigenous legal order that Gitsan people understand it to be
Coyote Made the Rivers - Hamil
Spokane people with river as a sacred place and part of sacred continuum that connects Spokane to unseen worlds.
Columbia River as a source of life, mobility and sustenance for tripes and an object of colonial violence through dams
salmon circumventing the dams - songs don’t come the way they used to, like the salmon
Woody Guthrie - leftist singer that made song celebrating white history in the land and bigging up dams. ‘Roll on Columbia, Roll on’ (1941)
Jessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina), ‘Introduction: Listening to the Density of Indigeneity’
Inuit throat singing as woman’s genre.
Sound Relations of Inuit musical life in Alaska to amplify significance of sound as integral to self-determination.
Listening closely to density of Inuit musical life
Inuit performing arts processes demonstrating relationships between human and more than human
sound as extraction
REPRESENT - DJ He Took
from reading by Perea
Juxtaposition of a hip hop flash mob with Inuit motion dancing.
Mixing aural and visual tropes of place, time, genre and technology
pizza box turntables
flashmob outside
Inuit throat singing sounds remixed
Janae Davis, et al., ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crisis’
Thinking about the history of the problem to improve
critique on plantationocene due to lack of engagement with embodied politics of the plantation such as race and gender.
Demanding attention for blackness
Ethico-political vision that addresses multiple global crises of the plantation.
McKittrick (2013) and Woods (2007) plantationocene
Woods - permutations of the plantation characterize contrasting zones such as enclosures and reserves.
McKittrick emphasises placelessness that formed the foundation of the plantation hierarchy and dynamics
Sharpe, The Weather (2016)
Connection between lungs and the weather - breathing free air for slaves.
Who has access to freedom and who can breathe freely
weather as inescapable
Haraway Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene (2015)
Notion of human connected across species.
emphasises co-creation
speculative framework imagining alternative ways of relating Earth and inhabitants
challlenges anthropocentric vies
inclusive understanding and responsibility
‘making kin’ and connection across species
Titus, ‘Ecomusicology, Indigenous Knowledge and Environmental Degradation in Ibadan, Nigeria’ (2019)
YORUBA POPULAR MUSIC
Yoruba popular music and engagement with the environment
Ethnographic investigation of place of music in Ibadan flood disaster.
indigenous knowledge respected in the past
Connections between cultural past and present
Yemoja goddess of rivers with festival appealing to her for loss of indigenous knowledge
music for connection
landfill harmonic
orchestra with instruments made from recycled materials
music from landfill
recycled orchestra
Paraguy
‘the world sends us garbage, we send back music’ - director
Gautier writing about Alexander von Humboldt
19th century Columbian listening practices
travels to Latin America as natural scientist
writes about the vocalisations of Boga boatmen on the river
larger sonic scene around the river
for Humboldt the songs are noise
music defined in the context of non-musical vocalization
instruments and colonial projects
exporting materials from elsewhere and then re-importing
organs as colonial instruments
installation across the world
spread of ABRSM
operas houses
Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019)
paying attention to principles of action linking environment to culture
musicology without music
thinking beyond music
physical consumption of materials
vinyl lasting longer socially than physically
vinyl revival bringing back production
music cultural commodity and cultural industry
‘the digitization of music is not the dematerialization of music.’
Schwartz, Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences 2021
nuclear silences as part of global nuclear contexts
hiding of information and entangled entities
Marshall islands and throat as holding the soul - voice and composition
Sepkoski The Earth as Archive
original archive is the earth itself
humans generating own extinction
Earth containing sound and teaching how to listen
Coltrane – Mars
Interplay (or lack) between instruments.
Hearing the bodies in the music.
Two musicians.
Mostly a duet between tenor sax and drums.
Expansiveness.
Breaking free of gravity.
Album released posthumously.
Things to do with out of space and also with Coltrane’s own practice at this time.
Rashied Ali – drums moving time and space forwards.
Listening beyond the realms of the earth before people were theorizing it.
Named by Alice Coltrane? Interstellar Space (album).
Listening beyond domains of earth.
Earth generating sound under duress
cyroacoustics - understanding the impact of climate change on glaciers and sea levels
geomusicology?
cyroacoustics and listening to ice to understanding the earth
gas bubbles making sound
searching for oil with sound waves - using sound for destruction
trips to see glaciers collapse?
the study of the sounds produced by ice, particularly in glacial and polar environments.
Roy, Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture: Unsettled Matter (2023)
lac and shellac as visual media in India - decorate body
materials imported
sonic moment in its history
plastic century and synthetic elements
‘colonial unconscious’ in transnational recording industry - labor of shellac production
Bronfman, ‘Glittery: Unearthed Histories of Music, Mica, and Work’ (2021)
mica stone used as electrical insulator
gramophones
electronically reproduced music barely acknowledged mica
music made possible through infrastructures and part that support welfare and imperialism
connected worlds of music, work, technology and war
Planetary anthropology/musicology - Georgina Born
Music and digital media, thinking globally.
Planetary as virtual – shared spaces that are not physical.
Entanglements between music and the digital.
MusDig: relational musicology + post-positivist empiricism. Connecting relational musicology and the digital.
Exoplanetary musicology (Chua and Rehding)
Alien Listening
zooming out and de-centering the whole world to get away from the human
dot blinking as representation of human notions of music theory - getting away from this. without dot no space but dot creating space
considering speculative ontologies of space and sound
Sun Ra, Space is the Place. Afrofuturists have long speculated about how what musical encounters in space might be (as Utopian possibility?) BUT cultural difference is always central to (and extant prior to) that encounter.
Muslim Futurism. Jinns playing music. Jinns, angels. Creation and destruction of universe through sound.
protest
noise and musical disruption
human-made sound with the intent to disrupt
application of music and sound to an aesthetics of the earth
Ecologically conscious music for climate change
soundtrack to our planet? only human voice is Attenborough, soft string music for an aestheticized view of the Earth and mimicry of natural landscape
vococentrism
voice prevalent over other sonic elements
normally ascribed to human
language, meaning and words nature does not have
challenging conceptions of the voice through aesthetics of the Earth
Yothu Yindi - Treaty (1991)
Removed lyrics and replaced with didgeridoo solo?
Multi-lingual song
‘A political’ because got rid of English lyrics.
Band bringing music stories and issues to the world
in response to a promised treaty over Indigenous land that never materialised
Australian Aboriginal group members
‘this land was never given, this land was never bought and sold’
‘treaty yeh, treaty now’
legal case of Indigenous music
Delgamuukw v. the Queen (1985), a land claim trial in which Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en sought jurisdiction over their territories in northern British Columbia, Canada.
Oral history important.
Contested inclusion of song in the court proceedings. Judge refused to acknowledge legitimacy.
exomusicology
a non-human reception of music
AI, music, ecology and the human
creative aid?
music and the human
playing with sound
power to replicate and appropriate human voices
machine as extension of the human
power of AI to aid green technologies but is steeped in capitalist ventures (capitalocene, Moore, 2015)
AI not creating the same emotional response as humans within listeners - the more human appearing the better (Sun et al, 2023)
materiality of festivals
gigs creating waste
touring carbon footprint
Green (2023) - bushfires in Australia and extreme weather impacting music events
digital listening and envrionment
processing power required for streaming services
charities helping
Music Declares Emergency Collective - recovery from COVID as more green
European Independent Music Companies Association - installing renewable energy systems in London headquarters and encouraging pressing plants to switch to green
Music fans care more about climate change and want the music industry to do extra on the issue. (2022) – University of Glasgow
‘Turn up the Volume’ survey
2184 adults polled
shows music fans expect more from the music industry
82% of music fans concerned about climate change compared to 72% non-music fans.
Music fans more likely to place priority on efforts to tackle climate change.
Brennan, M. (2020). The Environmental Sustainability of the Music Industries.
production and consumption of music means we are always interacting with broader social structures and material infrastructures and environmental impacts
A world where music does not have an environmental impact is a world without music
live music ecology - ecological approach to live music emphasising different aspects of production
waste in material elements
instrument manufacturing and materiality
Roy, E. (2020). ‘Total trash’. Recorded music and the logic of waste.
recorded sound participated in and helped define a ‘throwaway culture’
shellac at the core
popular music playing with materialities
waste and capitalism
Production and consumption of popular music wasteful since the inception of the recording industry.
solutions would involve remodelling Western societies
Burtner, M. (2017). Climate Change Music: From Environmental Aesthetics to Ecoacoustics
Music and ecology working on several temporal scales.
Climate change music attempts to capture the multiply directed characteristics of environmental time.
Butner 2010 - syntax of snow
score for snow and bells offers the performer and lister a way to connect environmental change and music through the intricate performance of music snow.
Playing glockenspiel and snow at the same time. Snow amplified by microphone.
Six Ecoacoustic Quintets No. 1: Water (Ice)
musicians play tubs of water containing ice
microphones in air, water and frozen capture vibrations
1975 collaboration with climate campaigner Greta Thunberg in 2019.
BBC stated the band will likely take international flights for their tour despite the climate change pledge in this song.
Song weaponises the systems within which the band exist.
Gets the message out to a wide audience.
Thunberg talking against musical background that promotes ideas of aesthetics of the earth
‘its time to rebel’
foregrounds lyrics
promoting change - facts used (1.5 degrees)
Clarke (2005) perception, ecology, music
ecological approach to perception - relationship between perceivers and their environments and perception and action
perceiving as a result of action and action due to perception
different perceptual capacities based on knowledge
emphasis on consideration of context in which music is perceived and understood
Gibson (1979) and ecological psychology
perception related to opportunities for action that the environment provides
link between relationship of organisms to their envrionment
applied to way in which humans perceive their environment and how this sparks action - historically West seen it as something to take from but Indigenous work with?
Harris (1981) vococentrism
prioritisation of spoken language
ontology/ontological
branch of philosophy that studies existence - what entities exist and how they are grouped, how they relate to each other
what it means to exist
post-human ecology
challenging anthropocentric perspectives through de-centering the human and emphasising interconnectedness
human exceptionalism (and AI)
belief that humans are fundamentally different to other forms of life
where does AI fit with this? idea that it is human made but not quite human, taking over with near-human forms
AI as threat to the environment and threat to human
Morreale (2021) ethical and political issues with AI in music creation
commercial AI music making creating biggest issues relating to consumerism and commodification - deals between music and IT (Microsoft and Open AI)
1. creating musician redundancy - Spotify ‘fake artists scandal’ and the production of platform owned music and playlists
2. AI music extracting knowledge and material from existing music exploiting the cultural capital of individuals in digital colonialism (Mejias, 2019, Taiuro, 2020)
dataveillance (Drott,. 2020) and analysing user data to commodify personal information and human behaviour
Titon (2013) ecomusicology
‘the study of music, culture, sound and nature in a period of environmental crisis’
Allen (2014) ecomusicology
'’ecocritical musicology’ and the study of music, nature and culture in all the complexities of those terms’’
Edwards (2015) ecomusicology
‘critical reflection upon music and sound, set against the backdrop of this epochal environmental crisis’
