Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (The MIT Press)

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In other words, to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour. Avid readers of crime fiction will be familiar with the ‘little grey cells’ of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes’ examination of trace evidence, both of which lead to the conviction of many fictional criminals.

Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In the aim of deflating its socially constructed value and thus consumer desire, Devine instead black-boxes the musical text altogether. But the same hardiness means that vinyl is exceptionally difficult to dispose of, once its usefulness is at an end.

In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests. Unlike Holmes and Poirot, Song Ci was a real person, a Chinese judge who lived over 700 years ago and personally examined the crime scenes of physical assaults or difficult murders. The tapes, Hirschkind argues, are not mechanisms for social control as much as jumping-off points for Muslims to find their way towards ethical self-improvement. When Clausen and Treadwell completed their analysis of wild-potato seeds, though, they found no trace of swainsonine or any other alkaloids. Here, it is useful to take a wider historical view to think about the conditions of contemporary music production and consumption and the aesthetic exceptionality of music as a cultural object.

This picture book follows Lenny, a composer, who stops and listens to sounds of daily life which gives him inspiration for his own compositions.Sterne explores the cultural history of how and why Americans developed technologies that reproduced and transmitted sound. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. As the window for meaningful mitigation of the worst effects of climate change contracts rapidly, it’s important for scholars of music to confront the imbrications of their object of analysis with ecological catastrophe. We might examine, for instance, the segregation of music from everyday life constituted by the noise and discipline of industrial production or look to the close relation between music machines and industrialization.

Devine shows the historical rise in emissions to have continued with the turn of century shift to “data,” the third and final epoch in his account. Kyle Devine knows, and in Decomposed he teaches us about such things with intelligence, humaneness, and passion.I’ve written two children’s books about different powers of music: Bailey Brings Her Friends Together with Music and The Aria in Me . A vinyl junkie is not the person who has a few old 45s shoved in the cuboard from their days in high school. The various petrochemical-derived polymers from which LPs, cassettes and CDs are manufactured linked music directly to the oil industry’s massive emissions of carbon, toxic fumes and chemicals, not to mention the warfare and ongoing colonial land grabs on which the industry depends. The save file's numbers MUST be the very first thing in the file, otherwise Terra doesn't know where they are. But Devine isn’t interested in inducing guilt; he simply wants us to become more aware of the materiality of music.