Sounding History is a podcast about the global history of music with an unexpected twist. Your hosts, music historians Tom Irvine and Chris Smith, explore sonic impacts of the extraction of resources from the Earth’s environment. Instead of narrating music history as a story about performers, composers, and works, we explore how extraction economy (and the historical processes that came with it, such as settler colonialism, enslavement, and environmental destruction) made the world of sound we live in today.
In each episode we introduce two "postcards": sonic micro-histories that...
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...
Published 12/22/21
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...
Published 12/15/21