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...

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...

In this episode we’re talking about canals: the ones dug into the ground to channel water, goods, and people, and the ones that carry energy through the machines (computers) that are everywhere today.

What does human-caused global heating have to do with music history? That’s one of the main questions we’re asking on Sounding History. Climate change didn’t come out of nowhere. Many historians now agree that measurable human impacts on climate can be seen from around 1600, and have a direct connection to European colonial expansion. Colonialism reconfigured the world economy around the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of humans to provide the labor for that extraction....

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.