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...

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...

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...