Hosted by the Media School's Arts & Sciences Colloquium.
Music is often called the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music is seen as a progress of dematerialization—from physical discs to invisible digits. In this talk, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever be
fore. Devine uncovers hidden histories of recorded music—histories of what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. In the process, he shows that a variety of apparently peripheral people and processes are actual central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.
Kyle Devine is an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. His book, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers as well as the IASPM-Canada Book Prize. He has also coedited a related project, called Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, which will be out early next year.