Sounding History

By: Chris Smith Tom Irvine
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  • Summary

  • 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 illustrate how music can be understood through stories about labor (how we work), energy (how we power their lives), and data (how we consume and transfer information). We use this categories to explore new layers of narrative about music on a global scale. Our goal is a music history for a new era: the Anthropocene, the age of human-generated climate change. We work as researchers and university teachers in the US and Britain. But between us we have long experience outside of the ivory tower, as musicians in styles from folk to early music, as radio hosts, and public speakers. In Sounding History we turn to the new medium of podcasting, looking to share with listeners stories about people and their soundworlds that have not been heard before. Tom teaches at the University of Southampton in the UK and is also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national research institute for data science and AI. Chris directs the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University. Between us we have written and edited books about the history of music and dance in the United States, the soundscapes of the Western Encounter with China, and the global history of German music. Sounding History, and the book project that goes with it (a global music history of music for general readers). Sounding History is not our first collaboration. Decades ago, we worked together in public radio and performed together in early music ensembles, laying a groundwork of curiosity and spontaneity for our partnership today. Join us as we take up this new collaboration, a music history for our times.
    2022 Sounding History
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Art Entertainment & Performing Arts Music World
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Episodes
  • Data in the Anthropocene: Music's Carbon Footprint & the Environmental Endgame

    Data in the Anthropocene: Music's Carbon Footprint & the Environmental Endgame
    Dec 22 2021
    Kyle Devine’s 2019 book Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music is making waves. As Devine explains, the book started as an investigation of the nostalgic return of the vinyl record, a seemingly “backwards” trend in current music consumption. However, the more he looked into the issue, the more he was challenged by the story of the music’s material presence as data in the age of mechanical reproduction. His key takeaway, and stark truth: recording technology, from shellac discs, to vinyl LPs, CDs, mp3s, and contemporary streaming services, comes with environmental impacts. What music is made of matters, and its cost to the natural world is a problem of “political ecology.”In this final episode of our first season Chris takes us through the book, looking for resonances and intersections with the Sounding History project. As a historian of empire he finds parallels, for instance, between the music industry’s environmental costs and empire’s human toll, up to and including mass enslavement: whether in the sugar slaveocracies of the Caribbean, or the server farms of Iceland, empire’s environmental costs have too often been concealed “just over the horizon.”Yet despite our enthusiasm for the book, we are not entirely convinced by some portions of Devine’s account. We reflect, for example, upon the price (in deforestation and exploitative labor) of the shellac record, as against the liberation and democratization that easily accessible recording technology brought to subaltern and minoritized musical experiences in the early twentieth century. Shellac records made it possible, wherever musicians and technology could come together, for people (“the people,” even) to tell their stories in sound. Without shellac, we believe, there would have been no blues revolution, no Ma Rainey, no Robert Johnson, even, no jazz. It turns out that the social-environmental-historical-economic impact of datafied music is not an easy nut to crack.We thus end the podcast (and our first season!) with a quick glimpse of some work Tom is doing at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national center for data science and AI, where he directs the project “Jazz as Social Machine.” Today machine learning agents drive cars, diagnose disease, play chess, and design buildings–among many other human tasks. Such autonomous systems also improvise jazz. It turns out, though, that jazz improvisation is apparently harder than driving a car! Why? The answer has to do with risk, historical “consciousness,” and the attitudes towards “getting it wrong” that underpin the algorithms of the machine learning revolution.Key PointsMusic objects, Kyle Devine argues in his book Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music, come with considerable environmental costs, both from their materials (the chemicals used to make vinyl records and CDs, for instance) and the energy required to make them widely available (for example the consumption of electricity to sustain the server farms than underpin music streaming).Of all the many human tasks that are now subject to takeover by machine learning agents, jazz improvisation turns out to be a particularly thorny challenge, perhaps because so much of machine learning depends on the avoidance of risk.ResourcesYou can learn more about the environmental costs of music in Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: A Political Ecology of MusicHis argument is summarized in an article he wrote in 2015 for the journal Popular Music.You can find out more about Tom’s project “Jazz as Social Machine” on the Alan Turing Institute Website.The Musica project, led by Kelland Thomas and Donya Quick, is at the Stevens Institute of Technology.For more on the technological transformation wrought by shellac records, you can revisit a recommendation from earlier in our Season I, Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Music Revolution.All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!
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    50 mins
  • Soundscapes of War and Worship: Mozart and the Call to Prayer

    Soundscapes of War and Worship: Mozart and the Call to Prayer
    Dec 15 2021
    We begin with a famous (and very beautiful) aria from the Abduction from the Seraglio K. 384 by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (Mozart nerd alert: he never called himself “Amadeus,” ever, and we aren’t going to either). It’s from the beginning of Act 3, as the tenor hero, Belmonte, prepares to rescue his kidnapped bride Konstanze and her companion Blöndchen from the palace of Basha Selim. We are in an obviously sticky–and potentially deadly–situation. The music, beginning with a serene yet at times painfully dissonant introduction in the winds, takes listeners to a different place, where, although time moves at different speed, things sound absolutely familiar.Much ink has been spilled on Mozart’s relationship to the music of his native Austria’s near neighbours, the Turks. Tom suggests here that, in the late eighteenth century, the sound of the Islamic world was not far away at all, especially not from Vienna, the city in and for which Mozart wrote the Abduction. In fact, while writing the opera Mozart was living right in the middle of an unstable and fluid borderland between the “West” and its Ismamic “others.” The Ottoman Empire was only a few days’ journey away. Today you could cover the distance in a matter of hours. In fact if you map the performances of the Abduction in its early years, you see the routes of the traveling troupes who made the opera a hit across Europe heading closer and closer to the Islamic world that lay on Mozart’s doorstep. Thinking about Belmonte’s aria as a musical sign of the “in-between” opens up new historical perspectives on a beloved opera and, potentially, on how sound divides (or links) people who share the occupation of geographical spaces.The theme of shared space takes us East for our second postcard, to contemporary Singapore. Drawing on recent fieldwork by the Singapore musicologist Tong Soon Lee, Chris explores how the Islamic call to prayer, repeated five times daily across the Muslim world, delineates sonic space in the city-state, which, like the borderlands of Austria two centuries previously, has a long history complicated by empire, commerce, migration and ethnic/religious diversity. The difference is that cities are smaller, tighter, and sonically far more dense than are the sprawling pastures, fields, and forests of agriculture. In the urban cityscape, borders can be perceived between neighborhoods, streets, or even individual people in their houses. Since independence, Singapore’s semi-democratic/semi-authoritarian government has found itself playing the role of sonic referee, seeking to leave room for the city’s Islamic majority population to live their beliefs in public via the Call to Prayer, while preserving a soundscape with uninvaded spaces for everyone. Referencing Lee, Chris talks us through how the Call to Prayer itself has implicated contested claims to  public religious sound in Singapore’s multi-ethnic environment, and the ways that new conceptions of “space,” technology, and privacy yield renewed modes of religious expression. In Singapore, via the direction/redirection of the Call’s loudspeakers (first outward toward the city, and then later inward toward the mosque), and subsequently via the broadcast of the Call, on its five-times-daily schedule, on radio and then television, Muslims can enter shared sonic space–a “virtual mosque” whose religious community is real and renewed. When competing imperial, democratic, or authoritarian soundscapes collide, as Tom suggested and Chris elaborates, there are no easy answers. But some of the solutions, both past and present, offer fascinating clues to how sound makes, unmakes, and reinvents community.In a fascinating preview of an upcoming episode, Chris and Tom pivot to a related discussion of the power of electronic media–and specifically of radio–to create not only a shared “virtual” environment (for Muslim worship, for example) but even a new national identity. Colonial and postcolonial sounds are a key theme in the podcast, so we chat briefly about the great singer Umm Kulthum (1898-1975), an icon of modernizing Egypt who used powerful Cairo-based radio, and then television and film, to forward a vision of the nation whose political power its second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) himself recognized and exploited. On Thursday nights during her broadcasts, traffic would halt in the streets, and shops would open their doors, as the broadcast voice of Umm Kulthum poured forth across the Arab world, literally sounding a new Egyptian nation into being.When competing imperial, democratic, or authoritarian soundscapes collide, as Tom suggested and Chris elaborates, the sonic consequences can be complex. But listening carefully to sound as history, both past and present, can offer fascinating clues to how what we can hear makes, unmakes, and reinvents community.Key PointsIt is easy to fall into overly black-and-white categories when ...
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    47 mins
  • Sound Sculpting in East Asia & the American South

    Sound Sculpting in East Asia & the American South
    Dec 8 2021
    Grace Chang (Ge Lan, 葛蘭/葛兰), (born 1933) was a breakthrough star in one of several  Golden Ages of Hong Cinema, this one around around 1960. For a comparatively short time between the mid fifties and sixties, Chang was one of the most popular screen stars in the Chinese-speaking world outside of the People’s Republic. She encapsulated a new female ideal for aspirational audiences on the Western side of the divide in Cold War East Asia: a woman who was young, mobile, pleasure-seeking, and most importantly empowered to play the main role in her own life’s dramas. Her films, comic and dramatic alike, explored themes such as youth culture, urbanization, family breakdown, and sexual emancipation. And man could she sing.This episode’s first postcard explores Chang’s 1960 film Wild, Wild Rose (野玫瑰之戀/野玫瑰之恋) directed by Wong Tin-Lam with music by Ryōichi Hattori. We open in an upscale Hong Kong nightclub. Chang, the tragic heroine, is singing a Latin jazz version of the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. Yet the fact that she’s singing Bizet – this is a retelling of the Carmen story after all – is not even the most unexpected thing about the performance: what’s even more interesting is how she sings it. In this version, Chang gets through a wide range through what Chris calls “a spontaneous combustion of dance music,” in a jazz idiom that “refracts” styles from Latin (one of her previous films was Mambo Girl, 1957) to boogie-woogie, all delivered in a one-off vocal growl that actually echoes sounds from Chinese spoken theater.You’ll have to listen to the episode to hear more of our take on what this brilliant mixture means, but as Tom says, the scene has a “double bottom.” If you look–and listen–underneath its surface, you find layers of context that echo 1920s Japan, wartime Shanghai under Japanese occupation, and 1950s Hong Kong, that last a distant outpost of the collapsing British Empire, now beginning a rapid transformation from poverty towards, outwardly at least, shiny capitalist prosperity.We finish the first part of the episode by dwelling on Chang’s guitar, a chrome-plated resonator that looks an awful lot like the kind that Hawaiian players like Sol Hoopii and bluesmen like Tampa Red had made famous three decades earlier. They are in fact very similar: as objects of music technology, these unique guitars tie Chang and the “American” players together like nodes in a network.Unlike Chang, who faded into unjustifiable obscurity after she retired suddenly in 1964, Robert Johnson (1911-1938) lived on after his untimely death as a central figure in the collective mythography of the Delta Blues. But memories can deceive. Our argument in the second half of the episode is that Johnson’s reputation as a brilliant, naive genius (a “memory” backed up by Son House’s suggestions that he somehow sold his soul to the Devil in return for musical secrets, as implied in Walter Hill’s problematic 1987 film Crossroads) flies in the face of what actually happened. If you peel back the layers of the mythographic onion, in place of a tortured and doomed musical superman, we find a brilliant and intentional musical synthesist with a special genius at making new technologies resonate together. Visual evidence is key to what we are claiming. It’s easy, Chris explains, to read the famous cover painting of the iconic Columbia Records two-LP gatefold album (see website), which depicts Johnson playing and singing directly into the corner of a San Antonio hotel room, as evidence of man so self-consciously shy, so removed from functional social skills, that he literally could only play to the wall. But what Johnson was really doing was sculpting sound, using the corner of the room to “corner load” the acoustics of the recording, intentionally and artfully compressing his acoustic Gibson L1’s sound and boosting its signal as Jimi Hendrix would later do via effects pedals with his electric Stratocasters. In pulling everything he could out of new microphone technology and the unique acoustical demands of his art form, Johnson, in other words, was a conscious, expert, and intentional artist: a master engineer of the Delta Blues.Key PointsDespite the proliferation of oversimplified expectations, presumptions, and definitions, jazz is not a fixed thing. Like any musical style, jazz–in its sounds, practices, and expressive goals– is what people who make it say it is. The spread of “jazz”  to East Asia before and after World War II is a usefully complicated example.The 1960 Hong Kong film Wild, Wild, Rose, starring the breakout star Grace Chang, demonstrates how jazz sounds and associations traveled, and how listening in new ways can deepen understanding of global processes of commerce, politics, and technology.Objects such as musical instruments–in our example Chang’s resonator guitar, which looks an awful lot like those made famous by...
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    37 mins

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A refreshing take on global music history

Sounding History contains entertaining and fascinating insights about music, culture, and commerce, showcasing parts of the world and communities of people that are not often included in conventional discussions of music history. Every episode I feel like I learn so much, often about a topic I was not even aware of. The hosts are engaging, humble, informative, and clearly passionate about the research that they do. The music they feature within the episodes is always amazing, and the links/playlists/sources they provide are incredibly helpful if I ever want to learn/listen to more.

Highly recommend to anyone interested in music and/or global history!

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