Making Infrastructures Audible

The editorial introduction to this book offers an intellectual and political proposition for studying the media infrastructures of music and sound. It provides a summary of existing infrastructural scholarship across media studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, and other fields. It also describes the work of infrastructural analysis in relation to music and sound studies. Key concepts and approaches include examining supporting casts and operating in a deflationary mode, as well as adopting a mediatic perspective on the infrastructures of music and sound in order to understand the broad technosocial conditions that give rise to these cultural forms in the first place. Certain aspects of musical culture are described in terms of cultural techniques. There is also a section on the histories of notation, paper, ink, and publishing as media infrastructures of music and sound. Ultimately, the introduction lays the groundwork for a book that is about humble things and ordinary people—deeply hidden, plainly obvious, and everywhere powerful infrastructures of music and sound. The goal is to make infrastructures audible. For it is at this level—the level of supply chains, circulatory systems, and waste streams—where scholars can confront some of the most pressing dilemmas regarding the conditions of music, and the human condition more generally.