Shadows of Black and White

This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.

Making Music, Building Roads

This chapter explores how the analyses of audible infrastructures presented in this volume connect to the established and growing body of literature on civic infrastructures from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are clearly convergent interests between those who work on roads, water, and energy systems, on the one hand, and those who study the production, circulation, and reproduction of sound, on the other. To analyze the materialities of music making, as with civic infrastructures, is to investigate the relational capacities of the materials from which things are made, the diverse types of labor through which these materials become integral to their emergent forms, and the uneven distribution of access to the wider structures that underpin the circulation and reproduction of such forms. In particular, the chapter focuses on how the relationship between the hardware of engineered systems and the software of sociality creates new possibilities for thinking about the politics of infrastructure. The chapter explores these resonances between audible and civic infrastructures by considering the M1 Symphony, a work commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of Britain’s first long-distance motorway. The example provokes reflection on the relationship between media and infrastructure, between composition and improvisation, and between ontological experiment and artful design.

The Sounds of Zombie Media

This chapter investigates how do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures in New York City and Berlin make sound and music with “zombie media,” or physical materials rescued from obsolescence that are recycled, repurposed, and reanimated. In situating DIY repurposing practices within a context of conspicuous production, or the tendency to obsess over constant invention and fabrication, it explores zombie media as experimental instrument building, sound art, and multimedia art. Through solo tinkering, group workshops, concerts, and exhibits, participants employ the DIY ethos present in underground and experimental music and art scenes, as well as maker and hacker cultures, to explore the aesthetic, material, and cultural value of electronics at various life stages and afterlives. Some of their tools and techniques of repurposing include: circuit bending, hardware hacking, scavenging electronic waste, and repairing broken audio equipment. Drawing on discussions of the zombie, ranging from its original Haitian context to its widespread use as a symbol for the anxieties of late capitalism and overconsumption, the chapter shows how participants engage infrastructures of waste through an ethic of aversion, cultivating sustainability skills that demonstrate “productive” uses of time and materials, but which nevertheless embody conspicuous production. The lure of zombie media is its reanimating power—a resourcefulness-through-resistance that operates via sincerely held beliefs about labor, frugality, and conserving material goods.

Electronic Music and the Problem of Electricity

For the past twenty years, South African popular music has been dominated by electronic genres such as house, kwaito, and hip-hop—especially among the Black population living in and around major urban centers. Based on fieldwork in the townships of Soweto, this chapter focuses on a fundamental condition of possibility for any kind of electronic music: electricity. Since 2008, South Africa has experienced massive problems with its electricity infrastructure. These problems resulted in widespread rolling blackouts between 2008 and 2009, and since 2014 the situation has worsened. The chapter asks what becomes of electronic music in a context where access to electricity is radically unreliable, if not completely absent. What do musicians do when the electricity supply stops? What kinds of affect become impossible, and what kinds of affect are generated? How do power outages impact a musician’s relationship to citizenship and to the state? The chapter traces the lines of connection between informal home studios and Eskom (South Africa’s state-owned electricity utility) as way of listening to and for infrastructure—developing a critique regarding the tropes of invisibility and breakdown in infrastructural research along the way. It further illuminates the ways that electronic musicians in South Africa are compelled to engage the very material basis of their activities. With this approach, the meaning of the term “electronic music” is revealed to be much more than a generic or stylistic description. In South Africa, electronic music refers first and foremost to its material constitution as electrical energy.

Timber to Timbre

The Gibson Les Paul is one of the most iconic electric guitars ever made. Although there is a vibrant scholarly literature surrounding the Les Paul’s symbolic entanglements with issues of race, gender, and class, few have considered the ecopolitical entanglements involved in producing a key material dimension of that guitar’s signature sound: Honduran mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla). Fiji is one of the main harvesting sites of Honduran mahogany, and this chapter charts the social and environmental transformations that occurred following this wood’s introduction to Fiji in the 1880s, considering especially the increasing demand for mahogany as it has been driven by the popularization of the Les Paul since the mid-twentieth century—an issue that, to this day, continues to define forestry in the region. By examining the global commodity chains and infrastructures underlying Les Paul production, this chapter focuses on the role that Honduran mahogany, or the “White Man’s timber,” as it is called by some locals, has played in reconfiguring Fijian landowners’ definitions of what constitutes a forest, sustainability, and justice. In doing so, the chapter interrogates the power relations and ontological politics in which different actors, species, and things are enmeshed. Ultimately, the chapter shows that the aesthetic investments of musicians in particular timbres are rooted in broader legacies of timber-driven colonialism and plantation capitalism.

The Infrastructure and Environmental Consequences of Live Music

This chapter offers a backstage perspective on the physical and organizational structures of touring and concertgoing. In doing so, it addresses the global challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability through the lens of the live music sector, focusing on the UK as a case study. More specifically, the chapter investigates how actors in the live music industry—made up of artists, audiences, and organizers—perceive and address climate change and sustainability, one of the most urgent problems facing the wider global community. The chapter develops the concept of a “live music ecology,” arguing that an ecological approach to live music draws attention to three other factors: (1) the materiality of the infrastructures and buildings in which live music happens; (2) the interdependence between the actors who identify themselves as operating within a music scene versus other nonmusic work spheres who have a significant impact on live music; and finally (3) the sustainability of live music culture, where all the factors above contribute to meet the needs of the present ecology “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The underlying argument of this chapter is that the infrastructures at play in the production of live music are often directly at odds with the escapist ideology often found in live music performances as cultural events. Indeed, the chapter highlights some of the ideological contradictions embodied by concert spaces that style themselves as utopian and “green.” Ultimately, it argues that we need more efficient and sustainable musical infrastructures, and that a crucial part of achieving that goal involves developing critical infrastructural imaginaries.

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.

Glittery

During the commercial broadcasting boom of the 1920s, mica became an essential component of various radio parts, especially the audion vacuum tube, which became central to signal amplification during this period. As uses multiplied and factories produced greater quantities of sound-reproduction machines, the demand for mica exploded. This chapter traces a history of mica through the interwar years, arguing that the newfound necessity of this mineral pushed radio manufacturing into an existing—and vexed—infrastructure held together through exploitative labor regimes, environmental degradation, and the tense politics of empire during this period. It uncovers the surprisingly far-reaching political and social contexts involved in the production of a single radio component. The point of departure is RCA’s effort to find alternative sources of mica, which was primarily controlled by UK interests that, in turn, controlled key mica mines in India. These mines relied on female and child workers, deemed by many observers as the most efficient at splitting the extracted mineral into fine sheets. Such considerations drew RCA into direct negotiations with the US Bureau of Mines, the US Army, and mica mines in Appalachia and New Hampshire, thereby tethering them to hundreds of women and children in various parts of the world whose labor they deemed essential to their enterprise.

Street Net and Electronic Music in Cuba

Cuba has one of the lowest internet penetration rates in the world. This encourages Cubans to create alternative ways of coping with digital scarcity, including hidden wi-fi antennas and ethernet cables strung over streets and rooftops, and physical networks of digital media circulation that rely on memory sticks and other portable devices. These alternative networks counter the inefficiency and unreliability of the official media infrastructures, providing the population with access to digital media and to what presently circulates outside of Cuba. Electroacoustic and electronic musicians benefit from these physical networks of circulation by accessing text, audio, and image files, as well as cracked software, anti-virus definitions, and plug-ins. This chapter explores the creative impacts of evolving media infrastructures on the production and circulation of digital media in Cuba, looking at how wires, waves, and webs affect the creation of new collectives and new music during a period of rapid economic and political transformation. It addresses the strategies adopted by electronic musicians to access programs and software, and to create music in a context of digital scarcity and through illicit and legal infrastructures. The chapter discusses telecommunications networks and the digitalization of music on this island, where the creative strategies for dealing with such infrastructures (or the lack thereof) contribute to new fields of musical practice. Digital culture in Cuba is about alternative local intranets as much as the official global internet, hand-to-hand data sharing as much as peer-to-peer file transfers, human “servers” as much as computer servers.

Rivers, Gatherings, and Infrastructures

From an interdisciplinary communications studies perspective, this chapter triangulates the relationship between several ascendant approaches to music, media, and infrastructure. The author notes that infrastructure and affect have performed certain “gathering” functions within the past decades of media studies, albeit as distant poles of attraction. The chapter registers a similarly productive tension in the ways that infrastructural studies of music reassemble their object as the point of convergence of multiple histories of materials, movements, and social processes, while infrastructural media studies trace the ways in which materials, networks, and assemblages of various kinds carry out the social distribution of meaning, affect, and memory.