Data in the Anthropocene: Music's Carbon Footprint & the Environmental Endgame

12/22/21 • 49 min

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 Points

Music 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.

Resources

You can learn more about the environmental costs of music in Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music
His 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 co...

It turns out that the social-environmental-historical-economic impact of datafied music is not an easy nut to crack.

Key Points

Music 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.

Resources

You can learn more about the environmental costs of music in Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music
His 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 co...

Previous Episode

Soundscapes of War and Worship: Mozart and the Call to Prayer

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 Points