Lecture Title: The Political Ecology of Music
Speaker: Professor Kyle Devine
Lecture Time: March 18th, 4:00 p.m.
ZOOM: 257 399 8249
Password: D##U55
Venue: Room 410, Foreign Languages Building
Organizer: School of Foreign Studies
Introduction to the Speaker: Kyle Devine is the author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, which has received awards from the Association of American Publishers and the Canada Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. He is also co-editor of Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media. Devine works in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo.
Introduction to the lecture: Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music
Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In this presentation, 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 before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music — what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.
