Audible Infrastructures

Reviews / Votes

A collection of insightful essays on the media infrastructures of sound and music ... This is a major contribution to the existing infrastructural scholarship. * Keisuke Yamada, Technology and Culture * This is a major contribution to the existing infrastructural scholarship. * Keisuke Yamada, Technology and Culture * Audible Infrastructures stands out as a groundbreaking collected volume focusing on what makes music possible for most of us: instruments, recordings, transmission and listening systems, with all their multifaceted dependencies. * Sound Studies * When a needle drops on a record or the play button is pressed the sound issuing forth rests upon massive infrastructural systems in order to exist. Audible Infrastructures brings those infrastructures into focus. It looks less at music than at the technologies music is stored on, the raw materials extracted to make them, and the waste they turn into. Drawing on emergent work on infrastructures and media ecologies the editors have produced a field defining book, one that is effortlessly inventive, and one of the most stimulating I have read in a long time. * Brian Larkin, Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College * Audible Infrastructures primes us to listen for music's resonances far beyond the specific moment and site of audition. This powerful collection articulates how each stream on Spotify, each strum of the guitar, each flip of the LP, each voice raised in protest is networked across time and space to the forests, mines, plantations, power plants, and dumping grounds where music is made material. * Shannon Mattern, Department of Anthropology, The New School *