Kyle Devine @ Musical Materialities in the Digital Age

Kyle Devine is presenting on 'The Material Intensity of Digital Music' at Musical Materialities in the Digital Age, University of Sussex, 27-28 June.

In the presentation I argue against everyday discourses which suggest that music digitalised is music dematerialised. Instead, I highlight the obdurate 'material intensity' of digital music's delivery infrastructure and accessory technologies. Drawing on work in material culture studies and the sociology of waste, my focus is on how the manufacture and delivery of digitally mediated music 'consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources' (Maxwell and Miller 2012). Like earlier predictions about the paperless office, claims about the possibility of a digitally weightless musical culture assume an untenable lightness of being. Ending on a longer view of the history of the recording industry, I suggest that while the political economy of music may follow a path of abstraction, from the solidity of manufacturing to the airiness of rights agreements, the same cannot be said of the political ecology of music.

This work stems from Kyle's current project, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. It's about the history of what recordings are made of, and about what happens to those recordings when they are disposed of. The larger project inscribes a history of recorded music in five materials: shellac, polyvinyl chloride, polyester, polycarbonate, and data - otherwise known as 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s.