Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Kyle Devine, “Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change”

Everywhere you look, music is changing—overhauling itself in response to sustainability issues and the climate crisis. There are records made of plants, stereos that run on sunshine, streaming services powered like hot springs and cooled inside mountains. There are sector-specific carbon calculators, climate credentials, and emissions audits. There are organizations that size up (and draw down) the environmental impact of music on all levels. And there is a lot of ecological awareness: white papers, green road maps, industry pacts, emergency declarations, sound installations, song contests, podcasts, playlists, and more. We are witnessing a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be, not just what it is about or how it sounds.

What is changing are the basic technological, institutional, and cultural bases that decide how music gets made and heard in the first place. These changes are good. They are needed. At the same time, a variety of factors threaten to get in the way of what everyone wants to accomplish. In this presentation I highlight what is good about the good things, drawing on years of work with people in music who are committed to change. I also explain what is not so good about the not-so-good things, showing how stubborn political economic realities can turn even the best ideas and intentions back into the problems they set out to solve. And I suggest what further changes might authorize the most daring hopes and boldest plans for rescuing the future of music—along with everything else.

Kyle Devine works at University College Dublin, where he leads a research grant on the political economy of artificial intelligence in music. His books include Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music, an award-winning environmental history of the record industry, Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, which received the Ellen Koskoff Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change, recently published by Verso.

Before joining UCD, Kyle spent ten years at the University of Oslo, where he taught music and environmental humanities, and was dean of graduate studies at the University of Winnipeg. He has held visiting fellowships at McGill University and the University of Melbourne and worked previously at City St George’s, University of London and Worcester College, University of Oxford.