Unsound Supplies
Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes
Series: Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 4 December 2025
- ISBN 9780197814574
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages320 pages
- Size 234x156x22 mm
- Weight 621 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 50 659
Categories
Short description:
Unsound Supplies investigates the hidden provenance of the materials that have shaped modern musical and audio technology. In ten detailed chapters, it uncovers the global, often colonial, sources of materials such as African ivory, Brazilian wood, and Indian shellac used in musical instruments and audio equipment. The book reveals the complex supply chains, labor conditions, and political and epistemic forces behind these resources, challenging a conventionally sanitized view of music production. Its critical perspective on the often-overlooked material foundations of modern soundscapes make it a thought-provoking read for those interested in music, history, and global trade.
MoreLong description:
Unsound Supplies explores the complex and often hidden provenance of the raw materials that underpin the rich musical cultures of modernity. Each of the book's ten chapters focuses on one material used in musical instrument making and the audio communications industry in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries--from African ivory and transatlantically traded rubber to Manila paper, Brazilian Pernambuco wood, tropical mahogany, Indian jackfruit trees, and steel, aluminum, wax, and shellac sourced from around the globe.
Together, the chapters trace the geographically diverse and frequently colonial origins and extraction processes of these materials, while also revealing their shifting values and meanings along supply chains. The authors critically examine the logistics, large-scale infrastructures, working conditions, and political, economic, and epistemic forces that have facilitated this material diversity.
Employing a variety of methods and approaches, Unsound Supplies reflects on the narratives and historiographical challenges that arise when discussing the material underpinnings of modern soundscapes, which are so often obscured and morally sanitized by modern musical and sonic aesthetics. The volume unleashes a noisy materiality marked by myriad contradictions, global connections, and uncertainties.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part I. Rethinking Sonic Perfection
Phonographic Imperfect: A Network Archaeology of Shellac
High Energy for a Great Modernity: Musical Instruments Made with Aluminum
Part II. Writing Against the Chain
Keyed In: Ivory, Slavery, and the Colonial Networks of the Piano, 1850-1931
Pernambuco: Listening for "the Very Substance of America"
Part III. Paying Attention to Noisy Matter
Paper: A Sonic Archaeology of Some Vegetable Fibers
Forging Acoustic Precision
Part IV. Conducting Material-Oriented Provenance Research
Sounds in Wax: Comparative Musicology, Chemistry, and the World as a Resource
The Troubling Sound of Mahogany: Sugar, Slaves, and Square Pianos
Part V. Tuning In to Sound Cultures Beyond Extractivism
Kautschukmelodie: Blood Rubber, Epistemic Murk, Song Properties
Sweet and Sound: Crafting Jackfruit Kattai in South India
