Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (The MIT Press)

Product Information

But after reading ‘Into the Wild,’ I was able to track down a manuscript about Vapniarca that has been published online. Devine holds out hope for a shift in consciousness, similar to the one that has taken place in our relationship with food. It’s been estimated that, in the twentieth century, more than a hundred thousand people worldwide were permanently paralyzed from eating grass pea. Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists - to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance. We can work on the smaller parts individually using logical reasoning by making sure we think sensibly about the problem and possible solutions.

Collaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. In this audacious book, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life.The Knockoff Economy approaches the question of incentives and innovation in a wholly new way-by exploring creative fields where copying is generally legal, such as fashion, food, and even professional football. But in hinging his dispersion of music to particular staple commodities out of which it’s made, Devine risks obscuring the relations of power that condition the very processes he seeks to understand.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Avid readers of crime fiction will be familiar with the ‘little grey cells’ of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes’ examination of trace evidence, both of which lead to the conviction of many fictional criminals. No less problematic are the streaming services’ own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians. For example, understanding how a bicycle works is more straightforward if the whole bike is separated into smaller parts and each part is examined to see how it works in more detail.

Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska. It turns out that cultural shifts encouraged the preservation of sound, and those machines we developed in turn changed the ways we listen. Lambein and other experts warn, however, that individuals suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin.Once the inmates had ingested enough of the culprit plant, it was as if a silent fire had been lit within their bodies. Instead of accumulating heaps of vinyl or plastic, we unpocket our sleek devices and pluck tunes from the ether.