Skip to main content
Quantity
Pre-order. Available May 13 2027
$126.36 RRP $157.95 Website price saving $31.59 (20%)

Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available

Description

Lying at the intersection of sound studies and energy humanities, this edited volume is the first to explore the sounds of fossil fuels and the entanglement of energy and listening within petrocapitalism.

In a chorus of engines on the highway, as in the thunder and whine of airplanes overhead, oil has come to define and shape the sonic contours of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Over the past two centuries, fossil fuels have asserted their presence in countless other, sometimes unexpected ways: through coal and oil companies as musical sponsors, in the sonics of coal and oil towns and traditional peatlands, in seismic survey, through the vinyl record (which relies on oil-derived, synthetic plastic pellets), and across audiovisual culture more broadly.

Drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches, including musicology, ethnomusicology, screen music studies, sound studies, comparative literature and more, this book presents case studies situated in the British Isles, North America, Venezuela, Russia, Equatorial Guinea and Iran, to examine questions of sonic materiality, extractive listening and environmental destruction.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • EPUB 3.0
  • Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
  • WCAG level AA
  • WCAG v2.2 compliant
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

  • No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
  • Has alternative text descriptions for images

Visual adjustments

Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
  • Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
  • Purposes of all links are made clear

Rich content

Language tagging provided

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sonic Views on Fossil Fuels
Gavin Williams, King's College London, Annette Davison, University of Edinburgh, and Laudan Nooshin, City St George's, University of London


PART 1 Sonic Extractions

1. Wetland, Wasteland, Wealth: Listening to the Northern Irish Peatlands
Lara Weaver, Queen's University Belfast

2. Deconvolved: Big Data, Oil and Geo-Histories of Sound
Gavin Williams, King's College London

3. Rhythms of Venezuela: The Extraction and Refinement of Traditional Music
Andrea Zarza Canova, British Library and University of Nottingham, and Carlos Colmenares Gil,
Indiana University, Bloomington.


PART 2 Oil's Agencies

4. Mediating Global Economics and Local Politics Through Music in Equatorial Guinea
Pablo Infante-Amate, Universidad de Jae´n

5. Petrocapital Ambient Soundtrack
Michael Nardone, Université de Montréal

6. “More Than Just the Sounds of Traffic”: The Petro-Sonics of Tehran
Laudan Nooshin, City St George's, University of London


PART 3 Carbon Aesthetics

7. Energising Energy: Satire, Electronic Dance Music and Russian Petroculture in the 2010s
Annette Davison, University of Edinburgh, and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, University of Edinburgh

8. “Goin' to the Big Oil Show”: Celebrating Oil in Song in Devon, Alberta
Jamie Meyers-Riczu, University of Alberta

9. “Give Me Oil in my Lamp”: Sounding the Biosonic Hymn
Erin Johnson-Williams, University of Southampton


PART 4 Fossils Echo

10. Oil, Memory, and Trauma in Abadan Port-Oil City
Armaghan Fakhraeirad, University of Pennsylvania

11. Hearing Musical Petrocultures in Scotland's Mining Communities, 1850-1930
Rowan Bayliss Hawitt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

12. Peter Handford's Steamscapes
Jonathan Hicks, University of Aberdeen


Afterword
Tim Boon, University College, London

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published May 13 2027
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 256
ISBN 9798765124574
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Gavin Williams

Gavin Williams is Lecturer in Music at King’s Coll…

Anthology Editor

Laudan Nooshin

Laudan Nooshin is Professor of Music at City, Univ…

Anthology Editor

Annette Davison

Annette Davison is Professor of Music and Audiovis…

Related Titles

Environment: Staging