Emergent Sound: Labor, Materiality, and Nonrepresentational Music

Abstract

This article considers what it would mean to rethink music as emergent, to think of ephemerality in relation to potentiality. To think, that is, of the voice and the LP, musical instruments and tabletops as potential sound, available (and intended) for the production of sound, awaiting, in fact, to be sounded. It grounds this discussion in the multi-dimensional relationship between sound and labor, taking up sounds of work, the circulation of sound across mediums of liveness and mediation during 1940s recording bans, and the noisy and contradictory silences of these bans, when some, especially those working with folk musicians who were often in solidarity with labor, continued to record.

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