Kyle Devine

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Phone +47 22854060
Mobile phone +47 90927991 (SMS only)
Room 319
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Visiting address Sem Sælands vei 2 ZEB-bygningen 0371 Oslo
Postal address Postboks 1017 Blindern 0315 Oslo

Academic Interests

The questions I ask are about how culture works, and the work culture does, in large-scale capitalist settings. 

I recently finished a book about how the musical world is responding to climate crisis. There are many positive developments: records made of sugar, stereos that run on sunshine, custom carbon calculators, playlists for the planet, and much more. At the same time, some stubborn political and economic realities threaten to turn even the best solutions back into the problems they want to solve. I highlight what is good about the good things. I present a political argument for why the not-so-good things are not so good. And I suggest what additional changes might authorize the boldest plans for rescuing the future of music—along with everything else. The book will be published by Verso in 2025.

Previously, I wrote a book called Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019). It shows that recorded music has always exploited natural and human resources, and that its reliance on those resources is more damaging today than ever before. The book received the IASPM International Book Prize, the IASPM-Canada Book Prize, and a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. It was an Honorable Mention for the IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award.

I coedited a related book called Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (2021). It looks at the mediated social lives and social deaths of various musical commodities and practices in industrializing and industrialized parts of the world. The book received the Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Most of my other publications have been about histories, cultures, and theories of sound reproduction. I coedited Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (2015) and I coauthored work on gender and social inequalities in music technology for Twentieth-Century Music (2015) and the Contemporary Music Review (2016). 

Music sociology is my other main interest—especially the field's pasts and prospects—and here I coedited The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (2015).

Teaching and Supervision

I’m always happy to hear from prospective students working in my main fields of interest. I encourage projects that are conceptually adventurous, politically engaged, and empirically grounded. Some of my teaching contributions include:

Background

Before joining the University of Oslo in 2015, I taught at City University of London and Worcester College, University of Oxford. At Oxford, I also worked with the Music and Digitization Research Group.

Tags: Music and Media, Music Sociology, Sound Studies, Music and Society, Popular Music Studies, Musicology, Music History, Environmental Humanities

Publications

Devine, Kyle. 2019. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Devine, Kyle, and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, eds. 2021. Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Devine, Kyle (2022). Sustainability, Solutionism, and the Problem of Music. Vibes. ISSN 2748-6389. 2, p. 85–95. Full text in Research Archive
  • Devine, Kyle (2022). Run of the Mill: Economies of Music Before Production and After Consumption. In Morcom, Anna & Taylor, Timothy D. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780190859633. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190859633.013.9.
  • Devine, Kyle & Shepherd, John (2021). On Popular Music Studies in Canada: An Interview with John Shepherd by Kyle Devine. MUSICultures. ISSN 1920-4213. 48, p. 276–291. Full text in Research Archive
  • Brennan, Matt & Devine, Kyle (2020). The cost of music. Popular Music. ISSN 0261-1430. 39(1), p. 43–65. doi: 10.1017/S0261143019000552.
  • Devine, Kyle (2019). Musicology Without Music. In Braae, Nick & Hansen, Kai Arne (Ed.), On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 978-3-030-18099-7. p. 15–37. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_2.
  • Devine, Kyle (2017). Desert Island Discomorphoses: Listening Formations and the Material Cultures of Music. In Brown, Julie; Cook, Nicholas & Cottrell, Stephen (Ed.), Defining the Discographic Self: Desert Island Discs in Context. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780197266175. p. 67–82. doi: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266175.003.0005.

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Published June 1, 2015 12:34 PM - Last modified Mar. 12, 2024 7:56 AM