Unsound Supplies: Noisy Matter and the Making of Modern Soundscapes

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.

Fanny Gribenski is Assistant Professor of Music at New York University. She is the author of L’Église comme lieu de concert (2019) and Tuning the World (2023). Her current research examines the relationships between musical instruments, ecology, and empire. Gribenski has been a fellow of the Thiers Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the Huntington Library, and has worked as a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS) and IRCAM, Paris.

David Pantalony is Curator of Science and Medicine at Ingenium - Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, and has been a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the Dibner Institute at MIT, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He was awarded the Bunge Prize for his book on the acoustical instrument maker Rudolph Koenig. Pantalony has held curating positions at Dartmouth College (NH) and the Bakken Library and Museum in Minneapolis. He is adjunct professor in the University of Ottawa’s History Department, where he has taught collection-based seminars on provenance.

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor of Media and Knowledge Technologies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she also leads the Research Center ＂Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics.＂ Her academic career includes positions and fellowships at Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Amsterdam, the Laboratoire SPHERE in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Princeton University. She has published widely on the history of early modern and modern aviation, architecture, acoustics, neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and sound media. Her current research explores the relationship between concepts of humanity and of technology.