Arts of Extraction: Oil, Digital Audio and Geo-Histories of Sound (Dr Gavin Williams, King's College London)

Ethnomusicologists have long called attention to extractive dynamics in musical cultures. But what of sound as a technology of extraction in the oil industry? This colloquium will explore the convergence, since the Second World War, between seismic survey and oil industries in which dynamite and air gun explosions have become standard ways of sounding the earth’s strata. It will peer into the history of mathematics, computing, and spectrographic analysis; it will consider the effects of underwater blasts on marine life; and it will track the implications for early digital audio, in particular, focussing on efforts to clean up shellac discs using digital techniques borrowed from the analysis of seismic recordings in search of oil. Ultimately, my goal will be (in this talk or some point in the future) to evaluate the extent to which sonic practices of oil extraction have bled into auditory and musical cultures more broadly, and vice versa, as well as the extent to which both oil and music register capitalism’s framing of the earth in extractible terms.

GAVIN WILLIAMS is a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, between 2013-16, and since lived and worked in UC Berkeley and Cardiff. His book Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc was published by University of Chicago Press in June, and he is currently putting together an edited collection together with co-editors Laudan Nooshin and Annette Davison called Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics.