In seeking to respond to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene era, our research team of five scholars, including faculty and advanced graduate students, along with each of their collaborators in their respective research sites, has come together to explore the possibilities of a methodology that we call Field to Media. Field to Media involves using video production to study and amplify ecomusical responses to climate change, pollution, deforestation, and other environmental challenges. This methodology is intended as a pragmatic process that blends participant observation with participatory action research and applied or activist engagement. Specific to this project, our efforts have involved the co-creation of five different music videos to address a range of pressing environment-related matters in USA/Canada, Tanzania, Bangladesh, China, and Haiti. In this article, we consider some of the potential successes and challenges that we have each experienced in the course of producing these music videos.

What is the cost of music in the so-called Anthropocene? We approach this question by focusing on the case of sound-recording formats. We consider the cost of recorded music through two overlapping lenses: economic cost, on the one hand, and environmental cost, on the other. The article begins by discussing how the price of records has changed from the late 19th to the 21st century and across the seven most economically significant playback formats: phonograph cylinder, gramophone disc, vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, digital audio files on hard drive, and streaming from the cloud. Our case study territory is the United States, and we chart the gradual decline in the price of recorded music up to the present. We then examine the environmental and human costs of music by looking at what recordings are made out of, where those materials come from, and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Despite what rhetorics of digital dematerialisation tell us, we show that the labour conditions in the digital electronics and IT industries are as inhumane as ever, while the amount of greenhouse gases released by the US recording industry could actually be higher today than at the height of any previous format. We conclude by asking the obvious (but by no means straightforward) question: what are musicians and fans to do?

Understanding how recorded and amplified stage musics contribute towards producing the Anthropocene necessitates attending to complex transnational flows of material, capital and labor, and how they coalesce into technological objects. This is complicated by the wide array of sites, practices and knowledges involved during various stages of the production process, from initial resource extraction, to smelting, component manufacturing, technology assembly, and distribution. To develop a suitable technological ethics, and to understand what happens to environments and to human, animal and plant lifeworlds, requires one to resist abstraction and undertake a global accounting of resource ecologies with recourse to planetary-scale political economy. Towards this goal, I provide a partial account of an early 2000s mic preamp, a mundane but nonetheless fetishised recording studio technological object. I focus on two metals, tin and tantalum, that are primarily extracted for electronics manufacturing, and two building blocks of electronics, solder and capacitors, which are essential for making contemporary electronics.

This article introduces three situated moments – or plateaux – in order to partially uncover the particular affinities between popular music and the ‘logic of waste’ in the Anthropocene Era, from early phonography to the present digital realm (with a focus on the UK, United States, and British India). The article starts with a ‘partial inventory’ of the Anthropocene, outlining the heuristic values of waste studies for research in popular music. The first plateau retraces the more historical links between popular music and waste, showing how waste (and the positive discourses surrounding it) became a defining element of the discourse and practices of early phonography. It aims to show how recorded sound participated in (and helped define, in an emblematic manner) a rapidly expanding ‘throwaway culture’ at the turn of the 20th century. The second plateau presents a more global panorama of the recording industry through a focus on shellac (a core, reversible substance of the early recording industry). Finally, the third plateau presents some insights into the ways in which popular music may ‘play’ and incorporate residual materialities in the contemporary ‘digital age’. I argue that the logic of waste defined both the space and pace of the early record industry, and continued to inform musical consumption across the 20th century – notably when toxic, non-recyclable synthetic materials (especially polyvinyl) were introduced.

This article explores the relationship between the human time of music making and the temporal layers that pervade the natural resources of musical instruments. It therefore offers case studies on two of popular music's most common instruments, the electric guitar and the synthesiser, and their symbolic and material temporalities: guitar players’ quest for ‘infinite sustain’ from Santana to today's effects manufacturers and the ‘psychogeophysical’ approach by artist and theorist Martin Howse, who developed a synthesiser module using radioactive material in order to determine musical events by nuclear decay. While language uses metaphors of sustain and decay as figurative ways to express both musical and planetary dimensions, practices of music offer alternative ecologies of relating the seemingly unrelatable scales of deep time and musical time. If in the Anthropocene humankind becomes aware of its role as a geophysical force, thinking about making music in the Anthropocene requires an awareness for the temporalities involved in the materials at hand. Besides an ecological perspective, the article looks at various media (magazines, ads, and manuals) and thus positions economical mechanisms of the musical instrument manufacturing market as a small-scale experimental setting for larger-scale industrial processes.

Tanya Tagaq's work is political, often tackling themes of environmentalism and Indigenous rights. The Inuk throat singer uses live performance and audiovisual media to engage themes of climate change and give voice to environmental violence. Her work diversifies the discourse of environmentalism to include the voices and environmental trauma experienced by marginalised peoples, specifically North American Indigenous-centred sounds and perspectives. Songs such as ‘Fracking’ from Animism (2014) and ‘Nacreous’ from Retribution (2016) are simultaneously expressions of ecological protest and healing, as Tagaq listens with urgency and uses embodied musical practice to explore the aurality of pipeline politics and other forms of ecological imbalance and harm. I analyse how Tagaq's work, both her songs and their accompanying music videos and multimedia, gravitates towards the ecological, considering what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the non-human world – plants, animals, water, natural resources – sound like.