A Conversation about Why Sound Matters
from the No Tags podcast
I was happy to be a guest on Chal Ravens’ and Tom Lea’s No Tags, the complete episode is available here:
Following is a portion of the transcript where we talk about my latest book, Why Sound Matters.
Chal Ravens: Many people know you first and foremost as a musician, but you’ve written quite a lot – three books of nonfiction. Are there older, more secret books I don’t know about?
Damon Krukowski: I have a secret past as a poet. It’s not so secret, it’s just that nobody ever wanted to know about it.
CR: Being a poet is hard. I think it’s fair to say you’re a lifelong writer, but for people who don’t know your writing, what are the most consistent themes or questions running through it?
DK: All three nonfiction books are about sound, from an experiential point of view more than a theoretical or technological one. I don’t claim to have golden ears, like some mastering engineers do, and I don’t have a super expensive hi-fi at home. But I do have a lot of experience with sound. I think we all do, because we’re human beings.
It’s actually very easy to share ideas about the experience of sound with people. The problem is that we lack a vocabulary for it. Part of my project has been to try to build, or at least contribute to, a vocabulary for discussing sound that isn’t about quality, which tends to be mystifying, and isn’t about music theory, which I still consider myself rather an amateur at.
It started because I used to write for art magazines like Artforum and eventually Art in America. They’d have me write about music or sound art, and I became something of a go-to person for anything touching on sound. But I was writing for a non-music audience: a hip, plugged-in audience, but not one that spoke the insider language of music writing. I kept coming up against a similar problem in the art world: how do you talk about sound art without resorting to art speak, which I’m no expert in. I was really trying to build a common ground. The book emerged out of that.
CR: Your latest book is Why Sound Matters, part of a Yale University Press series where all the books are titled Why Something Matters. That framing immediately suggests the reader needs to be persuaded, as if most people think sound doesn’t matter, or simply don’t think about it. Have you found that to be the case?
DK: Absolutely. The series is a little problematic to me. There’s actually a volume called Why Food Matters, which is absurd. They originally came to me and asked for Why Music Matters, and I said no, for the same reason they should never have commissioned Why Food Matters. Also, who am I to say why music matters? It seems so presumptuous.
I took it as a challenge. How do you discuss this in real terms without resorting to humanist clichés, [like] ‘Sound matters because it makes your life richer’. Frankly, this is what I think they expected me to hand back. I bristled at the title the whole time I was writing. Finally, my partner Naomi said: ‘What if you just drop the ‘why’ when you’re thinking about it?’ So I started thinking of what I was writing simply as Sound Matters. Then I was able to write the book.
I also took the title literally: sound as a physical material, the matter of sound. That’s how the book starts, with me trying to establish sound as something material.
CR: Let’s walk through a little of that argument. Part of your central case is that sound is material and has value – rather than being apparently immaterial, something that just floats around and somehow ends up in your brain. You frame this early on through noise pollution. I wondered if you’d ever come across a term sometimes used in Britain: sodcasting?
DK: No – is it podcasts about the Earth?
CR: No! It’s where you sit on the top deck of the bus and play music off your phone – or, increasingly, AI-generated TikTok videos, and everyone around you thinks you’re a sod. Very British.
DK: That’s brilliant. So the person playing it is the sod?
CR: Exactly.
Tom Lea: Very pressing topic for this podcast.
CR: So you’re making the argument that sound has value, but you’re also showing that it can have a destructive, negative value – like noise pollution.
DK: The book is ultimately working toward an argument about how musicians need to be fairly paid and how sound needs to be properly valued in our economy. I wanted to reach for a justification that went deeper than simply saying ‘support me’ or ‘pay me’, because I really do believe there’s something more fundamental at root here, which is the devaluation of labour.
When artists aren’t paid, I think we have something in common with workers across the 21st-century economy. We’re not compensated for our labour. Establishing that labour is involved with sound and music is actually a stretch. It’s not self-evident in the way it is with, say, manufacturing.
I reached for the idea that sound is a material, it’s something that can be worked, wasted and abused, like anything else in the environment. Noise pollution is something we all experience. We know what it is to have our environment poisoned by sound. Yet when I went looking for environmental literature about it, I found almost none. Noise has been relegated to a lifestyle concern, a very ‘60s idea of ‘peace, love, and understanding’, while the planet is on fire and the seas are rising. It barely appears in the index of most new books about the climate crisis.
I figured I actually had something to contribute there, because noise pollution is part of the same environmental crisis, operating on the same logic: the abuse of our shared resources in service of profit and capital.
CR: One of the examples you give is the serious harm that underwater noise causes to ocean ecology: seismic testing to locate oil and gas, sonar blasts that devastate animals who rely on sound to communicate. It isn’t just an inconvenience for wildlife.
DK: It’s a disaster-level problem in the ocean. That’s the one place where I could find real scientific literature, precisely because it’s the domain we as humans can’t hear. We have sympathy for ocean mammals, but because the sound is literally beneath our perception, it’s been documented and written about without most people noticing. Above ground, where we do hear, we’re just awash in noise, and somehow that registers even less.
It was a funny turn for me to take, because my first nonfiction book, The New Analog, was also about noise, but in a very different sense: noise as communicative material. My argument was that digital media eliminates what we identify as noise and delivers only signal, whereas analogue always carries both together. Digital draws a hard line and sorts them.
There, I was valorising noise in music. Here I’m doing something different, treating noise as evidence of waste in the natural environment, accepting it as non-communicative. I broke my own terminology. But both arguments return to the same underlying question, which comes very much from John Cage: what is noise, what is signal, and who gets to decide?
CR: That brings us back to value. I was slightly struggling with the idea that sound is material and therefore it has value, because value is such a nebulous term. Are you implying value to humans? Exchange value? Somewhere between the two? You do bring in some Marxist economics near the end.
DK: The hinge is labour. What I was trying to establish is that sound, as a material in the world, must be worked. How do you work materials? Through labour. We readily acknowledge the value of materials and the labour of working with them in almost every other context, but not typically with sound. That was what I wanted to highlight. My Marxist economics are a little shaky, I’ll admit. The funny thing is that this commission came to me through the economics editor at Yale University Press, who had read some of my pieces about labour in the music industry. When he first called, I said, ‘Look, I don’t have an economics degree, I took intro economics in college and really disliked it.’ He said, ‘That’s exactly why you’re saying things that aren’t usually said within the profession.’ He was embracing my punk rock approach. The question was, how do I put it on firmer footing?
That’s where I reached, quite literally, for the terra firma of material. You have iron ore in the ground, you plant seeds in the earth, you work materials. We’re completely comfortable with that framework. But because sound seems immaterial, we don’t consider the work that goes into shaping it. A good example in the book is Foley, the art of making sound effects for film and radio. That’s always been acknowledged as labour, as paid work. Foley artists still use boxes of sand and shoes of different weights to make footsteps for films. You can see, very concretely, how the soundtrack is being worked with human labour.
But then you get to the James Bond theme song, and we leave all of that completely behind. Now we’re in the netherworld of intellectual property, celebrity, supply and demand. I wanted to ask, could we talk about music using the same framework we use when we discuss value in terms of labour elsewhere?
CR: You mention well-known field recordists Bernie Krause and Chris Watson and posit that value comes into play the moment they turn their expert ear and attention toward something like a wave in the Pacific Ocean, and press record. Some value is added through that act of focused labour, even if it doesn’t immediately translate into market value.
There’s also a mirrored quality to your thinking. You’re just as interested in the non-commercialisable, almost non-musical aspects of music. The world around music, the life of music, which isn’t always about playing music at all. You illustrate this beautifully with an anecdote about Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts.
DK: The connection between Krause, Watson, and Charlie Watts is this: there’s no other way to get what they made than to have everything that surrounded it. You can’t just put Charlie Watts on a drum stool, press record, and get that backbeat. You need Charlie Watts in the Rolling Stones, living everything they lived. The anecdote is from an interview he gave, I think in the ‘80s, when they’d been together 25 years. He said something like, [his career had consisted of] 20 years hanging around and five years being in the Rolling Stones. The idea is that you cannot have the five years of music without the 20 years of hanging out.
That cuts straight to what we’re facing today, because digital media and the tech logic that drives it cuts all of that out. These platforms are always driving for efficiency, eliminating everything they don’t think generates value in the conventional sense: saleableness, capital attraction. So they just get rid of it.
A classic example is London black cab drivers versus Uber. You don’t need ‘The Knowledge’ if you have satnav, but now nobody actually knows how to get around London. When Naomi and I arrive to play shows, we can’t even fit the two of us and our equipment into one car anymore. A black cab could have managed that. You didn’t improve things [with Uber] – you hollowed them out. What Charlie Watts was doing in those 20 years hanging around was acquiring knowledge, the same kind of knowledge as a cabbie learning every alley in the city. It looks like waste from one angle, but from another it’s the only way to build the real value of what comes afterwards.
Listening to: Gilles Peterson presents International Anthem
Cooking: erbazzone with early spring greens
This is a very "life-as-a-musician"-affirming read, and a very enjoyable one at that. Thanks for presenting it transcribed, from someone who much prefers listening to prerecorded music than prerecorded talk.