Conference Agenda

This paper traces the material and industrial trajectory of piano felt, following its transformation from animal fiber—once living on merino sheep in colonial pasturelands—into a precision-engineered acoustic medium. In doing so, it rethinks how musical instruments, and industrial objects more broadly, reorganize animal vitality into technologies of sensory experience. Rather than treating instruments as inert tools, I approach the piano as a site where biological capacities such as elasticity, resilience, and thermal regulation were extracted, industrially reformatted, and stabilized as acoustic properties—a process I describe as the conversion of sheep life into “soft power.” Focusing on the nineteenth-century generalization of felt in the piano, I examine how animal bodies—initially rabbit and hare, and later sheep—were disaggregated into fibers and recomposed into stratified materials optimized for acoustic precision. Felt became essential not only to the hammer, where it mediates the transfer of kinetic energy into vibration, but also to dampers and key mechanisms that regulate resonance and silence. These applications positioned felt as a critical interface between motion and sound, enabling the dynamic control and tonal consistency associated with modern piano performance. These acoustic capacities, however, were not inherent but engineered through intensive industrial processes. Drawing on archival records, advertising materials, and oral history interviews of formal workers, the paper shows how piano felt production depended on global wool supply chains rooted in colonial pastoralism, as well as labor regimes that exposed laborers and environments alike to toxic chemicals, airborne wool dust, and polluted waterways. The making of acoustic precision thus entailed ecological transformation and the industrial reorganization of both human and animal life. Finally, the paper argues that the piano functioned as a laboratory for the development of precision felt whose applications extended far beyond music, into machinery, automobiles, appliances, and aerospace technologies. Through this material history of the piano, felt thus emerges as a compressed archive of colonial extraction and industrial modernity, translating animal life and ecological transformation into the regulated touch and sound of modern sensory environments.

How productive is it to consider the “biography” of an object like a sound recording? Would its materiality or inanimateness make it a nonsensical proposition? Or, to what extent a critical approach to the lives and afterlives of musical artifacts can reveal modalities of human and non-human co-laboring that may not be evident otherwise? Building on the pioneering work of Igor Kopytoff on the “cultural biographies of things” and on recent approaches in posthumanism, political ecology, and sound studies, this paper examines the biography of a particular sound recording: Eugenio López’s 1910 monologue “Un gaucho en París,” a comical depiction of the misfortunes of an Argentinian in the French capital. I study the material and social lives of that record, from the capture of the performer’s interpretation to its massive dissemination as a commodity to its commercial oblivion and its afterlife as an archival object. By way of that story, I examine the entanglements between sound extraction and commercial imperialism in the early twentieth century and beyond. I argue, ultimately, that sound recordings are cultural artifacts produced and reproduced by virtue of colonial structures and that their “living” trajectories bear testimony of the durability and strength of imperial domination in the global geopolitical realm as much as in the musical marketplace. Alongside these ideas, the paper advances a twofold intervention in the fields of musical biographies and music industry studies. On the one hand, it provides a discussion of the methodological implications of applying the framework of “estrangement” to account, at once, for the lives of non-living things and the coloniality of seemingly non-colonial endeavors. On the other hand, it engages with a broader examination of practices of colonial extractivism in the activities of both the sound recording industry and academia.

This paper examines the twin demands of preservation and access that emerge from the act of accumulating recorded sound objects within official institutional structures. These issues converge in the production of digital surrogates—“a digital copy of a record on any analog medium”—which are now widely celebrated as a miraculous solution to the competing demands of preservation and access. Claiming that recorded sound objects do not contain music but create it, I show how digital surrogates remake our relationship to music and music history, framing the practical and affective experience of listening in such a way that the ever-increasing historicity of recorded sound is what the listening experience comes to be about. The seemingly heroic efforts of producing and circulating digital surrogates are complicated by the competing claims of copyright owners, whose goals regarding preservation and, especially, access do not coincide with those of institutional sound collections. They are further complicated by the fact that digital surrogates and the infrastructures needed to manage and reproduce them are often much more fragile than the historical formats of recorded sound they are thought of as preserving. Thus the beliefs that animate the heroic framing of digital surrogates as a deus ex machina are in fact saturated with anxieties of loss. The digital surrogate is not some preservationist silver bullet but the archetypical lossy format, the fragility of which gives the lie to the alluring but doomed conviction that historical sound recordings—like anything we care about—can and should exist forever.