On February 3, 2023, a freight train transporting hazardous chemicals through the Ohio village of East Palestine derailed, spilling approximately forty million gallons of industrial waste into nearby waterways. Drawing brief attention from national news media outlets, the East Palestine derailment was only the most recent in a series of industrial chemical spills, both accidental and intentional, that have ravaged the waters of the Ohio River and the people along its shores for decades. This paper examines musical responses to individual and serial instances of industrial pollution in the Ohio River Valley. Building from ethnographic methods, archival data, and analysis of songs produced in styles ranging from bluegrass to emo, this paper demonstrates how musicians juxtapose rootedness with nostalgia, resignation with anger, and desperation with optimism, amplifying the sophisticated sentiments of the impacted populace. This paper joins a small publication stream, including memoirs (e.g., Bilott 2020) and collaborative research (e.g., Lassiter, Hoey, and Campbell 2020), that attend to the related deterioration of public trust in the efficacy and honesty of both government officials, regulative agencies, and manufacturing corporations in the region.

A soundwalk is an excursion consisting of a combination of auditory and physical exploration of a place. In this paper, I question the boundaries between sound and music studies, employing an ethnomusicological toolset for the study of soundwalks in Tuscany, central Italy. Here this practice is used by local cultural, environmental, and conservation organisations to foster environmental awareness and build in the local communities an empathic understanding and respectful acknowledgement of the environment and its non-human inhabitants. I explore five case studies of soundwalks aimed at listening to environmental sounds and music in various areas of naturalistic interest. The case studies include three widespread festivals: ‘Musica sulle Apuane,’ ‘Dei suoni I passi,’ and ‘Passaggi,’ the everyday auditory activities of the two natural reserves operated by the Italian League for Birds Protection (LIPU) in Tuscany, including their use of musical performances, and the cultural and environmentalist sensorial excursions organised by the ‘In Quiete’ co-op in the Casentinesi forest. Building on a holistic understanding of soundscapes that includes music as one of the many possible environmental sounds, I propose a revised definition of soundwalks that includes musical performances as one of the possible sound sources. While the goals and the rationale behind the events are different, all the soundwalks impact the public similarly, helping to reconnect the visitors with the landscape. In conclusion, I propose a model of ecomusicological analysis for soundwalks dividing them into three overlapping impact levels: the conservationist/practical, the educational/ecocritical, and the empathetic/emotional.

Artists are deploying a myriad of positionalities and approaches to raise awareness about the environmental crises and become more accountable for their music’s multi-dimensional ecological footprint. These positionalities and approaches speak of different environmentalisms – systems of beliefs– that mediate each artist’s engagement with their surrounding environment. The study of these diverse environmentalisms within music related to the environmental issues is still in development. Thus, this presentation will seek to contribute to the ongoing discussion by expanding the kind of musical and sound practices that have been considered so far, and by situating the reflection on a country constantly affected by ecological problems but where the discussion about music, sound, and environment is just beginning. In this vein, the research is located in Chile, and it addresses two musical projects belonging to diverse genres and political-cultural positions: Bahía Mansa (Iván Aguayo), an artist within the ambient music genre who composes his music through field recordings and synthesizers; and Mawiza, a Mapuche metal band within the Mapuche ül metal genre. The methodologies that guide the research are digital fieldwork, archival work, semi-structured interviews, and discourse as well as music analysis. Meanwhile, the notions of “worlding” (De la Cadena 2015), “geological ear” (Ochoa Gautier, 2022), and “performing environmentalisms” (McDowell et al., 2021) will be used as theoretical concepts to scrutinize how Bahía Mansa and Mawiza establish a connection with their surrounding environments through sound and musical practices, and what do these connections tell us about the environmentalisms that guide them.