Worldmaking

What does Connor (2010) identify as the reason for the orderly retreat of ‘the world’ from the world?

An increase in world consciousness

What does Goodman (1978) say that much worldmaking consists of?

Taking apart and putting together, often conjointly; of dividing wholes into parts, drawing distinctions.

How does Goodman (1978) suggest humans handle vast quantities of perceptual/cognitive material?

Through suitable arrangements and groupings

What is the interplay of presence and absence in worldmaking?

The making of one world out of another usually involves some extensive weeding out and filling (Goodman 1978)

What does Piekut (2014) say ANT helps musicologists to do?

To attenuate normative assumptions about our object of inquiry, to put aside vague or reified concepts such as ‘music’, ‘society’, or even ‘network’

How does Piekut (2014) describe agency?

It is an action or an event - not an intention - that manifests an agency. If something makes a difference, then it is an actor.

How do Collins and Gooley (2016) define cosmopolitanism?

An ethical-political stance, investing in a certain virtue in belonging to, or striving to belong to, a ‘larger’ world as a way of keeping local and parochial attachments in check.

How do Collins and Gooley (2016) suggest that the discourse cosmopolitanism invoked the ‘world’?

Not as a spatial or empirical reality but as an aspirational concept - an enlarged sense of world-belonging that throws narrower ties into relief or into some sort of critical perspective.

What three reasons does Ochoa Gautier (2023) give for the dramatic change in the politics of sonic exchange in the 19th century?

Changing histories of listening; new technological developments; expansion of colonial ambitions

What year was the phonograph invented in?

1877

What did Edison say about the phonograph in April 1878?

He boasted about its potential for preserving the sounds of Indigenous languages (Ochoa Gautier 2023)

What problem was the early phonograph imagined to solve?

It was understood as a tool to bypass the need to change the medium from sounding to writing, and therefore, supposedly had perfect reproduction (Ochoa Gautier 2023)

What does Ochoa Gautier (2023) say that the development of technologies such as the phonograph were crucial in expanding?

The German and American expansionist agenda

What were the ways in which the phonograph was imagined based on?

A long history of colonial documentation of Indigenous languages and music through writing (Ochoa Gautier 2023)

Give an example for Ochoa Gautier’s (2023) claim that ‘racialisation is frequently clothed in affirmative language’

The desire to ‘preserve’ as a supposed act of benevolence

What was created in Berlin in 1900?

The Phonogram Archive

How does Ochoa Gautier (2023) encapsulate the impact of sonic extraction on Indigenous people?

‘Insofar as culture is preserved as sounds, these colonial discourses on music concealed and erased the displacement of the Indigenous peoples’

How does Ochoa Gautier (2023) define the ‘auditory regime of extraction, confinement, and extinction’?

A way of imagining sounds of particular groups of people as always already dead or on the brink of dying and therefore in need of being properly preserved and stored away

What do McMurray and Mukhopadhyay (2024) mean by ‘acoustics of empire’?

How sound and empire are intertwined in relationships of power and resistance

What question do McMurray and Mukhopadhyay (2024) pose?

Whether the ‘soundscape of modernity’ is permanently entangled with the colonial encounter

What do McMurray and Mukhopadhyay (2024) mean by ‘imperial sound objects’?

Items that circulated around 1800 as part of Euro-American expansion around the globe, producing sound or otherwise generating some form of sonic encounter

What does Davies (2017) say that musical instruments act in?

The configuration of political geographies

What does Davies (2017) say that instruments are implicated in the production of?

Land; they make land by acting in the crystallisation of both a politics and a cosmos

What happened in Wheatstone’s 1835 conference?

Demonstrated three instruments - ‘speaking machines’ - from various parts of the world, engineered to study the voweled qualities of the human voice

How did Wheatstone view the ‘speaking machines’ he presented at the 1835 conference?

As a pedagogical tool for the purification of elocution, to obliterate local accent

What does Reese (2021) say that the early phonograph was used for?

Reanimating and performing the socially significant sounds of widely dispersed British settler communities in Australia

What was a priority for early settler colonialists in Australia?

The construction of church and civic belfries (Reese 2021)

By what decade were bells a common feature of the Australian colonial landscape?

1850s

What does Reese (2021) say that recordings were used for in 19th-century Australia?

To animate an ordered, affectively charged soundscape, which deepened settler place-attachment and ultimately contributed to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Australia

When does Banfield (2007) say was the ‘high noon of British imperialism’?

1876-1953

How does Banfield (2007) relate musical sounds to smells?

• Musical sounds, like smells, can be desperately evocative of memories and feelings associated with them

• Unlike smells, they can be taken along, reproduced for this purpose at will

How does Banfield (2007) say musical culture and its products can be used?

To establish community identity, fix power relations between members, demonstrate taste and purchasing power

What was shipped to various colonial churches in the West Indies, India and West Africa?

British-manufactured organs

Why does Banfield (2007) say that organ export was important for colonial missionary activity?

• A disciplined, participatory front in divine worship was a crucial adjunct to fragile authority

• A mechanical barrel organ could be operated by someone without much musical skill

What scholar talks about the colonial system of British music examinations e.g. ABRSM?

Banfield (2007)

What do Rehding and Waltham-Smith (2023) say that industrialisation is inseparable from?

The racial inequalities of empire

What do Rehding and Waltham-Smith (2023) say that 19th-c transformations of music and music-making reflect?

A specifically racialised and extractivist character that capitalism assumes while colonialism comes up against industrialisation and new types of globalisation

Who uses the framework ‘worldmaking projects’?

Albert et al (2026)

What do worldmaking projects presuppose?

The idea of a future that can be actively imagined and changed (Albert at al. 2026)

Who calls the cylinder phonograph an ‘actant’ in the ANT sense?

Bostrom (2011)

What does Romero (2026) argue guided and sustained the global outreach of sound recording corporations?

The entanglement of political and commercial imperialism

Romero (2026) says that the British Empire was not just of flesh and blood: what else was it?

An empire of the senses

What year did Jesse Walter Fewkes travel to Maine?

1880

What did Fewkes say about the Passamaquoddy tribe?

That they would soon fade into the misty recesses of history

What is significant about Fewkes’s expedition to the Passamaquoddy tribe in Maine?

It was the first known use of the phonograph in the context of ethnographic fieldwork (Hochman 2014)

What common rhetorical trope in the discourse of early audio ethnography did Fewkes employ?

The personification of the phonograph as a disinterested third party in the relationship between the observer and observed - a third party uncontaminated by language, culture, and perception (Hochman 2014)

What does Bennett (2009) say that the Western view of matter as inert provides fuel for?

Human fantasies of conquest and consumption

What is the broad basic claim of new materialism?

That everything in this world exists and becomes what it is only through its intricate and overlapping relations and interconnections with numerous other things and beings (Ejsing 2023)

What do Coole and Frost (2010) say that new materialism recognises?

That phenomena are caught in a multitude of interlocking systems and forces, considering anew the location and nature of capacities for agency

How does new materialism redefine agency?

Agency is redefined in larger nonhuman patterns beyond its associations with human intelligence, perception, and intentionality (Opperman 2021)

Give a new materialist definition of agency

As that which has the power to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events (Opperman 2021)

What does Willett (2026) say about human imaginaries and what is the significance of this?

That human imaginaries co-evolve with non-human entities; this shapes political intentionality

What is the dualistic worldmaking of grand opera?

The world(s) conveyed on stage, and ‘the world’ that allows that world to be conveyed - the ‘world behind the world’ (Connor 2010)

In what year and where was gas lighting installed in Paris?

1822 at the Salle Le Peletier, the then-home of the Paris Opera

What scholar writes about operatic gas lighting?

Cruz 2020

What does Kittler say about the history of the stage?

That it could be traced in the phenomenon of illumination

What is significant about the way gas lighting was installed in the Salle Le Peletier?

It was installed not just on the stage but in the auditorium and corridors

What is a pertinent example of early operatic gas lighting?

The ‘Ballet of the Nuns’ in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable

What was new about Meyerbeer’s ‘Ballet of the Nuns’ in Robert le Diable?

The audience was in complete darkness save for the gas lighting, illuminating the stage from above

What does Sérié say about the effect of gas lighting in Meyerbeer’s ‘Ballet of the Nuns’?

That ‘plunged into darkness, isolated from each other, the audience were projected into another universe that was at once fantastical and plausible’