Music and Sound, Geography and

The first systematic scholarly studies of music in geography were conducted by cultural geographers in the late 1960s and 1970s. These efforts were largely limited to examining music lyrics for their geographic content. Location and the evocation of attachment to these places is, indeed, one important aspect of the geography of music, but the subfield of music geography has become more sophisticated in the intervening decades. The current focus is not only on the geographic significance of lyrics but also on the origin and diffusion of disparate musical styles, the geographic variations in consumer demand for various genres and artists, and the enormously important music industry, which produces, markets, and distributes these artistic endeavors.

Prior to the invention of the phonograph in the 1870s and the radio broadcasting of music in the 1920s, music was a purely oral (and aural) tradition that was ephemeral. Recording technology allowed music to become an important material artifact of a particular culture. Recording equipment made it possible for “song catchers” such as John and Alan Lomax to scour the hills and hollows of Appalachia in the 1920s and 1930s in search of and to record folk songs and ballads in the Celtic tradition and to establish the linkages between the new world and the old one left behind. Because of the dominance of the Berkeley School of cultural geography, folk music traditions dominated these geographic studies, and popular modern music was slower to gain a foothold in geography vis-à-vis other disciplines interested in music.

In the 1960s and 1970s, cultural geographers also became interested in the origin and diffusion of popular culture and its associated music. Larry Ford, for example, suggested that the various genres that made up contemporary music (e.g., rock-and-roll, bluegrass, country and western, gospel, blues) could be used pedagogically to illustrate and enliven discussion of geographic concepts such as culture hearths and diffusion mechanisms. Musicologists with an interest in geography examined the place names mentioned in popular country music lyrics, noting that the two states mentioned the most frequently (i.e., Tennessee and Texas) were also the states of origin of the greatest number of members of the Country Music Association. Geographic variations in the melodic elements of the music that would be of interest to musicologists were, however, largely ignored, perhaps because few geographers studying the subject were themselves well versed in the field of musicology.

Coincident with the “cultural turn” in economic geography in the late 1980s, there arose an interest in music geography among a different set [Page 1968]of geographic scholars. Economic geographers such as Andrew Leyshon and Allen Scott mainly focused on the corporate aspects of the music market (e.g., the geographic consequences of corporate mergers and acquisitions in the recording industry). Music was a multibillion-dollar culture industry that was driving our consumerist culture. Those economic forces were of more interest to this new set of scholars than the more descriptive aspects that interested cultural geographers two decades earlier. The music industry displayed a tendency toward overproduction (e.g., too many musical acts signed to recording labels, too many records released that did not allow the labels to recoup their costs) as a result of uncertainty in the marketplace. Today, researchers such as Andrew Leyshon struggle to come to grips with the geographic consequences of changes in the demand side of the music industry, such as the downturn in compact disk (CD) sales, after an initial surge in sales caused by the switch in recording medium from vinyl and cassette tape to CDs, and the increase in mp3 downloads—both legal and illegal. On the production side, geographers have also begun to focus on the geographic implications of home studios (i.e., less expensive and more ubiquitous digital technologies that are replacing older and more expensive analog versions). Still to be thoroughly researched is the seeming rise of independent labels and nontraditional outlets for bringing new musical acts to the attention of the public (e.g., MySpace pages, You-Tube videos).

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