Community music around the world reflects the growing and diverse ways humans collectivise and express themselves in ways that articulate our cultural, social, and environmental complexity. Revisiting, redevising, and reimagining some of the field’s approaches, ideologies, and contexts, this co-edited volume investigates beyond generalist intercultural and internationalist concepts to reveal the complexity of social ways people come together to make music and to making music be central to this sociality. The authors explore the role community music plays out around the world and how various instrumentally based music-making communities operate as ecologies that allow notions of social, political, and cultural agency and identity/ies. Chapters cover various instrumental community music ensembles, observing how they, as social microcosms of change and stasis, provide working methods new and old, extol values, and model ethical behaviours that are fluid and dynamic, steadfast and unyielding, and that contribute to the ebb and flow of people and their agency that remains under-researched. Insights are provided on variously functioning ensembles throughout the world, showing how myriad instrumental music communities act as drivers, complex environments, and apparati for musical and social expression that accommodates the musical aspirations of their members. Taken as a whole, this book explores community music as local, glocal, global phenomena, critically discussing the redefinition of community music and what music-making means to people in the twenty-first century.

Ubiquitous music is an interdisciplinary area of research that lies at the intersection of music and computer science. Initially evolving from the related concept of ubiquitous computing, today ubiquitous music offers a paradigm for understanding how the everyday presence of computers has led to highly diverse music practices. As we move from desktop computers to mobile and internet-based multi-platform systems, new ways to participate in creative musical activities have radically changed the cultural and social landscape of music composition and performance. This volume explores how these new systems interact and how they may transform our musical experiences. Emerging out of the work of the Ubiquitous Music Group, an international research network established in 2007, this volume provides a snapshot of the ecologically grounded perspectives on ubiquitous music that share the concept of ecosystem as a central theme. Covering theory, software and hardware design, and applications in educational and artistic settings, each chapter features in-depth descriptions of exploratory and cutting-edge creative practices that expand our understanding of music making by means of digital and analogue technologies.

How does sound ecology--an acoustic connective tissue among communities--also become a basis for a healthy economy and a just community? Jeff Todd Titon's lived experiences shed light on the power of song, the ecology of musical cultures, and even cultural sustainability and resilience. In Toward a Sound Ecology, Titon's collected essays address his growing concerns with people making music, holistic ecological approaches to music, and sacred transformations of sound. Titon also demonstrates how to conduct socially responsible fieldwork and compose engaging and accessible ethnography that speaks to a diverse readership. Toward a Sound Ecology is an anthology of Titon's key writings, which are situated chronologically within three particular areas of interest: fieldwork, cultural and musical sustainability, and sound ecology. According to Titon--a foundational figure in folklore and ethnomusicology--a re-orientation away from a world of texts and objects and toward a world of sound connections will reveal the basis of a universal kinship.

Makis Solomos explores the ecologies of music and sound, inspired by Felix Guattari, for whom environmental destruction caused by capitalism goes hand in hand with deteriorating ways of living and feeling, and for whom an ecosophical stance, combining various ecological registers, offers a glimpse of emancipation, a position strengthened today by intersectional approaches. Solomos explores environmental, mental and social ecologies through the lens of the history of music and current artivisms – especially in the fields of acoustic ecology, contemporary music and sound art. Several theoretical and analytical debates are put forward, including a theory of sound milieus and the biopolitics of sound; the relationships between music and the living world; soundscape compositions, field recording, ecomusicology, and the creation of sound biotopes; the use of sound and music to violent ends as well as considering the social and political functions of music and the autonomy of art, sonic ecofeminism, degrowth in music, and much more.

Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music explores music as a dynamic practice embedded in contemporary ecological contexts, one that both responds to, and creates change within, the ecologies in which it is created and consumed. This highly interdisciplinary analysis includes theoretical and practical considerations – from blockchain technology and digital platform commerce to artificial intelligence and the future of work, to sustainability and political ecology – as well as contemporary philosophical paradigms, guiding its investigation through three main lenses: How can music work as a conceptual tool to interrogate and respond to our changing global environment? How have transformations in our digital environment affected how we produce, distribute and consume music? How does music relate to matters of political ecology and environmental change? Within this framework, music is positioned as a starting point from which to examine a range of contexts and environments, offering new perspectives on contemporary technological and ecological discourse. Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music is a valuable text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and practitioners concerned with producing, performing, sharing and listening to music.

Sounds, Ecologies, Musics poses exciting challenges and provides fresh opportunities for scholars, scientists, environmental activists, musicians, and listeners to consider music and sound from ecological standpoints. Authors in Part I examine the natural and built environment and how music and sound are woven into it, how the environment enables music and sound, and how the natural and cultural production of music and sound in turn impact the environment. In Part II, contributors consider music and sound in relation to ecological knowledges that appear to conflict with, yet may be viewed as complementary to, Western science: traditional and Indigenous ecological and environmental knowledges. Part III features multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches by scholars, scientists, and practitioners who probe the ecological imaginary regarding the complex ideas and contested keywords that characterize ecomusicology: sound, music, culture, society, environment, and nature. A common theme across the book is the idea of diverse ecologies. Once confined to the natural sciences, the word "ecology" is common today in the social sciences, humanities, and arts - yet its diverse uses have become imprecise and confusing. Engaging the conflicting and complementary meanings of "ecology" requires embracing a both/and approach. Diverse ecologies are illustrated in the methodological, terminological, and topical variety of the chapters as well as the contributors' choice of sources and their disciplinary backgrounds. In times of mounting human and planetary crises, Sounds, Ecologies, Musics challenges disciplinarity and broadens the interdisciplinary field of ecomusicologies. These theoretical and practical studies expand sonic, scholarly, and political activism from the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda of social justice to embrace the more diverse and inclusive agenda of ecocentric ecojustice.

Musical imagination and creativity are amongst the most abstract and complex aspects of musical behaviour. This book is a wide ranging, multidisciplinary review of the latest theory and research on musical creativity, performance and perception by some of the most eminent scholars in their respective disciplines.