Sounding History brings together an international team of researchers, production staff, and on-air talent. Drawing on decades of experience in teaching, broadcasting, and scholarship, our team came together locked down in Britain, Mexico, and the United States, in the dark early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We imagined a podcast about a new kind of music history.
We seek new conversations: between Tom and Chris, between present and past, history and the environment, and the production team and you. From our makeshift home studios we reach out to the world and across 500 years of sounding historical experience.
Sounding History is made with help from Texas Tech University and the University of Southampton Faculty of Arts and Humanities and is a production of Seedpod Sound. Our podcast manager is Meg Davies.
Your Hosts
Chris Smith
Chris Smith is Professor, Chair of Musicology, and director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University. He composed the full-length theatrical dance show Dancing at the Crossroads (2013), the “folk oratorio” Plunder! Battling for Democracy in the New World (2017), and the multi-media immersive site-specific theater piece Yonder (2020). His monographs are The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (2013) and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (2019). Chris conducts the Elegant Savages Orchestra and concertizes on guitar, bouzouki, banjo, and diatonique accordion; he is also a former nightclub bouncer, line cook, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck. He is a published poet.
Tom Irvine
Tom Irvine is a global historian of music with special interests in the British Empire, modern Germany, jazz, and Science and Technology Studies. He is Professor and Head of Music at the University of Southampton (UK) and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London, the UK’s national research center for data science and artificial intelligence, where he leads the project “Jazz as Social Machine.” His monograph Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter 1770-1839 was published by University of Chicago Press in 2020. The writing of the book was supported by a Mid-Career Fellowship of the British Academy. Before coming to academia Tom worked as a freelance violist, mainly in historical performance. During his professional training he worked as a public radio announcer at WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana.