Dr Gavin Williams

I completed my PhD in music at Harvard University in 2013 with a dissertation entitled 'Arts of Noise: Sound and Media in Milan ca. 1900'. Since then I have held a variety of appointments researching and teaching music and environmental humanities: at the University of Cambridge (Research Fellow, 2013-19), King's College London (Leverhulme ECR, 2016-19), the University of California, Berkeley (Lecturer, 2019-2021) and Cardiff University (Research Associate, 2023).

Research Interests

• 19th- and 20th-century music
• Music and the Environment
• Sound Studies
• Energy Humanities

I work on the history of listening in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My book, Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc (University of Chicago Press, July 2024), explores the materiality of listening to recorded music from global and environmental perspectives during the first half of the twentieth century. I have published articles and essays on Italian Futurism, popular music in London and Milan, and I edited the book Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019), which won the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Edited Volume Book Award in 2020. More recently, my research has focussed on sound and the environment, having co-organized with Annette Davison and Laudan Nooshin a conference on Petrosonics which took place at King's in May 2023. I helped establish, and also run, a research network on Welsh Energy Humanities.

Selected publications

• Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, July 2024)
• ‘Shellac as Musical Plastic’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 74/3 (2021), 463–500.
• ‘The Reproduction of Caruso,’ Cambridge Opera Journal 33/1-2 (2022), 161-179.
• Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Prize for Outstanding Edited Collection 2020.

Teaching

I teach a range of courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, including nineteenth-century music, film music, music and digital culture, sonic urbanism, and music and the environment. I am always happy to talk to undergraduates about dissertation topics in related areas, so please feel free to be in touch. At the postgraduate level, I have taught courses related to my research into sound recording and the environment and research methodologies, together with a range of guest seminars in music, history and literary studies. I am also pursuing pedagogical research into collaboration with the Music Studies in/of the Anthropocene Research Network.