Gavin Williams

I am a Lecturer in Music and have been at King’s since 2022, having previously held teaching and research posts at Cambridge, UC Berkeley and Cardiff.

I work on the politics of sound and listening and I have published essays on Italian and British music, including the history of sound art. I’ve also worked on listening in wartime and sound reproduction technology: my first book, Format Friction, is about the global record industry and the many different ways people listened to shellac discs in Singapore and Malaysia, Italian diaspora in New York, and in South Wales (where I grew up).

Some of my current research looks into conditions under which energy systems become audible, both in musical cultures and in everyday life. Together with co-editors Annette Davison and Laudan Nooshin, and an interdisciplinary group, I am putting together a book called Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics, which focuses on the many ways in which coal and oil have shaped the senses in the Anthropocene. I’m a member of an interdisciplinary network that promotes the study of energy humanities in Wales, and a senior researcher associated with Fiona Smyth’s ERC-funded project (‘Spectres and Camouflage’) on the technological history of silent environments across the twentieth century.