Lying at the intersection of sound studies and energy humanities, this edited volume is the first to explore the sounds of fossil fuels and the entanglement of energy and listening within petrocapitalism.

In a chorus of engines on the highway, as in the thunder and whine of airplanes overhead, oil has come to define and shape the sonic contours of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Over the past two centuries, fossil fuels have asserted their presence in countless other, sometimes unexpected ways: through coal and oil companies as musical sponsors, in the sonics of coal and oil towns and traditional peatlands, in seismic survey, through the vinyl record (which relies on oil-derived, synthetic plastic pellets), and across audiovisual culture more broadly.

Drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches, including musicology, ethnomusicology, screen music studies, sound studies, comparative literature and more, this book presents case studies situated in the British Isles, North America, Venezuela, Russia, Equatorial Guinea and Iran, to examine questions of sonic materiality, extractive listening and environmental destruction.

Gavin Williams is Lecturer in Music at King's College London, UK. His publications include the edited volume Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (2019) and Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc (2024), and he is currently working on a project about the spectrogram as a form of environmental knowledge. He is also working on a book, in collaboration with Fiona Smyth, on noise and silence in the twentieth century.

Laudan Nooshin is Professor of Music at City St George's, University London, UK. Her publications include Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (2009), The Ethnomusicology of Western Art Music (2014), Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity (2015), and Voices for Change in the Classical Music Profession: New Ideas for Tackling Inequalities and Exclusions (2023). Laudan is co-founder of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies Network (https://edims.network/) and an Advisory Board member for the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is currently in receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a project exploring the musical and cultural lives of Polish exile-refugees in Iran during World War 2.

Annette Davison is Professor of Music and Audiovisual Media at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her publications include Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s-90s (2004), Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire: A Film Score Guide (2009), and the co-edited collections The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions (2004), and The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (2013). She is currently working on a book and videographic project that explores the place of oil in films and television series.