“Everything will die”: How music gear is harming the environmentMany of us are aware of the environmental impact from factors such as pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. However, the impact of the music gear we buy and use on the planet’s health rarely enters the conversation.

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What’s the carbon footprint of your synthesizer? How do festivals and live sound impact the environment? And what about generative AI? We look into these three key areas and speak with manufacturers about the steps they’re taking to address them.
Live sound’s environmental impact
Thanks to some outspoken artists, such as Massive Attack, festivals and live performance venues are reassessing their environmental impact. Changes are underway, with large batteries and onsite solar panels offsetting some of the power usage. But there’s another area where more needs to happen: the speakers. Or, more specifically, the magnets inside them.
“We have a climate risk register with seven things on it, and only one of those specifically calls out one material,” says Andy Land, the head of sustainability for the Focusrite Group. This includes live sound outfits like Martin Sound, which has rigs at Glastonbury, among many other events. That one material? Neodymium, which is required to make high-performance speaker magnets that can output at a high enough level without weighing beyond what is safe for a crew to lift. These rare earth magnets also appear in gadgets like smartphones, hard drives and electric cars, and their environmental impact starts at extraction and continues throughout their lifecycle.
“The bigger issue is not that we can’t find an alternative,” laments Andy. Iron ferrite magnets are acceptable to use when weight isn’t as much of an issue. The problem, ultimately, is access. “We’re in competition with electric car manufacturers and wind turbine manufacturers who want a neodymium alternative as well, and their buying power is magnitudes higher than ours.”
Thankfully, other materials used by the live sound industry, such as plastics, are improving. “They’ve been making really good progress with switching all that plastic to recycled plastic,” Andy says, “and they’ve had no issues with that, to be honest.” They’re also using bioplastics produced from renewable biomass sources in outdoor weatherised speaker cabinets.
Advancements made by Martin Sound and associated brands are having a positive knock-on effect with the rest of the Focusrite Group as well. “They seem to be having a lot of success with this stuff, and they’re almost becoming the R&D lab for the entire group on sustainability engineering projects,” says Andy, “and then everyone else copies what the live sound side does. Which is working quite well, actually.”
Synthesizer manufacturing
How green is your synthesizer? That’s a question that Priscilla Haring-Kuipers, the general manager of Dutch boutique synth manufacturer This Is Not Rocket Science, wants people to ask. The topic of ethical electronics should be important, she asserts, and has written on the topic in electronics publications like Elektor.
After releasing their Fénix IV, a self-contained modular synthesizer, a few years ago, Priscilla decided to calculate the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process using Idemat, an app aiming to help designers create more sustainable products.
What goes into a synthesizer? To start with, there are the PCBs, although you have very little control over their makeup. As Andy Land noted in Light and Sound magazine, “With PCBs and semiconductors, we’re at the whim of whatever the Taiwan producer does. We have to wait for them to improve their stock—we don’t have the buying power to influence that.”
There are also other materials to measure, such as aluminium for the case, components, plastic for the knobs and buttons, cardboard and bubble wrap for the packaging, and so on. But for This is Not Rocket Science, one other element was far and away the biggest contributor to CO2 generation.
“I did the whole calculation for the building of the Fénix IV,” Priscilla explains. “And by far, the biggest CO2 cost of the entire production was us flying to China to source a bunch of the components.” One trip to Shenzhen used 5450kg of CO2. “Everything included [in four years of making 100 units] was about equal in CO2 to one flight back and forth to China.”
To offset this, This Is Not Rocket Science has made the decision to not fly anymore. “The reason why we’re not flying is the Fénix.” It is also compensating the entire run with the carbon offset organization, TreesForAll.
Generative AI
Generative AI has emerged in the last few years as a real hot button issue for musicians. Although the main point of contention so far has been the unethical way that AI has been trained on existing, copyrighted music, there’s a real environmental downside to the emerging technology as well.
According to a just-released study, AI had as much impact on the environment this year as did New York City. In what could actually be a fairly conservative estimate due to the lack of publicly available data, the study found that global demand for AI could hit 23 gigawatts this year, with between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. That’s a lot of prompts. New York City, by comparison, is responsible for 50 million tons.
AI sucked up a significant amount of water this year as well, reportedly as much as the world drinks in bottled water. Water is used to cool data centers and keep servers from going into the red. There’s also a demand for water use at power plants, which use H2O to rotate turbines with steam. More data centers means more power plants necessarily coming online, which will only exacerbate the problem.
There’s also the issue of how to dispose of what is left after you remove the water. “Basically, you take a bunch of water out of a river, and you evaporate it into the sky,” explains Andy. “You’re left with a salty brine of whatever minerals were left at the data centre, and that has to be disposed of correctly. You can’t just release that into the river because it would just be like dumping salt into a river. Everything will die.”
Unfortunately, where audio AI companies like Suno and Udio fit into this is hard to say because of the industry-wide lack of transparency. “I don’t know where audio generation fits within this,” says Andy. “There’s not enough research or data available about audio generation.”
What we do know is that across AI companies, both training and end-user prompts require large amounts of energy; prompts in particular, as scale grows. “Deploying these models in real-world applications, enabling millions to use generative AI in their daily lives, and then fine-tuning the models to improve their performance draws large amounts of energy long after a model has been developed,” says MIT News.
While the conversation around the theft of music for training purposes is absolutely an important one, we also shouldn’t lose sight of the environmental impact of AI, one that will only continue to grow as more people make use of it.
What can be done?
What needs to be done? We as consumers can certainly buy from companies with green policies, ask companies about their manufacturing processes, and take public transportation to festivals and other events.
“For any event, currently the biggest footprint is always the audience travel to the event,” notes Andy. “How you get there is probably the biggest thing an individual can influence on that side of things, because they’re not going to be able to plug in their own battery and contribute a little bit of power. That’s not realistic.”
Ultimately, however, the responsibility for ethical electronics lies not with consumers but with the manufacturers themselves. “I don’t believe it’s right to focus on what individuals can do because the companies are the ones that control these things,” says Andy.
“Consumers shouldn’t be burdened with the task of having to worry about these things. It should be the companies that are responsible for those emissions doing the work.”
Priscilla recommends that companies put environmentally friendly policies in place before manufacturing, rather than trying to fix things later. “Ideally, metrics such as the carbon footprint should be available in the component libraries of your design software,” Priscilla writes in Elektor. “Then you would have this information … when you are still making choices about what to create. When you have the audacity to add something to the world that did not exist before, there are consequences.”
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