The initial impetus for this special issue came from a conference I co-organised on Music, Politics and the Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney, in April 2013, which coincided with a request from Ross Watkins of Social Alternatives to edit a special issue on Music and Politics. Papers presented at the conference covered topics including music and environmental activism; music and its technological environment; music, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies; the constitution and development of different musical environments; music, landscape, architecture and design; music, memory and place; and music and the political environment. This had in turn been influenced by a conference held by the Canadian branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Montreal in July 2011, at which I had given a paper on the music of the Australian lyrebird. Although only three papers survive here from the UTS conference, and the rest are from a call for papers sent to the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) list, there is an Australian focus in at least two of the papers published here, along with papers focusing on music in Iceland and Canada.