Sound Space And The City

Download or read book Sound, Space, and the City written by Marina Peterson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On summer nights on downtown Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, Grand Performances presents free public concerts for the people of the city. A hip hop orchestra, a mariachi musician, an Afropop singer, and a Chinese modern dance company are just a few examples of the eclectic range of artists employed to reflect the diversity of LA itself. At these concerts, shared experiences of listening and dancing to the music become sites for the recognition of some of the general aspirations for the performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life. In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes—from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences—through which civic space is created at downtown performances. Along with archival materials on urban planning and policy, Peterson draws extensively on her own participation with Grand Performances, ranging from working in an information booth answering questions about the artists and the venue, to observing concerts and concert-goers as an audience member, to performing onstage herself as a cellist with the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra. The book offers an exploration of intersecting concerns of urban residents and scholars today that include social relations and diversity, public space and civic life, privatization and suburbanization and economic and cultural globalization. At a moment when cities around the world are undertaking similar efforts to revitalize their centers, Sound, Space, and the City conveys the underlying tensions of such projects and their relevance for understanding urban futures.

Download or read book Music, Sound and Space written by Georgina Born and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.

Download or read book Sound Worlds from the Body to the City written by Ariane Wilson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reveals the extent to which aural perception influences our spatial awareness. Spanning various fields and practices, from psychology to geography, and from zoology to urban planning, it covers a range of environments in which sounds contribute to forming our sense of space and place. The contributions gathered here lead from the mother’s womb, through the habitats of insects and owls, to the resonating bodies of buildings and the city, to artistic endeavours that aim to consciously reveal the spatiality of sound. In this progression, the book demonstrates the profoundly constitutive role of hearing and listening at all stages of our biological and social development, as well as the epistemological, phenomenological and emotional importance of sound in relation to our construction of space. As such, it will appeal not only to architects, town-planners and artists, but also to the growing community of scientists and scholars intrigued by sonic issues. Differing from both quantitative acoustics and sound design, its approach opens new perspectives on the sonic dimension and aural understanding of our environment by tracing analogies between a diversity of spaces formed when sound interacts with listening as a mode of attention.

Download or read book Stereophonica written by Gascia Ouzounian and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Episodes in the transformation of our understanding of sound and space, from binaural listening in the nineteenth century to contemporary sound art. The relationship between sound and space has become central to both creative practices in music and sound art and contemporary scholarship on sound. Entire subfields have emerged in connection to the spatial aspects of sound, from spatial audio and sound installation to acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. But how did our understanding of sound become spatial? In Stereophonica, Gascia Ouzounian examines a series of historical episodes that transformed ideas of sound and space, from the advent of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century to visual representations of sonic environments today. Developing a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective, Ouzounian draws on both the history of science and technology and the history of music and sound art. She investigates the binaural apparatus that allowed nineteenth-century listeners to observe sound in three dimensions; examines the development of military technologies for sound location during World War I; revisits experiments in stereo sound at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1930s; and considers the creation of "optimized acoustical environments" for theaters and factories. She explores the development of multichannel "spatial music" in the 1950s and sound installation art in the 1960s; analyzes the mapping of soundscapes; and investigates contemporary approaches to sonic urbanism, sonic practices that reimagine urban environments through sound. Rich in detail but accessible and engaging, and generously illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, and diagrams of devices and artworks, Stereophonica brings an acute, imaginative, and much-needed historical sensibility to the growing literature around sound and space.

Download or read book Esquivel! written by Susan Wood and published by Lerner Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Juan Garcia Esquivel was born in Mexico and grew up to the sounds of mariachi bands. He loved music and became a musical explorer. Defying convention, he created music that made people laugh and planted images in their minds. Juan's space-age lounge music popular in the fifties and sixties has found a new generation of listeners.

Download or read book The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World written by Trevor Cox and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A lucid and passionate case for a more mindful way of listening to and engaging with musical, natural, and manmade sounds." —New York Times In this tour of the world’s most unexpected sounds, Trevor Cox—the “David Attenborough of the acoustic realm” (Observer)—discovers the world’s longest echo in a hidden oil cavern in Scotland, unlocks the secret of singing sand dunes in California, and alerts us to the aural gems that exist everywhere in between. Using the world’s most amazing acoustic phenomena to reveal how sound works in everyday life, The Sound Book inspires us to become better listeners in a world dominated by the visual and to open our ears to the glorious cacophony all around us.

Download or read book The Noisy Renaissance written by Niall Atkinson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.