The Audible Past

Download or read book The Audible Past written by Jonathan Sterne and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-13 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book The Audible Past written by Jonathan Sterne and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-13 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Download or read book Entertaining Lisbon written by Joao Silva and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the decades leading up to 1910, Portugal saw vast material improvements under the guise of modernization while in the midst of a significant political transformation - the establishment of the Portuguese First Republic. Urban planning, everyday life, and innovation merged in a rapidly changing Lisbon. Leisure activities for the citizens of the First Republic began to include new forms of musical theater, including operetta and the revue theater. These theatrical forms became an important site for the display of modernity, and the representation of a new national identity. Author João Silva argues that the rise of these genres is inextricably bound to the complex process through which the idea of Portugal was presented, naturalized, and commodified as a modern nation-state. Entertaining Lisbon studies popular entertainment in Portugal and its connections with modern life and nation-building, showing that the promotion of the nation through entertainment permeated the market for cultural goods. Exploring the Portuguese entertainment market as a reflection of ongoing negotiations between local, national, and transnational influences on identity, Silva intertwines representations of gender, class, ethnicity, and technology with theatrical repertoires, street sounds, and domestic music making. An essential work on Portuguese music in the English language, Entertaining Lisbon is a critical study for scholars and students of musicology interested in Portugal, and popular and theatrical musics, as well as historical ethnomusicologists, cultural historians, and urban planning researchers interested in the development of material culture.

Download or read book Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature written by Richard Leppert and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas—cultural, social, and personal—associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

Download or read book Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology written by Miriama Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singing the Body Electric explores the relationship between the human voice and technology, offering startling insights into the ways in which technological mediation affects our understanding of the voice, and more generally, the human body. From the phonautograph to magnetic tape and now to digital sampling, Miriama Young visits particular musical and literary works that define a century-and-a-half of recorded sound. She discusses the way in which the human voice is captured, transformed or synthesised through technology. This includes the sampled voice, the mechanical voice, the technologically modified voice, the pliable voice of the digital era, and the phenomenon by which humans mimic the sounding traits of the machine. The book draws from key electro-vocal works spanning a range of genres - from Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce to Radiohead, from Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, to Björk, and from Pierre Henry's Variations on a Door and a Sigh to Christian Marclay's Maria Callas. In essence, this book transcends time and musical style to reflect on the way in which the machine transforms our experience of the voice. The chapters are interpolated by conversations with five composers who work creatively with the voice and technology: Trevor Wishart, Katharine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Miranda and Bora Yoon. This book is an interdisciplinary enterprise that combines music aesthetics and musical analysis with literature and philosophy.

Download or read book Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 written by Kirsten Gibson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to understand how people have understood and negotiated their relationships with the sounding world in Europe from the Middle Ages through to the early twentieth century. They consider, in particular: sound and music in the later Middle Ages; the politics of sound in the early modern period; the history of the body and perception during the Ancien Régime; and the sounds of the city in the nineteenth century and sound and colonial rule at the fin de siècle. The case studies also range in geographical orientation to include considerations not only of Britain and France, the countries most considered in European historical sound studies in English-language scholarship to date, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, British Colonial India, Germany, Italy and Portugal. Out of this diverse group of case studies emerge significant themes that recur time and again, varying according to time and place: sound, power and identity; sound as a marker of power or violence; and sound, physiology and sensory perception and technologies of sound, consumption and meaning.

Download or read book Sound Objects written by James A. Steintrager and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’s elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in the forefront of contemporary sonic discussions but also underscore auditory experience as fundamental to sound as a critical enterprise. In so doing, they offer exciting considerations of sound within and beyond its role in meaning, communication, and information and an illuminatingly original theoretical overview of the field of sound studies itself. Contributors. Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, John Dack, Veit Erlmann, Brian Kane, Jairo Moreno, John Mowitt, Pooja Rangan, Gavin Steingo, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne, David Toop