Download or read book Audible Infrastructures written by Kyle Devine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Music is typically encountered as a cultural surface. Songs emanate instantaneously and almost magically from our computers and phones. Tools for playing and making music, such as recordings and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase with no assembly required. And when we're done with this stuff, we can kick it to the curb, where it disappears effortlessly and without a trace. Day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. But it isn't. This book digs beneath such surface-level encounters to reveal the infrastructural dimensions of music and listening. It takes nothing for granted about the manufacture, delivery, or disposal of music's material and human bases. These infrastructural phenomena encompass the interrelated material, organizational, and ideological systems that facilitate three main phases in the social life and social death of musical commodities: (1) resources and production, (2) circulation and transmission, (3) failure and waste. The book asks how these three phases influence and respond to aesthetic conventions, material-environmental realities, and political-economic conditions in both industrializing and industrialized parts of the world. Although sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles may seem peripheral to musical culture, Audible Infrastructures shows that all these humble things and their ordinary people are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Undertaking a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures is thus a means of understanding society and of knowing ourselves-and it is a step toward the reorientation of our musical cultures"--

Download or read book Audible Infrastructures written by Kyle Devine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Music is typically encountered as a cultural surface. Songs emanate instantaneously and almost magically from our computers and phones. Tools for playing and making music, such as recordings and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase with no assembly required. And when we're done with this stuff, we can kick it to the curb, where it disappears effortlessly and without a trace. Day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. But it isn't. This book digs beneath such surface-level encounters to reveal the infrastructural dimensions of music and listening. It takes nothing for granted about the manufacture, delivery, or disposal of music's material and human bases. These infrastructural phenomena encompass the interrelated material, organizational, and ideological systems that facilitate three main phases in the social life and social death of musical commodities: (1) resources and production, (2) circulation and transmission, (3) failure and waste. The book asks how these three phases influence and respond to aesthetic conventions, material-environmental realities, and political-economic conditions in both industrializing and industrialized parts of the world. Although sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles may seem peripheral to musical culture, Audible Infrastructures shows that all these humble things and their ordinary people are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Undertaking a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures is thus a means of understanding society and of knowing ourselves-and it is a step toward the reorientation of our musical cultures"--

Download or read book Audible Infrastructures written by Kyle Devine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. Songs instantly emanate from our computers and phones, at any time of day. The tools for playing and making music, such as records and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase and use. And when we no longer need them, we can leave them at the curb, where they disappear effortlessly and without a trace. These casual engagements often conceal the complex infrastructures that make our musical cultures possible. Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste this book provides a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures. As contributors reveal the material-environmental realities and political-economic conditions of music and listening, they open our eyes to the hidden dimensions of how music is made, delivered, and disposed of. In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.

Download or read book A Philosophy of Ambient Sound written by Ulrik Schmidt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first book-length study of ambient sound as a key issue in sound studies and sonic philosophy. Taking a broad, media-philosophical approach, it explores ambient sound as a basic dimension of the sonic environment, sonic technologies, sonic arts and the material staging of listening. Through analyses of key concepts such as surroundability, mediatization, immanence, synthetization and continuous variation, the book elucidates how ambient aspects of sound influence our conceptions of what sound is and how it affects us by exposing sound’s relation to basic categories such as space, time, environment, medium and materiality. It also illuminates how the strategic production of ambient sound constitutes a leading aesthetic paradigm that has been a decisive factor in the shaping of the modern sonic environment – from key developments in experimental and popular music, sound art and cinematic sound design to the architectural-technological construction of listening spaces in concert halls and theaters and in current streaming infrastructures, digital surround sound and the everyday aesthetics of headphone listening.

Download or read book Decomposed written by Kyle Devine and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hidden material histories of music. Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies written by Antonio López and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-23 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies gathers leading work by critical scholars in this burgeoning field. Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, ecomedia studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The book gives form to this new area of study and brings together diverse scholarly contributions to explore and give definition to the field. The Handbook highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. Within these areas, authors navigate a range of different topics including infrastructures, supply and manufacturing chains, energy, e-waste, labor, ecofeminism, African and Indigenous ecomedia, environmental justice, environmental media governance, ecopolitical satire, and digital ecologies. The result is a holistic volume that provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, as well as future developments. This volume will be an essential resource for students, educators, and scholars of media studies, cultural studies, film, environmental communication, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities.

Download or read book Radiophilia written by Carolyn Birdsall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century ago, the emergence of radio, along with organized systems of broadcasting, sparked a global fascination with the 'wonder' of sound transmission and reception. The thrilling experience of tuning in to the live sounds of this new medium prompted strong affective responses in its listeners. This book introduces a new concept of radiophilia, defined as the attachment to, or even a love of radio. Treating radiophilia as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, it unpacks the various pleasures associated with radio and its sounds, the desire to discover and learn new things via radio, and efforts to record, re-experience, and share radio. Surveying 100 years of radio from early wireless through to digital audio formats like podcasting, the book engages in debates about fandom, audience participation, listening experience, material culture, and how media relate to affect and emotions.

Download or read book Remixing Music Studies written by Ananay Aguilar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of ‘musicologists’, ‘theorists’, and ‘ethnomusicologists’? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he emerged in the 1990s as one of the UK’s leading and most widely read voices in critical musicology. In this book, collaborators and former students of Cook pursue these questions and others raised by his work—from notation, historiography, and performance to the place of music in multimedia forms such as virtual reality and video games, analysing both how it can bring people together and the ways in which it has failed to do so.

Download or read book Tuning the World written by Fanny Gribenski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tuning the World tells the unknown story of how the musical pitch A 440 became the global norm. Now commonly accepted as the point of reference for musicians in the Western world, A 440 hertz only became the standard pitch during an international conference held in 1939. The adoption of this norm was the result of decades of negotiations between countries, involving a diverse group of performers, composers, diplomats, physicists, and sound engineers. Although there is widespread awareness of the variability of musical pitches over time, as attested by the use of lower frequencies to perform early music repertoires, no study has fully explained the invention of our current concert pitch. In this book, Fanny Gribenski draws on a rich variety of previously unexplored archival sources and a unique combination of musicological perspectives, transnational history, and science studies to tell the unknown story of how A 440 became the global norm. Tuning the World demonstrates the aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and political contingencies underlying the construction of one of the most “natural” objects of contemporary musical performance and shows how this century-old effort was ultimately determined by the influence of a few powerful nations.

Download or read book Classical Music Futures written by Neil Thomas Smith and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present. A rich balance of theoretical and practical discussion brings authority to this collection, which lays the foundations for timely responses to challenges ranging from the concept of the musical work, and the colonial values within Western musical culture, to unsustainable models of orchestral touring. The authors highlight how labour to meet the demands of particular futures for classical music might impact its creation and consumption, presenting case studies to capture the mediating roles of technology and community engagement. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of musicology and the sociology of music, as well as a general audience of practitioners, freelance musicians, music administrators and educators.

Download or read book On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements written by Nick Braae and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. The authors discuss genres as diverse as mainstream pop, hip hop, classic rock, instrumental synthwave, video game music, amateur ukelele groups, and audiovisual remixes, while also considering the music’s relationship to technological developments, various media and material(itie)s, and personal and social identity. The collection presents a range of different methodologies and theoretical positions, which results in an eclecticism that aptly demonstrates the breadth of contemporary popular music research. The chapters are divided into three major sections that address: wider theoretical and analytical issues (“Broad Strokes”), familiar repertoire or concepts from a new perspective (“Second Takes”), and the meanings to arise from music’s connections with other media forms (“Audiovisual Entanglements”).

Download or read book Ecologies of Creative Music Practice written by Matthew Lovett and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-12-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music explores music as a dynamic practice embedded in contemporary ecological contexts, one that both responds to, and creates change within, the ecologies in which it is created and consumed. This highly interdisciplinary analysis includes theoretical and practical considerations – from blockchain technology and digital platform commerce to artificial intelligence and the future of work, to sustainability and political ecology – as well as contemporary philosophical paradigms, guiding its investigation through three main lenses: How can music work as a conceptual tool to interrogate and respond to our changing global environment? How have transformations in our digital environment affected how we produce, distribute and consume music? How does music relate to matters of political ecology and environmental change? Within this framework, music is positioned as a starting point from which to examine a range of contexts and environments, offering new perspectives on contemporary technological and ecological discourse. Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music is a valuable text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and practitioners concerned with producing, performing, sharing and listening to music.

Download or read book Modular Synthesis written by Ezra J. Teboul and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-04-24 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People brings together scholars, artists, composers, and musical instrument designers in an exploration of modular synthesis, an unusually multifaceted musical instrument that opens up many avenues for exploration and insight, particularly with respect to technological use, practice, and resistance. Through historical, technical, social, aesthetic, and other perspectives, this volume offers a collective reflection on the powerful connections between technology, creativity, culture, and personal agency. Ultimately, this collection is about creativity in a technoscientific world and speaks to issues fundamental to our everyday lives and experiences, by providing insights into the complex relationships between content creators, the technologies they use, and the individuals and communities who design and engage with them. With chapters covering VCV Rack, modular synthesis, instrument design, and the histories of synthesizer technology, as well as interviews with Dave Rossum, Corry Banks, Meng Qi, and Dani Dobkin, among others, Modular Synthesis is recommended reading for advanced undergraduates, researchers, and practitioners of electronic music and music technology. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book We Still Here written by Charity Marsh and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We Still Here maps the edges of hip-hop culture and makes sense of the rich and diverse ways people create and engage with hip-hop music within Canadian borders. Contributors to the collection explore the power of institutions, mainstream hegemonies, and the processes of historical formation in the evolution of hip-hop culture. Throughout, the volume foregrounds the generative issues of gender, identity, and power, in particular in relation to the Black diaspora and Indigenous cultures. The contributions of artists in the scene are front and centre in this collection, exposing the distinct inner mechanics of Canadian hip hop from a variety of perspectives. By amplifying rarely heard voices within hip-hop culture, We Still Here argues for its power to disrupt national formations and highlights the people and communities who make hip hop happen.

Download or read book In Search of Lost Futures written by Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Search of Lost Futures asks how imaginations might be activated through practices of autoethnography, multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity—each of which has the power to break down methodological silos, cultivate novel research sensibilities, and inspire researchers to question what is known about ethnographic process, representation, reflexivity, audience, and intervention within and beyond the academy. By blurring the boundaries between the past, present, and future; between absence and presence; between the possible and the impossible; and between fantasy and reality, In Search of Lost Futures pushes the boundaries of ethnographic engagement. It reveals how researchers on the cutting edge of the discipline are studying absence and grief and employing street performance, museum exhibit, anticipation, or simulated reality to research and intervene in the possible, the impossible, and the uncertain.

Download or read book Lion s Share written by Veit Erlmann and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion’s Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda’s song "Mbube" for its hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.

Download or read book Music and Digital Media written by Georgina Born and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-09-12 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology has neglected the study of music and this needs to be redressed. This book sets out to show how and why. It does so by bringing music to the subfield of digital anthropology, arguing that digital anthropology has much to gain by expanding its horizons to music – becoming more interdisciplinary by reference to digital/media studies, music and sound studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the ‘digital’ assume clamouring audibility – while acting as a testing ground for innovations in the digital-cultural industries. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies. The chapters between them addresses popular, folk and art musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK/Europe, with each chapter providing a different regional or digital focus. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk and art musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. Praise for Music and Digital Media ‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ Marina Peterson, University of Texas, Austin 'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' David Toop, London College of Communication ‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ Eric Drott, University of Texas, Austin ‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds ‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ Jonathan Sterne, McGill University 'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' Anna Tsing, co-editor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene