Download or read book Sound and the Ancient Senses written by Shane Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, even though it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the Ancient Senses aims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the spheres. Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities. This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series, The Senses in Antiquity.
Download or read book Touch and the Ancient Senses written by Alex Purves and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike the other senses, touch ranges beyond a single sense organ, encompassing not only the skin but also the interior of the body. It mediates almost every aspect of interpersonal relations in antiquity, from the everyday to the erotic, just as it also provides a primary point of contact between the individual and the outside world. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which touch plays a defining role in science, art, philosophy, and medicine, and shapes our understanding of topics ranging from aesthetics and poetics to various religious and ritual practices. Whether we locate the sense of touch on the surface of the skin, within the body or – less tangibly still – within the emotions, the sensory impact of touching raises a broad range of interpretive and phenomenological questions. This is the first volume of its kind to explore the sense of touch in antiquity, bringing a variety of disciplinary approaches to bear on the sense that is usually disregarded as the most base and obvious of the five. In these pages, by contrast, we find in touch a complex and fascinating indicator of the body’s relation to object, environment, and self.
Download or read book Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses written by Shane Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like us, the ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand the world through their senses. Yet sensory experience has rarely been considered in the study of antiquity and, when the senses are examined, sight is regularly privileged. 'Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses' presents a radical reappraisal of antiquity's textures, flavours, and aromas, sounds and sights. It offers both a fresh look at society in the ancient world and an opportunity to deepen the reading of classical literature. The book will appeal to readers in classical society and literature, philosophy and cultural history. All Greek and Latin is translated and technical matters are explained for the non-specialist. The introduction sets the ancient senses within the history of aesthetics and the subsequent essays explores the senses throughout the classical period and on to the modern reception of classical literature.
Download or read book Making Senses of the Past written by Jo Day and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the nineteenth century, museums have kept their artifacts in glass cases to better preserve them, and drawings and photographs have become standard ways of presenting the past. These practices have led to an archaeology dominated by visual description, even though human interaction with the surrounding world involves the whole body and all of its senses. In the past few years, sensory archaeology has become more prominent, and Making Senses of the Past is one of the first collected volumes on this subject. This book presents cutting-edge research on new theoretical issues. The essays presented here take readers on a multisensory journey around the world and across time. In ancient Peru, a site provides sensory surprises as voices resound beneath the ground and hidden carvings slowly reveal their secrets. In Canada and New Zealand, the flicker of reflected light from a lake dances on the faces of painted rocks and may have influenced when and why the pigment was applied. In Mesopotamia, vessels for foodstuffs build a picture of a past cuisine that encompasses taste and social activity in the building of communities. While perfume and flowers are examined in various cultures, in the chamber tombs of ancient Roman Palestine, we are reminded that not all smells are pleasant. Making Senses of the Past explores alternative ways to perceive past societies and offers a new way of wiring archaeology that incorporates the senses.
Download or read book A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music written by Tosca A. C. Lynch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN MUSIC A comprehensive guide to music in Classical Antiquity and beyond Drawing on the latest research on the topic, A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music provides a detailed overview of the most important issues raised by the study of ancient Greek and Roman music. An international panel of contributors, including leading experts as well as emerging voices in the field, examine the ancient 'Art of the Muses' from a wide range of methodological, theoretical, and practical perspectives. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book explores the pervasive presence of the performing arts in ancient Greek and Roman culture—ranging from musical mythology to music theory and education, as well as archaeology and the practicalities of performances in private and public contexts. But this Companion also explores the broader roles played by music in the Graeco-Roman world, examining philosophical, psychological, medical and political uses of music in antiquity, and aspects of its cultural heritage in Mediaeval and Modern times. This book debunks common myths about Greek and Roman music, casting light on yet unanswered questions thanks to newly discovered evidence. Each chapter includes a discussion of the tools or methodologies that are most appropriate to address different topics, as well as detailed case studies illustrating their effectiveness. This book Offers new research insights that will contribute to the future developments of the field, outlining new interdisciplinary approaches to investigate the importance of performing arts in the ancient world and its reception in modern culture Traces the history and development of ancient Greek and Roman music, including their Near Eastern roots, following a thematic approach Showcases contributions from a wide range of disciplines and international scholarly traditions Examines the political, social and cultural implications of music in antiquity, including ethnicity, regional identity, gender and ideology Presents original diagrams and transcriptions of ancient scales, rhythms, and extant scores that facilitate access to these vital aspects of ancient music for scholars as well as practicing musicians Written for a broad range of readers including classicists, musicologists, art historians, and philosophers, A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music provides a rich, informative and thought-provoking picture of ancient music in Classical Antiquity and beyond.
Download or read book Dissonance written by Sean Alexander Gurd and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides, Greek singers, poets, and theorists delved deeply into auditory experience. They charted its capacity to develop topologies distinct from those of the other senses; contemplated its use as a communicator of information; calculated its power to express and cause extreme emotion. They made sound too, artfully and self-consciously creating songs and poems that reveled in sonorousness. Dissonance reveals the commonalities between ancient Greek auditory art and the concerns of contemporary sound studies, avant-garde music, and aesthetics, making the argument that “classical” Greek song and drama were, in fact, an early European avant-garde, a proto-exploration of the aesthetics of noise. The book thus develops an alternative to that romantic ideal which sees antiquity as a frozen and silent world.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East written by Kiersten Neumann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook is a state-of-the-field volume containing diverse approaches to sensory experience, bringing to life in an innovative, remarkably vivid, and visceral way the lives of past humans through contributions that cover the chronological and geographical expanse of the ancient Near East. It comprises thirty-two chapters written by leading international contributors that look at the ways in which humans, through their senses, experienced their lives and the world around them in the ancient Near East, with coverage of Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Persia, from the Neolithic through the Roman period. It is organised into six parts related to sensory contexts: Practice, production, and taskscape; Dress and the body; Ritualised practice and ceremonial spaces; Death and burial; Science, medicine, and aesthetics; and Languages and semantic fields. In addition to exploring what makes each sensory context unique, this organisation facilitates cross-cultural and cross-chronological, as well as cross-sensory and multisensory comparisons and discussions of sensory experiences in the ancient world. In so doing, the volume also enables considerations of senses beyond the five-sense model of Western philosophy (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), including proprioception and interoception, and the phenomena of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia. The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East provides scholars and students within the field of ancient Near Eastern studies new perspectives on and conceptions of familiar spaces, places, and practices, as well as material culture and texts. It also allows scholars and students from adjacent fields such as Classics and Biblical Studies to engage with this material, and is a must-read for any scholar or student interested in or already engaged with the field of sensory studies in any period.
Download or read book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses written by Susan Stewart and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-01-20 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, she argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses in contemporary life and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.
Download or read book A Natural History of the Senses written by Diane Ackerman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times
Download or read book Deep Classics written by Shane Butler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fragmented, buried, and largely lost, the classical past presents formidable obstacles to anyone who would seek to know it. 'Deep Classics' is the study of these obstacles and, in particular, of the way in which the contemplation of the classical past resembles – and has even provided a model for – other kinds of human endeavor. This volume offers a new way to understand the modalities and aims of Classics itself, through the ages. Its individual chapters draw fruitful connections between the reception of the classical and current concerns in philosophy of mind, cognitive theory, epistemology, media studies, sense studies, aesthetics, queer theory and eco-criticism. What does the study of the ancient past teach us about our encounters with our own more recent but still elusive memories? What do our always partial reconstructions of ancient sites tell us about the limits of our ability to know our own world, or to imagine our future? What does the reader of the lacunose and corrupted literatures of antiquity learn thereby about literature and language themselves? What does a shattered statue reveal about art, matter, sensation, experience, life? Does the way in which these vestiges of the past are encountered – sitting in a library, standing in a gallery, moving through a ruin – condition our responses to them and alter their significance? And finally, how has the contemplation of antiquity helped to shape seemingly unrelated disciplines, including not only other humanistic and scientific epistemologies but also non-scholarly modes and practices? In asking these and similar questions, Deep Classics makes a pointed intervention in the study of the classical tradition, now more widely known as 'reception studies'.
Download or read book Art History and the Senses written by Gabriel Koureas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form.
Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Download or read book The Ancient Phonograph written by Shane Butler and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A search for traces of the voice before the phonograph, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Long before the invention of musical notation, and long before that of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler searches for traces of voices before Edison, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice—as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists and to voice theorists but to anyone with an interest in the verbal arts—literature, oratory, song—and the nature of aesthetic experience.
Download or read book Sound Unseen written by Brian Kane and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice. The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.
Download or read book Sight and the Ancient Senses written by Michael Squire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is to Greek critical thinking about seeing that we owe our conceptual framework for theorizing the senses, and it is also to such thinking that we owe the lasting legacy of Greco-Roman imagery. Sight and the Ancient Senses is the first thorough introduction to the conceptualization of sight in the history, visual culture, literature and philosophy of classical antiquity. Examining how the Greeks and Romans interpreted what they saw, the collection also considers sight in relation to the other senses. This volume brings together a number of interdisciplinary perspectives to deliver a broad and balanced coverage of this subject. Contributors explore the cultural, social and intellectual backdrops that gave rise to ancient theories of seeing, from Archaic Greece through to the advent of Christianity in late antiquity. This series of specially commissioned thematic chapters demonstrate how theories about sight informed Graeco-Roman philosophy, science, poetry rhetoric and art. The collection also reaches beyond its Graeco-Roman visual framework, showcasing how ancient ideas have influenced the longue durée of western sensory thinking. Richly illustrated throughout, including a section of color plates, Sight and the Ancient Senses is a wide-ranging introduction to ancient theories of seeing which will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity.
Download or read book Sacred Space Sacred Sound written by Susan Elizabeth Hale and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary singer Susan Hale believes that early peoples deliberately built their structures to enhance natural vibrations. She takes us around the globe-from Stonehenge and New Grange to Gothic cathedrals and Tibetan stupas in New Mexico-to explore the acoustics of sacred places. But, she says, you don't have to go to the Taj Mahal: The sacred is all around us, and we are all sound chambers resonating with the One Song.
Download or read book Sounds All Around written by Susan Hughes and published by Kids Can Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, kid-friendly examination of how sound works. How does sound happen? How do we hear it? What makes some sounds loud and some soft? Some high pitched and some low pitched? How do humans and animals use sound to communicate? Which sounds happen naturally, and which are created for a specific purpose? This charming picture book explores all of these questions in easy-to-understand and child-friendly language, offering a gentle introduction to how sound works. Kids are experts at making noise. Now they’ll want to stop and listen, too!
