Nicolas Collins (ed.): A Call for Silence (2004)

As in the old Roue’s quip that “a drink before and a cigarette after are three best things in life,” sometimes the most important moments of our lives lie in an unspoken ellipse. The same is true of some of our most beautiful sounds. On this CD 34 artists provide personal views into that sonic ellipse, suggestions for listening to that which might otherwise pass you by: count-offs, groove grit, tape hiss, breaths, rests, CD glitch, guitar hum, audience anticipation, reverb tails, room tones, minutes of silence, the calm before a storm.

Publisher Sonic Art Network, London, 2004
28 pages

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Goodiepal or Gaeoudjiparl The Århus Warrior: “Radical Computer Music & Fantastisk Mediemanipulation (2009)

“The term Radical Computer Music was coined by Goodiepal in relation to the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra compositional game scenario. It promotes an expanded dialogue between human beings and artificial and alternative intelligences as a way to transgress a condition of stagnation, according to Goodiepal prevailing in contemporary computer music and media art. The game scenario is an exercise in the creation of musical scores to challenge the mindset of ‘other’ intelligences, considering issues such as utopia, time, notation techniques, language, levels of unscannability, and the role of the composer.

Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra was launched as an educational program at a special lecture given in April 2008 at the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, the work as such was first premiered in October 2007 at a solo exhibition at Andersen’s Contemporary in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Towards the end of 2008, Goodiepal created what he considers an expert panel consisting of members with various skills and backgrounds such as Andreas Hauer-Jensen, Anders Jørgen Mogensen, Uglemads, Martha Hviid and Tordis Berstrand. He has since taken the panel around Europe to help him lecture and perform and during the trips told them most of the secrets behind the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra game scenario and Radical Computer Music. Some of these ideas are also described in Radical Computer Music & Fantastisk Mediemanipulation: A Corrected and Illustrated Transcript of the Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough published in 2009 and offered here for download.” (Wikipedia)

Publisher MPH/Pork Salad Press, Portland/Copenhagen, 2009
ISBN 9781934399125, 1934399124
76 pages
via Radio Web MACBA

video reading 1:21h
Radical Computer Music at Wikipedia

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John M. Picker: Victorian Soundscapes (2003)

Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN 0195151917, 9780195151916
220 pages

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Michel Meulders: Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (2001/2010)

Although Hermann von Helmholtz was one of most remarkable figures of nineteenth-century science, he is little known outside his native Germany. Helmholtz (1821-1894) made significant contributions to the study of vision and perception and was also influential in the painting, music, and literature of the time; one of his major works analyzed tone in music. This book, the first in English to describe Helmholtz’s life and work in detail, describes his scientific studies, analyzes them in the context of the science and philosophy of the period—in particular the German Naturphilosophie—and gauges his influence on today’s neuroscience.

Helmholtz, trained by Johannes Müller, one of the best physiologists of his time, used a resolutely materialistic and empirical scientific method in his research. This puts him in the tradition of Kant and the English empirical philosophers and directly opposed to the idealists and naturalists who interpreted nature based on metaphysical presuppositions. Helmholtz’s research on color vision put him at odds with Goethe’s more romantic theorizing on the subject; but at the end of his life, Helmholtz honored Goethe’s contributions, acknowledging that artistic intuition could reveal truths about the human mind that are inaccessible to science.

Helmholtz’s work, eclipsed at the beginning of the twentieth century by new ideas in neurophysiology, has recently been rediscovered. We can now recognize in Helmholtz’s methods–which were based on his belief in the interconnectedness of physiology and psychology–the origins of neuroscience.

Originally published as Helmholtz: Des lumières aux neurosciences, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2001
Translated and edited by Laurence Garey
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262014483, 9780262014489
235 pages

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Andrei Smirnov, Liubov Pchelkina: Generation Z: Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in 1910-1930 (2011) [English/Hungarian]

Variophone, theremin terpsitone, rhythmicon, emiriton, ekvodin, graphical sound – just to mention a few of the amazing innovations of the beginning of the 20th century in Soviet Russia, a country and time turbulent with revolutions, wars and totalitarian dictatorship.

While the history of Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde art and music is fairly well documented, the inventions and discoveries, names and fates of researchers of sound, creators of musical machines and noise orchestras, founders of new musical technologies have been largely forgotten except, perhaps, Leon Theremin, inventor of the first electronic musical instrument, the theremin.

This community of creators, however, was inherently incompatible with the totalitarian state. By the late 1930s it became effectively written out of histories, wiped out from text books.

Many of their ideas and inventions, considered as utopian at that time, were decades later rein¬vented abroad. We still use them today not knowing their origin.

This booklet was produced for the Budapest edition of a traveling exhibition curated by Andrei Smirnov of the Theremin Center and Liubov Pchelkina of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Publisher OSA Archivum, Budapest, 2011
ISBN 9789638853820
20 pages

exhibition (from the curators)
exhibition (gallery website)

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R. Murray Schafer: The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (1969)

“Overheard in the lobby after the premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth: ‘Yes, but is it music?’

Overheard in the lobby after the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan: ‘Yes, but is it music?’

Overheard in the lobby after the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre: ‘Yes, but is it music?’

Overheard in the lobby after the premiere of Varèse’s Poème électronique: ‘Yes, but is it music?’

A jet scrapes the sky over my head and I ask: ‘Yes, but is it music? Perhaps the pilot has mistaken his profession?’ ” (Preface)

Publisher Berandol Music Limited, Scarborough, Ontario, and Associated Music Publishers, New York, 1969
67 pages
via Charles Turner

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R. Murray Schafer: Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course (1967)

The book includes R. Murray Schafer’s notes and exercises which formed part of an experimental music course offered to first-year students at Simon Fraser University.

With an Introduction by Keith Bissell
Publisher Clark & Cruickshank, a division of Berandol Music Limited, Toronto, Canada, 1967
46 pages
via Charles Turner

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