Emily Thompson: The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · acoustics, architecture, listening, music, sound recording, united states
“In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era.
Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston’s Symphony Hall, New York’s office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound—clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant—had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2002
ISBN 0262201380, 9780262201384
510 pages
PDF (33 MB, updated on 2017-5-15)
Comments (2)Eric Michaels: Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · aboriginal art, anthropology, art, australia, ethnography, film, photography, postmodernism, television
“Bad Aboriginal Art is the extraordinary account of Eric Michaels’ period of residence and work with the Warlpiri Aborigines of western Central Australia, where he studied the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities.
Sharp, exact, and unrelentingly honest, Michaels records with an extraordinary combination of distance and immersion the intervention of technology into a remote Aboriginal community and that community’s forays into the technology of broadcasting. Michaels’s analyses in Bad Aboriginal Art will disrupt and redirect current debates surrounding the theory and practice of anthropology, ethnography, film and video making, communications policy, and media studies—no less than his work has already disrupted and redirected the cultural technologies of both the Warlpiri and Australian technocrats.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816623414, 9780816623419
203 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-8-26)
Comment (1)Tia DeNora: After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · listening, music, music history, music sociology, music therapy, popular culture, sociology
Theodor W. Adorno placed music at the centre of his critique of modernity and broached some of the most important questions about the role of music in contemporary society. One of his central arguments was that music, through the manner of its composition, affected consciousness and was a means of social management and control. His work was primarily theoretical however, and because these issues were never explored empirically his work has become sidelined in current music sociology. This book argues that music sociology can be greatly enriched by a return to Adorno’s concerns, in particular his focus on music as a dynamic medium of social life. Intended as a guide to ‘how to do music sociology’ this book deals with critical topics too often sidelined such as aesthetic ordering, cognition, the emotions and music as a management device and reworks Adorno’s focus through a series of grounded examples.
•Hands on guide to how to do music sociology • First book to explore Adorno’s work within context of empirical music sociology and reassess his legacy • Develops a new approach to music sociology drawing on current musicological and sociology concerns
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2003
ISBN 052153724X, 9780521537247
176 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-23)
Comment (0)