Peter Krapp: Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011)

Brings to light the critical role of noise and error in the creative potential of digital culture.

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.

Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Volume 37 van Electronic Mediations
ISBN 0816676240, 9780816676248
216 pages

publisher
google books

Download (removed on 2012-6-30 upon request of the Digital Assets Coordinator of the University of Minnesota Press)

Matthew Nudds, Casey O’Callaghan (eds.): Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays (2009)

– A ground-breaking collection of essays on an underexplored topic in philosophy
– A comprehensive introduction will be useful for specialists and non-specialists alike
– All essays published here for the first time

Sounds and Perception is a collection of original essays on auditory perception and the nature of sounds – an emerging area of interest in the philosophy of mind and perception, and in the metaphysics of sensible qualities. The individual essays discuss a wide range of issues, including the nature of sound, the spatial aspects of auditory experience, hearing silence, musical experience, and the perception of speech; a substantial introduction by the editors serves to contextualise the essays and make connections between them. This collection will serve both as an introduction to the nature of auditory perception and as the definitive resource for coverage of the main questions that constitute the philosophy of sounds and audition. The views are original, and there is substantive engagement among contributors. This collection will stimulate future research in this area.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 019928296X, 9780199282968
270 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-23)

Daphne Oram: An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972)

“Daphne Oram was educated at Sherborne School for Girls, and then, during the war, she joined the BBC in London as a Music Balancer. There she worked with most of the well known international musicians in the fields of chamber music and opera. But, alongside this work, she was intrigued by the possibilities of manipulating magnetic tape sound, and as early as 1948 began to build special equipment for experiments. She was the first to compose an electronic sound track for a BBC television play (Amphitryon 38), all the composing being done in the middle of the night (using quickly assembled equipment) in the deserted Broadcasting House studios.

When the BBC eventually built an experimental studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram helped to design it and then directed it. In 1959, she decided to leave the BBC to create her own studio in her converted oasthouse at Wrotham, Kent. Since then, she has become internationally known for her work in films, television, theatre and radio; she has presented successful concerts of electronic compositions at the Mermaid Theatre, London, and at the Edinburgh International Festival. She has lectured widely–at London University, Cambridge University Arts Society, The Institute of Physics, Harrow School, Wellington College, Roedean, and at many other Colleges, Schools and Music Festivals. She has also appeared a number of times on television and in films.

For her Oramics research work, at her Kent studio, she received two Gulbenkian Foundation Grants.”

Publisher Galliard, London, and Galaxy Music Corporation, New York, 1972
ISBN 0852491093
145 pages
via Michal Murin, via GussetBlog

CD reviews

PDF (updated on 2016-8-24)
Post-BBC work: CD1, CD2 (Paradigm Discs, 2007)