Trevor Pinch, Frank Trocco: Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · electronic music, music, music history, sound recording
Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new–an extraordinary rarity in musical culture–it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be–how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion–is the story told for the first time in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.
The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used–from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson–recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.
Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674016173, 9780674016170
368 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
Comment (1)Daniel Gilfillan: Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · germany, pirate radio, public broadcasting, radio, sound recording, streaming, tactical media
A cultural history of German radio broadcasting from the 1920s to today
Since the rise of film and television, radio has continued to evolve, with satellite radio and podcasts as its latest incarnations. Any understanding of the development of radio, like its visual counterparts, depends on closely examining the artistic ventures that preceded commercial acceptance.
In Pieces of Sound, Daniel Gilfillan offers a cultural history that explores these major aspects of the medium by focusing on German radio broadcasting, providing a context that sees beyond programming to consider regulations, cultural politics, and social standardization. Gilfillan showcases the work of radio pioneers and artists over the past century, including Brecht’s work with the form, and how radio was employed before and after World War II. He traces how German radio broadcasters experimented with networked media not only to expand the artistic and communicative possibilities of radio, but also to inform perceptions about the advantages and direction of newer telecommunications media like Internet broadcasting and pirate radio, which artists are using today to engage with a medium that is increasingly under corporate control.
Gilfillan astutely observes how claims made for the Internet today echo those made for radio in its infancy and puts forth a broad and incisive historical analysis of German cultural broadcasting.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816647720, 9780816647729
240 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
Comment (0)Steve Goodman: Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · afrofuturism, anarchitecture, electronic music, philosophy, sound recording
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza strip, and high frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.
Most theoretical discussions of sound and music cultures in relationship to power, Goodman argues, have a missing dimension: the politics of frequency. Goodman supplies this by drawing a speculative diagram of sonic forces, investigating the deployment of sound systems in the modulation of affect. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.
Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262013479, 9780262013475
Length 240 pages
review (Geeta Dayal, rhizome.org)
review (Kodwo Eshun, The Wire) (PDF)
review (weirdvibrations.com)
Download (removed at the request of the author)