Trevor Wishart: On Sonic Art, 2nd ed (1985/1996)

“In this newly revised book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film, sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.”

A new and revised edition edited by Simon Emmerson
Publisher Routledge, 1996
ISBN 371865847X, 9783718658473
357 pages

Publisher

PDF (7 MB, updated on 2015-12-3)

Nicolas Collins: Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (2006)

“Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction for students of electronic music, installation and sound-art to the craft of making–as well as creatively cannibalizing–electronic circuits for artistic purposes. Designed for practioners and students of electronic art, it provides a guided tour through the world of electronics, encouraging artists to get to know the inner workings of basic electronic devices so they can creatively use them for their own ends.

Handmade Electronic Music introduces the basic of practical circuitry while instructing the student in basic electronic principles, always from the practical point of view of an artist. It teaches a style of intuitive and sensual experimentation that has been lost in this day of prefabricated electronic musical instruments whose inner workings are not open to experimentation. It encourages artists to transcend their fear of electronic technology to launch themselves into the pleasure of working creatively with all kinds of analog circuitry.”

Publisher Routledge, 2006
ISBN 0415975921, 9780415975926
245 pages

Key terms: photoresistor, resistor, Nicolas Collins, Circuit Bending, David Tudor, David Behrman, breadboard, Alvin Lucier, Phil Archer, Yasunao Tone, tape head, Schmitt Trigger, Integrated Circuit, electronic music, Stephen Vitiello, volts, soldering iron, Radio Shack, electrical tape, oscillator

Online companion to Third edition
Author
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-6-22)

Douglas Kahn: Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999)

“This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it–to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.”

Published by MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 0262112434, 9780262112437
455 pages

Reviews: Yvonne Spielmann (Leonardo, 2001), James William Sobaskie (Computer Music Journal, 2001), Allison Hunter (ebr, 2001), John Potts (Screening the Past, 2002), Publishers Weekly (1999).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (3 MB, updated on 2020-8-12)