Pauline Oliveros: Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-80 (1984)

Collected writings of an acclaimed composer, performer and humanitarian. The book includes articles on new music, women as composers, sonic meditation, attention and awareness, and technique.

Publisher Smith Publications, Baltimore, MD, 1984
ISBN 0914162608, 9780914162605
276 pages

PDF

Carsten Nicolai: Anti-Reflex, catalogue (2005) [English/German]

“Carsten Nicolai is considered today to be one of the most important representatives of a generation of artists who focus on exploring the points of intersection between art, nature, and science. As a visual artist, researcher, producer, and organizer of concert events combined in one person, Nicolai seeks to overcome the division among the senses in human perception and to make it possible to experience natural phenomena like the frequencies of sound and light or electromagnetic fields with the eyes as well as by hearing and touch. His installations radiate a minimalist aesthetics that captivates the viewer with its elegance, simplicity, and emphasis on technology. Following his participation in important international exhibitions like the Kassel documenta and the Venice Biennial, the Schirn Kunsthalle presented the first major survey, for which the artist produced a series of new works.” (from curator)

With texts by Magnus Haglund and Yuko Hasegawa.

Curated, edited and with foreword by Max Hollein
Publisher Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, Cologne, 2005
ISBN 3883758914, 9783883758916
200 pages

exhibition & publisher
co-publisher
google books

PDF

David Suisman, Susan Strasser (eds.): Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2010)

During the twentieth century sound underwent a dramatic transformation as new technologies and social practices challenged conventional aural experience. As a result, sound functioned as a means to exert social, cultural, and political power in unprecedented and unexpected ways. The fleeting nature of sound has long made it a difficult topic for historical study, but innovative scholars have recently begun to analyze the sonic traces of the past using innovative approaches. Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction investigates sound as part of the social construction of historical experience and as an element of the sensory relationship people have to the world, showing how hearing and listening can inform people’s feelings, ideas, decisions, and actions.

The essays in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction uncover the varying dimensions of sound in twentieth-century history. Together they connect a host of disparate concerns, from issues of gender and technology to contests over intellectual property and government regulation. Topics covered range from debates over listening practices and good citizenship in the 1930s, to Tokyo Rose and Axis radio propaganda during World War II, to CB-radio culture on the freeways of Los Angeles in the 1970s. These and other studies reveal the contingent nature of aural experience and demonstrate how a better grasp of the culture of sound can enhance our understanding of the past.

Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010
Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture series
ISBN 0812241991, 9780812241990
309 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-8-3)