Joseph Nechvatal: Immersion Into Noise (2011)

“The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information.

By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux.

Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores in Immersion Into Noise.”

Publisher Open Humanities Press; in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, 2011
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781607852414

Author interview: Taney Roniger (Anti-Utopias)
Review: Yuting Zou (The Brooklyn Rail, 2011).

Publisher

PDF (updated 2012-7-18)
HTML

Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, Steven Brown (eds.): The Origins of Music (1999)

What biological and cognitive forces have shaped humankind’s musical behavior and the rich global repertoire of musical structures? What is music for, and why does every human culture have it? What are the universal features of music and musical behavior across cultures? In this groundbreaking book, musicologists, biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, ethologists, and linguists come together for the first time to examine these and related issues. The book can be viewed as representing the birth of evolutionary biomusicology—the study of which will contribute greatly to our understanding of the evolutionary precursors of human music, the evolution of the hominid vocal tract, localization of brain function, the structure of acoustic-communication signals, symbolic gesture, emotional manipulation through sound, self-expression, creativity, the human affinity for the spiritual, and the human attachment to music itself.

Contributors: Simha Arom, Derek Bickerton, Steven Brown, Ellen Dissanayake, Dean Falk, David W. Frayer, Walter Freeman, Thomas Geissmann, Marc D. Hauser, Michel Imberty, Harry Jerison, Drago Kunej, François-Bernard Mâche, Peter Marler, Björn Merker, Geoffrey Miller, Jean Molino, Bruno Nettl, Chris Nicolay, Katharine Payne, Bruce Richman, Peter J. B. Slater, Peter Todd, Sandra Trehub, Ivan Turk, Maria Ujhelyi, Nils L. Wallin, Carol Whaling.

Publisher MIT Press, 2001
Bradford Books series
ISBN 0262731436, 9780262731430
512 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Iannis Xenakis: Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1963–) [French, English]

In this landmark book Iannis Xenakis offers a critical self-examination of his theoretical propositions and artistic output of the thirty-five years of his career. It is an essential tool for understanding the man and the thought processes of one of this century’s most important and revolutionary musical figures.

Publisher Richard Masse, Paris, 1963
232 pages

English edition
First published by Indiana University Press, 1971.
Additional material compiled and edited by Sharon Kanach
Publisher Pendragon Press, Stuyvesant/NY, 1992
Contains translations of 6 chapters from the 1963 French edition, 3 chapters and 2 appendices added to the 1971 English edition, and another 4 chapters and 1 appendix added for this edition.
Volume 6 of Harmonologia series
ISBN 0945193246
387 pages

Publisher (EN)

Musiques formelles. Noveaux principes formels de composition musicale (French, 1963, 17 MB, added on 2012-2-17; updated on 2014-2-28), Chapter PDFs (at Iannis-Xenakis.org, added on 2014-11-11)
Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (English, 1971/1992, no OCR; updated on 2012-8-3)