Jonathan Sterne: The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of technology, listening, media technology, music, music history, phonograph, radio, sound, sound recording, technology, telegraphy, telephone
“The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as “sound” and “not sound.” In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death.
Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class.
A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.”
Publisher Duke University Press, 2003
ISBN 082233013X, 9780822330134
450 pages
via nutzenberg
Reviews: James P. Kraft (American Historical Review), Karin Bijsterveld (Technology and Culture).
PDF (updated on 2022-12-7)
Comment (0)Hans Günther, Sabine Hänsgen (eds.): Soviet Power and the Media (2006) [Russian]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, cinema, communism, film, media, media theory, photography, politics, print, radio, socialist realism, sound, soviet union, technology, theatre
Proceedings from the conference “The Political as Communicative Space in History” (Bielefeld, October 2003) devoted to the comparative analysis of the media in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s provide a pioneering media-theoretical exploration of the role of radio, film, photography and print in the engineering of the communist Soviet power.
Sovetskaya vlast’ i media [Советская власть и медиа]
Publisher Akademicheskiy proekt, St. Petersburg, 2006
Open Access
ISBN 5733103353, 9785733103358
621 pages
Reviews: Wolfgang Schlott (Die Welt der Slaven, 2007, DE, PDF), Alexander Prokhorov (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2007), Alexander Ulanov (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007, RU), Jana Klenhova (ArtMargins, 2008), Yuliya Liderman (Usloviya teatra, RU, 2010).
PDF (broken link fixed on 2014-1-28)
PDFs
ReD (Revue Devětsilu): modern culture monthly (1927-1931) [Czech]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · architecture, art, art theory, avant-garde, bauhaus, constructivism, czechoslovakia, dada, design, film, graphic design, literature, photography, poetry, psychoanalysis, radio, surrealism, theatre
ReD (měsíčník pro moderní kulturu / Revue internationale illustrée de l’activité contemporaine / Internationale Monatsschrift für moderne Gestaltung) was an art magazine published by members of the Czech avant-garde art collective Devětsil.
Thirty numbers were published, with the special issues on the Russian avant-garde, Bauhaus, and photography/film/typography.
Several manifestos appeared in the journal: Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský’s Artificielisme (1:1, 1927), Karel Teige’s second Poetism manifesto [Manifest Poetismu] (1:9, 1928), and the Left Front [Levá fronta]’s founding manifesto (3:2, 1929).
Edited and designed by Karel Teige
Publisher Odeon – Jan Fromek, Prague
via NYPL Digital Library
Each volume in a single PDF (low resolution):
Volume I, 1927-1928 (10 issues, 360 pages)
Volume II, 1928-1929 (10 issues, 324 pages)
Volume III, 1929-1931 (10 issues, 315 pages)
Selected issues in separate PDFs:
The Russian Issue (1:2, Nov 1927)
Foto Film Typo Issue (2:8, Apr 1929)
The Bauhaus Issue (3:5, Feb 1930, partly in German)
JPG pages (search in page annotations):
View online
See also Devětsil: Revoluční sborník (1922), edited by Jaroslav Seifert and Karel Teige, in Czech.
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