Yolande Harris: Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness (2011)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · consciousness, environment, listening, sound, sound art, technology
“Scorescapes investigates how sound mediates our relationship to the environment, and how contemporary multidisciplinary art practices can articulate this relationship. It joins my own artistic practice with a theoretical analysis of the field, highlighting how relationships to the environment drawn through sound are profoundly bound up with technology. Key concepts include: making the inaudible audible; underwater sound and cetacean communication; field recordings and the contextual basis of sound; typologies of listening; the score as relationship; and techno-intuition.
Scorescapes negotiates a role for the artist and composer as a researcher, creating hybrid methods and developing alternative forms of knowledge that heighten personal awareness through direct engagement with sonic environments. Working closely with composers David Dunn, Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, and with bio-acoustic scientist Michel André, I tested and applied theoretical ideas, generating unexpected artistic research questions and methods. These included the need to distinguish between audification, sonification and visualization processes, the paucity of research on underwater sonic environments and the anthropocentric bias towards environmental sound.” (from the Abstract)
PhD thesis
Academy for Creative and Performing Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
Supervisors: Frans de Ruiter, David Dunn, Bob Gilmore
146 pages
via leidenuniv.nl
Ursonate Fanzine, 1-2 (2010-2011) [Spanish]
Filed under magazine, sound recording | Tags: · listening, music, noise, sound, sound art
Nº000
Published in public domain, 2010
62 pages
Nº001
Coordinación: Jose Luis Espejo, Oscar Martín
Reseñas: Miguel Angel Tolosa
100 pages
Ursonate_Fanzine surge con la única pretensión de generar un organo más de expresión, encuentro y reflexión alrededor de la comunidad involucrada en el arte sonoro, el ruido y la escena de netlabels y labels independientes.
PDF (Nº000)
PDF (Nº001)
ZIP (Nº001, sound compilation Sound of Ebb)
Steve J. Wurtzler: Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · acoustics, audience, film, listening, mass media, music, sound, sound recording, wireless networks
Electric Sounds brings to vivid life an era when innovations in the production, recording, and transmission of sound revolutionized a number of different media, especially the radio, the phonograph, and the cinema.
The 1920s and 1930s marked some of the most important developments in the history of the American mass media: the film industry’s conversion to synchronous sound, the rise of radio networks and advertising-supported broadcasting, the establishment of a federal regulatory framework on which U.S. communications policy continues to be based, the development of several powerful media conglomerates, and the birth of a new acoustic commodity in which a single story, song, or other product was made available to consumers in multiple media forms and formats.
But what role would this new media play in society? Celebrants saw an opportunity for educational and cultural uplift; critics feared the degradation of the standards of public taste. Some believed acoustic media would fulfill the promise of participatory democracy by better informing the public, while others saw an opportunity for manipulation. The innovations of this period prompted not only a restructuring and consolidation of corporate mass media interests and a shift in the conventions and patterns of media consumption but also a renegotiation of the social functions assigned to mass media forms.
Steve J. Wurtzler’s impeccably researched history adds a new dimension to the study of sound media, proving that the ultimate form technology takes is never predetermined. Rather, it is shaped by conflicting visions of technological possibility in economic, cultural, and political realms. Electric Sounds also illustrates the process through which technologies become media and the ways in which media are integrated into American life.
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2007
Film and Culture series
ISBN 0231136773, 9780231136778
393 pages
Review (Jonathan Sterne, Cinema Journal, 2008)
Review (Gerd Horten, The American Historical Review, 2008)
Review (Heidi Tworek, H-Net/Jhistory, 2010)
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
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