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

R. Murray Schafer: A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Soundmaking (1992)

This book will be useful to every teacher concerned with improving the listening skills of children and young people. The exercises could serve as a foundation for music but they are intended to have a broader application than this. In today’s noisy world it is more important than ever for whole populations to begin to listen more carefully and critically. Here are exercises dealing with soundmaking and listening, gradually leading on towards the designing of soundscapes, both personal and public.

Publisher Arcana Editions, 1992
ISBN 1895127157, 9781895127157
144 pages

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Adalaide Kirby Morris (ed.): Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (1997)

By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to ‘turn up the volume’ on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life.

The collection’s twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist ‘sonosphers’ to Henri Chopin’s electroacoustical audio-poämes, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements–statements held only partially in check by meaning. The accompanying CD offers soundtracks of early radio sounds, poetry readings, Dada cabaret performances, jazzoetry, audiopoems, and contemporary Caribbean DJ dub poetry.

The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

Publisher University of North Carolina Press, 1997
ISBN 0807846708, 9780807846704
349 pages

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