A 48-page book featuring essays by David Giovannoni, Patrick Feaster, and Anne Thiollier and a 7" flexi disc with historic phonautograms by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Emile Berliner.
Two horror films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2018, and one of them—The Shape of Water—won. Since 1990, the production of horror films has risen exponentially worldwide, and in 2013, horror films earned an estimated $400 million in ticket sales. Horror has long been the most popular film genre, and more horror movies have been made than any other kind. We need them. We need to be scared, to test ourselves, laugh inappropriately, scream, and flinch. We need to get through them and come out, blinking, still in one piece. Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film is a straightforward history written for the general reader and student that can serve as a comprehensive reference work. The volume provides a general introduction to the genre, serves as a guidebook to its film highlights, and celebrates its practitioners, trends, and stories. Starting with silent-era horror films and ending with 2020’s The Invisible Man, Lost in the Dark looks at decades of horror movies. Author Brad Weismann covers such topics as the roots of horror in literature and art, monster movies, B-movies, the destruction of the American censorship system, international horror, torture porn, zombies, horror comedies, horror in the new millennium, and critical reception of modern horror. A sweeping survey that doesn’t scrimp on details, Lost in the Dark is sure to satisfy both the curious and the completist.
In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies, and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history, outlines its role in cultural, social and political discourses, and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying and conceptualizing sound, and sets new challenges for the development of sound studies. Contributors. Andrew Eisenberg, Veit Erlmann, Patrick Feaster, Steven Feld, Daniel Fisher, Stefan Helmreich, Charles Hirschkind, Deborah Kapchan, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, David Novak, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Thomas Porcello, Tom Rice, Tara Rodgers, Matt Sakakeeny, David Samuels, Mark M. Smith, Benjamin Steege, Jonathan Sterne, Amanda Weidman
This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.
This book is a comprehensive illustrated account of the technologies and inventions in mass communication that have accelerated the advancement of human culture and society. A History of Communication Technology covers a timeline in the history of mass communication that begins with human prehistory and extends all the way to the current digital age. Using rich, full-color graphics and diagrams, the book details the workings of various mass communication inventions, from paper-making, printing presses, photography, radio, TV, film, and video, to computers, digital devices, and the Internet. Readers are given insightful narratives on the social impact of these technologies, brief historical accounts of the inventors, and sidebars on the related technologies that enabled these inventions. This book is ideal for students in introductory mass communication, visual communication, and history of media courses, offering a highly approachable, graphic-oriented approach to the history of communication technologies. Additional digital resources for the book are available at https://comtechhistory.site/
A search for traces of the voice before the phonograph, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Long before the invention of musical notation, and long before that of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler searches for traces of voices before Edison, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice—as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists and to voice theorists but to anyone with an interest in the verbal arts—literature, oratory, song—and the nature of aesthetic experience.