From Tin Foil to Stereo
Author: Oliver Read
Publisher: Indianapolis : H. W. Sams
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 618
ISBN-13:
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Segregating Sound
Author: Karl Hagstrom Miller
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2010-02-11
Total Pages: 386
ISBN-13: 0822392704
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the phonograph industry. Such links among race, region, and music were new. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues, ballads, ragtime, and string band music, but also nationally popular sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. In a cultural history filled with musicians, listeners, scholars, and business people, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a “musical color line,” a cultural parallel to the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South. Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of human civilization. Contending that people’s musical worlds were defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard, Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, music, and the market.
Transforming Noise
Author: Chen-Pang Yeang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-10-30
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 0198887760
DOWNLOAD EBOOKToday, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be domesticated into a synonym for errors and deviations to be now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise examines the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history sheds light on the interactions between physics, mathematics, mechanical technology, electrical engineering, and information and data sciences in the twentieth century. This book explores the process of engineers and physicists turning noise into an informational concept, starting from the rise of sound reproduction technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio in the 1900s-20s until the theory of Brownian motions for random fluctuations and its application in thermionic tubes of telecommunication systems. These processes produced different theoretical treatments of noise in the 1920s-30s, such as statistical physicists' studies of Brownian fluctuations' temporal evolution, radio engineers' spectral analysis of atmospheric disturbances, and mathematicians' measure-theoretic formulation. Finally, it discusses the period during and after World War II and how researchers have worked on military projects of radar, gunfire control, and secret communications and converted the interwar theoretical studies of noise into tools for statistical detection, estimation, prediction, and information transmission. To physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists, this book offers a historical perspective on themes highly relevant in today's science and technology, ranging from Wi-Fi and big data to quantum information and self-organization. This book also appeals to environmental and art historians to modern music scholars as the history of noise constitutes a unique angle to study sound and society. Finally, to researchers in media studies and digital cultures, Transforming Noise demonstrates the deep technoscientific historicity of certain notions - information, channel, noise, equivocation - they have invoked to understand modern media and communication.
Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies
Author: Matthew Rubery
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-05-09
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1136733329
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first scholarly work to examine the cultural significance of the "talking book" since the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the earliest machine to enable the reproduction of the human voice. Recent advances in sound technology make this an opportune moment to reflect on the evolution of our reading practices since this remarkable invention. Some questions addressed by the collection include: How does auditory literature adapt printed texts? What skills in close listening are necessary for its reception? What are the social consequences of new listening technologies? In sum, the essays gathered together by this collection explore the extent to which the audiobook enables us not just to hear literature but to hear it in new ways. Bringing together a set of reflections on the enrichments and impoverishments of the reading experience brought about by developments in sound technology, this collection spans the earliest adaptations of printed texts into sound by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and other novelists from the late nineteenth century to recordings by contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison and Barack Obama at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the voices gathered here suggest, it is time to give a hearing to one of the most talked about new media of the past century.
Listening Devices
Author: Jens Gerrit Papenburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2023-05-04
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 1501346725
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom 1940 to 1990, new machines and devices radically changed listening to music. Small and large single records, new kinds of jukeboxes and loudspeaker systems not only made it possible to playback music in a different way, they also evidence a fundamental transformation of music and listening itself. Taking the media and machines through which listening took place during this period, Listening Devices develops a new history of listening.Although these devices were (and often still are) easily accessible, up to now we have no concept of them. To address this gap, this volume proposes the term “listening device.” In conjunction with this concept, the book develops an original and fruitful method for exploring listening as a historical subject that has been increasingly organized in relation to technology. Case studies of four listening devices are the points of departure for the analysis, which leads the reader down unfamiliar paths, traversing the popular sound worlds of 1950s rock 'n' roll culture and the disco and club culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite all the characteristics specific to the different listening devices, they can nevertheless be compared because of the fundamental similarities they share: they model and manage listening, they actively mediate between the listener and the music heard, and it is this mediation that brings both listener and the music listened to into being. Ultimately, however, the intention is that the listening devices themselves should not be heard so that the music they playback can be heard. Thus, they take the history of listening to its very limits and confront it with its “other”-a history of non-listening. The book proposes “listening device” as a key concept for sound studies, popular music studies, musicology, and media studies. With this conceptual key, a new, productive understanding of past music and sound cultures of the pre-digital era can be unlocked, and, not least, of the listening culture of the digital present.
Handbook of Recording Engineering
Author: John M. Eargle
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2013-04-17
Total Pages: 493
ISBN-13: 1475711298
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJohn Eargle's 4th edition of The Handbook of Recording Engineering is the latest version of his long-time classic hands-on book for aspiring recording engineers. It follows the broad outline of its predecessors, but has been completely recast for the benefit of today's training in recording and its allied arts and sciences. Digital recording and signal processing are covered in detail, as are actual studio miking and production techniques -- including the developing field of surround sound. As always, the traditional topics of basic stereo, studio acoustics, analog tape recording, and the stereo LP are covered in greater detail than you are likely to find anywhere except in archival references. This book has been completely updated with numerous new topics added and outdated material removed. Many technical descriptions are now presented in Sidebars, leaving the primary text for more general descriptions. Handbook of Recording Engineering, Fourth Edition is for students preparing for careers in audio, recording, broadcast, and motion picture sound work. It will also be useful as a handbook for professionals already in the audio workplace.
Moving Image Technology
Author: Leo Douglas Graham Enticknap
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9781904764069
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe author explains scientific, technical and engineering concepts clearly and in a way that can be understood by non-scientists. He integrates a discussion of traditional, film-based technologies with the impact of emerging 'new media' technologies such as digital video, e-cinema and the Internet.
Computational Phonogram Archiving
Author: Rolf Bader
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2019-01-25
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 3030026957
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms automatically analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates these features. At the first International Symposium on Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to 11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg, Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists, music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers around the globe.
Off the Record
Author: Neal Peres Da Costa
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2012-05-16
Total Pages: 396
ISBN-13: 0195386914
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Off the Record, author and pianist Neal Peres Da Costa explores Romantic-era performance practices through a range of early sound recordings--acoustic, piano roll and electric--that capture a generation of highly-esteemed pianists trained as far back as the mid-nineteenth-century.
Entertaining Lisbon
Author: João Silva
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0190215704
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEntertaining Lisbon explores Portuguese entertainment as a form of negotiation between local, national, and transnational influences on identity. Connecting gender, class, ethnicity, and technology with theatrical repertoires, street sounds, and domestic music making, author João Silva investigates popular entertainment in Portugal and its connections with modern life and the rise of nationalism. An essential contribution to the literature on Portuguese music written in the English language, Entertaining Lisbon is a critical study for scholars and students of musicology interested in Portugal, and popular and theatrical musics, as well as historical ethnomusicologists, cultural historians, and urban planning researchers interested in the development of material culture.
