"Ocean of Sound" begins in 1889 at the Paris Exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. A culture absorbed in perfume, light and ambient sound developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications. David Toop traces the evolution of this culture, through Erik Satie to the Velvet Undergound; Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix. David Toop, who lives in London, is a writer, musician and recording artist. His other books are "Rap Attack 3 "and "Exotica,"
Sound Images of the Ocean is the first comprehensive overview of acoustic imaging applications in the various fields of marine research, utilization, surveillance, and protection. The book employs 400 sound images of the sea floor and of processes in the sea volume, contributed by more than 120 marine experts from 22 nations.
Numerous incidents suggest that man-made sound injures and can kill marine mammals. This book offers an objective look at how ocean noise should be addressed given the lack of regulatory structure and the scientific uncertainty over the effects of noise on marine life. It is an essential text for policymakers, governments and NGOs, biologists, environmental activists, , oceanographers, and those in the shipping, engineering, and offshore oil and gas industries.
This 1979 book attempts to connect the known structure of the ocean volume with experimental results in long-range sound transmission through the theory of wave propagation and the path-integral approach. The book is written at the post-graduate level, but has been carefully organised to give experimenters a grasp of important results without undue mathematics.
David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of 20th century music into an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound. 'A meditation on the development of modern music, there's no single term that is adequate to describe what Toop has accomplished here ... mixing interviews, criticism, history, and memory, Toop moves seamlessly between sounds, styles, genres, and eras' Pitchfork's '60 Favourite Music Books'
This collection of essays has been assembled and developed from papers given at the Ambient@40 International Conference held in February 2018 at the University of Huddersfield. The original premise of the conference was not merely to celebrate Enos work and the landmark release of Music for Airports in 1978, but to consider the development of the genre, how it has permeated our wider musical culture, and what the role of such music is today given the societal changes that have occurred since the release of that album. In the context of the conference, ambient was considered from the perspectives of aesthetic, influence, appropriation, process, strategy and activity. A detailed consideration of each of these topics could fill many volumes. With that in mind, this book does not seek to provide an in-depth analysis of each of these topics or a comprehensive history of the last 40 years of ambient music. Rather it provides a series of provocations, observations and reflections that each open up seams for further discussion. As such, this book should be read as a starting point for future research, one that seeks to critically interrogate the very meaning of ambient, how it creates its effect, and how the genre can remain vital and relevant in twenty-first century music-making.
Merging anecdote and biography, autobiography and interviews, fact and fiction and a characteristically eclectic selection of music, David Toop spirals us through the 20th century's guilty fascination with exotica. Notions of the exotic have long inspired musicians across the musical spectrum, from classical to ?easy listening? to rap - from Stravinsky to the Boo-Yah T.R.I.B.E. Exotica takes a look at some of the world's most witty, experimental and adventurous sound recordings while taking in the work of Les Baxter, the meaning of Carmen Miranda, leopard skin leotards, pink fluffy cubicles, elevator music, and more... Painstakingly researched and brilliantly insightful, Exotica includes interviews with Burt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, YMO's Haroumi Hosono, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and The Boo-Yah Tribe.
A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound. In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art. Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works. Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop's essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.
The continents of our planet have already been exploited to a great extent. Therefore man is turning his sight to the vast spaciousness of the ocean whose resources - mineral, biological, energetic, and others - are just beginning to be used. The ocean is being intensively studied. Our notions about the dynam ics of ocean waters and their role in forming the Earth's climate as well as about the structure of the ocean bottom have substantially changed during the last two decades. An outstanding part in this accelerated exploration of the ocean is played by ocean acoustics. Only sound waves can propagate in water over large distances. Practically all kinds of telemetry, communication, location, and re mote sensing of water masses and the ocean bottom use sound waves. Propa gating over thousands of kilometers in the ocean, they bring information on earthquakes, eruptions of volcanoes, and distant storms. Projects using acoustical tomography systems for exploration of the ocean are presently be ing developed. Each of these systems will allow us to determine the three-di mensional structure of water masses in regions as large as millions of square kilometers.
