Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, And ExperienceU of Minnesota Press - 203 pages As people from record collectors to file swappers know, the experience of music - making it, marketing it, listening to it - relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined. What was gained - or lost - when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition. Evens elegantly and forcefully dissects the paradoxes of digital culture and reveals how technology has profound implications for the phenomenology of art. Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music's relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | |
Chapter 1 Sound and Noise | |
Chapter 2 Sound and Time | |
Chapter 3 Sound and Digits | |
Chapter 4 Making Music | |
Notes | |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract acoustic instruments actual additive synthesis air pressure allows alter Alvin Lucier amplitude articulation audiophile become binary body cellular automata chord complex composer composition compression contracted create creative culture Dasein deictic Deleuze determine difference digital instruments digital technologies dimension domain duration effect experience expression faculty of music fingers FM synthesis force formal Fourier analysis Fourier theorem frequency grain granular synthesis guitar haecceity harmonic hear immersed implicated improvisation inflection innuendo interface La Monte Young limit listener manipulation means ment motion music-making musician noise notes object one’s operates original wave parameters perception performance phase piano piece pitch play player possibilities produce psychoacoustic recording relation repetition represent representation resistance result rhythm sample Schenkerian analysis semiotic sense signal sine wave singular sonic sound space specific standard Stockhausen strings subtractive synthesis techniques temporalities things timbre tion tuning variation vibrations wavelet analysis