[sonicfield]

The Auditory Setting - Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and production. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.

[sonicfield]

The Nomadic Listener

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

The Nomadic Listener is an augmented book project developed between 2012 and 2019. Based on the author’s artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, the book is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels, London, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, among others. Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attempts to attune to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the minutiae of life movingly interwoven with the author’s own memories, associations, desires and reflections. As readers we are brought inside a tender map of contemporary urban experience, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling.

[sonicfield]

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking

Nicolas Collins

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction to the craft of making – as well as creatively cannibalizing – electronic circuits for artistic purposes. With a sense of adventure and no prior knowledge, the reader can subvert the intentions designed into devices such as radios and toys to discover a new sonic world. You will also learn how to make contact microphones, pickups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, mixers, and unusual signal processors cheaply and quickly. At a time when computers dominate music production, this book offers a rare glimpse into the core technology of early live electronic music, as well as more recent developments at the hands of emerging artists.

This revised and expanded third edition has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments in technology and DIY approaches. New to this edition are chapters contributed by a diverse group of practitioners, addressing the latest developments in technology and creative trends, as well as an extensive companion website that provides media examples, tutorials, and further reading. This edition features:

Over 50 new hands-on projects.

New chapters and features on topics including soft circuitry, video hacking, neural networks, radio transmitters, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, data hacking, printing your own circuit boards, and the international DIY community

A new companion website at HandmadeElectronicMusic.com, containing video tutorials, video clips, audio tracks, resource files, and additional chapters with deeper dives into technical concepts and hardware hacking scenes around the world

With a hands-on, experimental spirit, Nicolas Collins demystifies the process of crafting your own instruments and enables musicians, composers, artists, and anyone interested in music technology to draw on the creative potential of hardware hacking.

[sonicfield]

Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

John Szwed

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.

[sonicfield]

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (Bloomsbury Handbooks)

Sanne Krogh Groth, Holger Schulze

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound.

Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

[sonicfield]

Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Sound System Culture (Strange Attractor Press)

Joe Muggs

An oral history of the UK's soundsystem culture, featuring interviews with Dubmaster Dennis Bovell, Skream, Youth, Norman Jay MBE, Adrian Sherwood, Mala, and others.

In the years following the arrival of the Windrush generation, the UK's soundsystem culture would become the most important influence on contemporary pop music since rock and roll. Pumped through towering, home-built speakers, often directly onto the thronged streets of events like the Notting Hill Carnival, the pulsating bass lines of reggae, dub, rave, jungle, trip hop, dubstep, and grime have shaped the worlds of several generations of British youth culture but have often been overlooked by historians obsessed with swinging London, punk, and Britpop.

This oral history, consisting of new interviews conducted by respected dance music writer Joe Muggs, and accompanied by dramatic portraits by Brian David Stevens, presents the story of the bassline of Britain, in the words of those who lived and shaped it. Features interviews with Dubmaster Dennis Bovell, Norman Jay MPE, Youth, Adrian Sherwood, Skream, Rinse FM's Sarah Lockhart and many others.

[sonicfield]

Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise

Stephen Kennedy

What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is a book about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age.

[sonicfield]

Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation

Carla J. Maier

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices** ***zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book *engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

[sonicfield]

Amplifications: Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory

Paul Carter

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications *presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer. A work of reflective philosophy, *Amplifications sits at the intersection of history, creative practice, and sound studies, recounting this narrative through a series of themes (rattles, echoes, recordings, etc.). Carter offers a unique perspective on migratory poetics, bringing together his own compositions and life's works while using his personal narrative to frame larger theoretical questions about sound and migration.

[sonicfield]

Brandon LaBelle: Overheard and Interrupted

Brandon LaBelle

Compiling works and writings from the last 13 years, this comprehensive monograph on American artist, writer and theorist Brandon LaBelle (born 1969) captures the artist’s expansive practice. Originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Berlin, LaBelle has been at the forefront of the sound arts since the mid-1990s, developing projects that adopt methods of intervention and spatial practice, that work with voice and modes of address, and that stage scenes of public gathering based on notions of interruption and radical sharing. LaBelle is a highly unique artist and writer, engaged in collaborative and public work, and the monograph documents his diverse activities in a range of international contexts. It includes a CD of a recent line performance by Labelle, essays on the artist by writer Fred Dewey, curator Edit Molnár, and cultural theorist Jeremy Woodruff, along with an interview with the artist by Elena Biserna.

[sonicfield]

Low End Theory

Paul C. Jasen

Low End Theory probes the much-mythologized field of bass and low-frequency sound. It begins in music but quickly moves far beyond, following vibratory phenomena across time, disciplines and disparate cultural spheres (including hauntings, laboratories, organ workshops, burial mounds, sound art, studios, dancefloors, infrasonic anomalies, and a global mystery called The Hum). Low End Theory asks what it is about bass that has fascinated us for so long and made it such a busy site of bio-technological experimentation, driving developments in science, technology, the arts, and religious culture.

The guiding question is not so much what we make of bass, but what it makes of us: how does it undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it draw bodily thought into new equations with itself and its surroundings? Low End Theory is the first book to survey this sonorous terrain and devise a conceptual language proper to it. With its focus on sound's structuring agency and the multi-sensory aspects of sonic experience, it stands to make a transformative contribution to the study of music and sound, while pushing scholarship on affect, materiality, and the senses into fertile new territory. Through energetic and creative prose, Low End Theory works to put thought in touch with the vibratory encounter as no scholarly book has done before.

For more information, visit: http://www.lowendtheorybook.com/

[sonicfield]

K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher

A comprehensive collection of the writings of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), whose work defined critical writing for a generation.

This comprehensive collection brings together the work of acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 - 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade. Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds.

[sonicfield]

Sound Materials: A Compendium of Sound Absorbing Materials for Architecture and Design

Tyler Adams

Sound Materials is a definitive resource for architects, designers and creative professionals -- the first publication of its kind to catalogue over 100 sound absorbing materials with full colour images paired with inspiring real-world applications. Fundamental technical concepts are clearly and concisely presented to provide a general understanding of how materials absorb sound and how these materials are commonly used to reduce noise and reverberation, inform our sense of space, and improve communication in everyday environments. This book not only surveys an extensive range of materials past, present and emerging, but also highlights many exciting opportunities for future innovation and collaboration at the intersections of acoustical engineering, materials science, design and architecture. A special chapter is devoted to interviews with leading designers and engineers who work with sound absorbing materials in a variety of novel and innovative ways.

[sonicfield]

An Epistemology of Noise

Cecile Malaspina

What do we understand 'noise' to be?

The term 'noise' no longer suggests only aesthetic judgement, as in acoustic or visual noise, and is now relevant to domains as varied as communication theory, physics and biology. This trans-disciplinary usage leads to confusion and complication, and reveals that the question of noise is a properly philosophical problem.

Presenting an analysis of the rising interest in the notion of noise, this book investigates if there can be a coherent understanding of what it is, that can be effectively shared among the natural and human sciences, technology and the arts. Drawing the philosophical consequences of noise for the theory of knowledge, Malaspina undertakes a philosophical revaluation of Shannon and Weaver's theory of 'information entropy'; this forms the basis upon which to challenge the common idea that noise can be reduced to notions of error, disorder or disorganization. The wider consequences of this analysis relate the technological and scientific aspect of noise, with its cultural and psycho-social aspects. At the heart of Malaspina's argument is the contestation of the ground upon which we judge and distinguish noise from information and finally the exploration of its emancipatory potential.

[sonicfield]

Inflamed Invisible: Collected Writings on Art and Sound, 1976-2018 (Goldsmiths Press / Sonics Series (2))

David Toop

**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.

[sonicfield]

Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean (Pitt Latin American Series)

Alejandra Bronfman, Andrew Grant Wood

Outside of music, the importance of sound and listening have been greatly overlooked in Latin American history. Visual media has dominated cultural studies, affording an incomplete record of the modern era. This edited volume presents an original analysis of the role of sound in Latin American and Caribbean societies, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine the importance of sound in the purveyance of power, gender roles, race, community, religion, and populism. They also demonstrate how sound is essential to the formation of citizenship and nationalism. Sonic media, and radio in particular, have become primary tools for contesting political issues. In that vein, the contributors view the control of radio transmission and those who manipulate its content for political gain. Conversely, they show how, in neoliberal climates, radio programs have exposed corruption and provided a voice for activism. The essays address sonic production in a variety of media: radio; Internet; digital recordings; phonographs; speeches; carnival performances; fireworks festivals, and the reinterpretation of sound in literature. They examine the bodily experience of sound, and its importance to memory coding and identity formation. This volume looks to sonic media as an essential vehicle for transmitting ideologies, imagined communities, and culture. As the contributors discern, modern technology has made sound ubiquitous, and its study is therefore crucial to understanding the flow of information and influence in Latin America and globally.

[sonicfield]

The amplification of souls

Gilles Aubry

Amplified Souls is a live sound performance by Gilles Aubry based on his research on the Amplified Religious Soundscape of Kinshasa, DRC, which took its place in 2011 for the Global Prayers project. Aubry improvises on a quad sound system with recordings documenting a spiritual deliverance session at the Libambu Ministry Church. During collective praying sessions involving speaking-in-tongues and a massive sound system, church members oppose evil spirits causing various existential problems. The sound, powerful and over-distorted, attests both to their supernatural powers and their capacity for soul amplification. By extension, performance also questions the devotion of noise music fans and the cultural boundaries of faith, noise and technology.