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Sound - Perception - Performance
by Rolf BaderMusical Performance covers many aspects like Musical Acoustics, Music Psychology, or motor and prosodic actions. It deals with basic concepts of the origin or music and its evolution, ranges over neurocognitive foundations, and covers computational, technological, or simulation solutions. This volume gives an overview about current research in the foundation of musical performance studies on all these levels. Recent concepts of synchronized systems, evolutionary concepts, basic understanding of performance as Gestalt patterns, theories of chill as performance goals or historical aspects are covered. The neurocognitive basis of motor action in terms of music, musical syntax, as well as therapeutic aspects are discussed. State-of-the-art applications in performance realizations, like virtual room acoustics, virtual musicians, new concepts of real-time physical modeling using complex performance data as input or sensor and gesture studies with soft- and hardware solutions are presented. So although the field is still much larger, this volume presents current trends in terms of understanding, implementing, and perceiving performance.
Sound Pictures: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, The Later Years, 1966–2016
by Kenneth WomackMore than anyone besides the bandmates themselves, George Martin was the man who created the unique sound of the Beatles. Sound Pictures offers a powerful and intimate account of how he did so. <P><P> The second and final volume of the definitive biography of the man, Sound Pictures traces the story of the Beatles’ breathtaking artistic trajectory after reaching the creative heights of Rubber Soul. As the bandmates engage in brash experimentation both inside and outside the studio, Martin toils along with manager Brian Epstein to consolidate the Beatles’ fame in the face of growing sociocultural pressures, including the crisis associated with the “Beatles are more popular than Jesus” scandal. <P><P> Meanwhile, he also struggles to make his way as an independent producer in the highly competitive world of mid-1960s rock ’n’ roll. As Martin and the Beatles create one landmark album after another, including such masterworks as Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (The White Album), and Abbey Road, the internal stakes and interpersonal challenges become ever greater. <P><P> During his post-Beatles years, Martin attempts to discover new vistas of sound recording with a host of acts, including Jeff Beck, America, Cheap Trick, Paul McCartney, and Elton John, his creative breakthroughs followed by unprecedented commercial success. Eventually, though, all roads bring Martin back to the Beatles, as the group seeks out new ways to memorialize their achievement under the supervision of the man who has come to be known as Sir George. Now, more than fifty years after the Beatles’ revolutionary triumphs, Martin’s singular stamp on popular music has become more vital than ever, as successive generations discover the magic of the Beatles and their groundbreaking sound.
Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues
by Budhaditya ChattopadhyayThis book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global South, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-consumerist cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties.Conversations with: Clarence Barlow, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rajesh K. Mehta, Sharif Sehnaoui, Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Hardi Kurda, Mario de Vega, Luka Mukhavele, Khyam Allami, Cedrik Fermont, Khaled Kaddal, David Velez, Juan Duarte, Youmna Saba, Abdellah M. Hassak, Mariana Marcassa, Amanda Gutiérrez, Syma Tariq, Alma Laprida, Siamak Anvari, Mohamad Safa, Debashis Sinha, Zouheir Atbane, Constanza Bizraelli, Jatin Vidyarthi, Joseph Kamaru, Surabhi Saraf, Isuru Kumarasinghe, Hemant Sreekumar.
Sound Reinforcement for Audio Engineers
by Wolfgang AhnertSound Reinforcement for Audio Engineers illustrates the current state of the art in sound reinforcement. Beginning with an outline of various fields of applications, from sports venues to religious venues, corporate environments and cinemas, this book is split into 11 chapters covering room acoustics, loudspeakers, microphones and acoustic modelling among many other topics. This comprehensive book packed with references and a historical overview of sound reinforcement design is an essential reference book for students of acoustics and electrical engineering, but also for engineers looking to expand their knowledge of designing sound reinforcement systems.
The Sound Reinforcement Handbook
by Gary Davis Ralph JonesSound reinforcement is the use of audio amplification systems. This book is the first and only book of its kind to cover all aspects of designing and using such systems for public address and musical performance. The book features information on both the audio theory involved and the practical applications of that theory, explaining everything from microphones to loudspeakers. This revised edition features almost 40 new pages and is even easier to follow with the addition of an index and a simplified page and chapter numbering system. New topics covered include: MIDI, Synchronization, and an Appendix on Logarithms.
Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain)
by Julia Grella O'ConnellThe plight of the fallen woman is one of the salient themes of nineteenth-century art and literature; indeed, the ubiquity of the trope galvanized the Victorian conscience and acted as a spur to social reform. In some notable examples, Julia Grella O’Connell argues, the iconography of the Victorian fallen woman was associated with music, reviving an ancient tradition conflating the practice of music with sin and the abandonment of music with holiness. The prominence of music symbolism in the socially-committed, quasi-religious paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, and in the Catholic-Wagnerian novels of George Moore, gives evidence of the survival of a pictorial language linking music with sin and conversion, and shows, even more remarkably, that this language translated fairly easily into the cultural lexicon of Victorian Britain. Drawing upon music iconography, art history, patristic theology, and sensory theory, Grella O’Connell investigates female fallenness and its implications against the backdrop of the social and religious turbulence of the mid-nineteenth century.
Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema
by Masha Salazkina Lilya KaganovskyThis innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.
The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era (SOAS Studies in Music Series)
by Kerstin KlenkeThe Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era is a pioneering study of the intersection between popular music and state politics in Central Asia. Based on 20 months of fieldwork and archival research in Tashkent, this book explores a remarkable era in Uzbekistan’s politics (2001–2016), when the Uzbek government promoted a rather unlikely candidate to the prominent position of state sound: estrada, a genre of popular music and a musical relic of socialism. The political importance it attached to estrada was matched by the establishment of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus for state oversight. The Sound State of Uzbekistan shows the continuing legacy of Soviet concepts to frame the nexus between music, artists and the state, and explains the extraordinary potency ascribed to estrada. At the same time, it challenges classical readings of transition and also questions common binary models for researching culture in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Proposing to approach lives in music under authoritarianism as a form of normality instead, the author promotes a post-Cold War paradigm in music studies.
Sound Streams: A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence
by Andrew J BottomleyIn talking about contemporary media, we often use a language of newness, applying words like “revolution” and “disruption.” Yet, the emergence of new sound media technologies and content—from the earliest internet radio broadcasts to the development of algorithmic music services and the origins of podcasting—are not a disruption, but a continuation of the century-long history of radio. Today’s most innovative media makers are reintroducing forms of audio storytelling from radio’s past. Sound Streams is the first book to historicize radio-internet convergence from the early ’90s through the present, demonstrating how so-called new media represent an evolutionary shift that is nevertheless historically consistent with earlier modes of broadcasting. Various iterations of internet radio, from streaming audio to podcasting, are all new radio practices rather than each being a separate new medium: radio is any sound media that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience. Rather than a particular set of technologies or textual conventions, web-based broadcasting combines unique practices and features and ideas from radio history. In addition, there exists a distinctive conversationality and reflexivity to radio talk, including a propensity for personal stories and emotional disclosure, that suits networked digital media culture. What media convergence has done is extend and intensify radio’s logics of connectivity and sharing; sonically mediated personal expression intended for public consideration abounds in online media networks. Sound Streams marks a significant contribution to digital media and internet studies. Its mix of cultural history, industry research, and genre and formal analysis, especially of contemporary audio storytelling, will appeal to media scholars, radio and podcast practitioners, audio journalism students, and dedicated podcast fans.
The Sound Studies Reader
by Jonathan SterneThe Sound Studies Reader blends recent work that self-consciously describes itself as ‘sound studies’ along with earlier and lesser-known scholarship on sound from across the humanities and social sciences. The Sound Studies Reader touches on key themes like noise and silence; architecture, acoustics and space; media and reproducibility; listening, voices and disability; culture, community, power and difference; and shifts in the form and meaning of sound across cultures, contexts and centuries. Writers reflect on crucial historical moments, difficult definitions, and competing accounts of the role of sound in culture and everyday life. Across the essays, readers will gain a sense of the range and history of key debates and discussions in sound studies. The collection begins with an introduction to welcome novice readers to the field and acquaint them the main issues in sound studies. Individual section introductions give readers further background on the essays and an extensive up to date bibliography for further reading in sound studies make this an original and accessible guide to the field.
Sound, Symbol, Sociality
by Matthew P. UngerBased on ethnographic research within the extreme metal community, Unger offers a thought-provoking look at how symbols of authenticity and defilement fashion social experience in surprising ways. Exploring the many themes and ciphers that comprise this musical community, this book interprets aesthetic resonances as a way to understand contemporary identity, politics, and social relations. In the end, this book develops a unique argument: the internal composition of the community's music and sound moulds symbols that shape, reflect, and constrain social patterns of identity, difference, and transgression. This book contributes to the sociology of sound and music, the study of religion in popular culture, and the role of aesthetics in everyday life. It will be of interest to upper level students, post-graduate students and scholars of religion, popular culture, and philosophy.
Sound Teaching: A Research-Informed Approach to Inspiring Confidence, Skill, and Enjoyment in Music Performance
by Henrique Meissner Renee Timmers Stephanie E. PittsSound Teaching explores the ways in which music psychology and education can meet to inspire developments in the teaching and learning of music performance. The book is based on music practitioners’ research into aspects of their own professional practice. Each chapter addresses a specific topic related to musical communication and expression, performance confidence and enjoyment, or skill development in individual and group learning. It explains the background of the research, outlines main findings, and provides suggestions for practical applications. Sound Teaching provides a research-informed approach to teaching and contributes to music tutors’ professional development in teaching children and adults of various ages and abilities. Sound Teaching is written for vocal and instrumental music teachers, music performers with a portfolio career, and music students at conservatoires and universities. Music students undertaking practice-related research will find examples of research methodologies and projects that are informative for their studies. Musical participants of all kinds – students, teachers, performers, and audiences – will find new ways of understanding their practice and experience through research.
Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture
by Paul D. MillerThe role of sound and digital media in an information-based society: artists—from Steve Reich and Pierre Boulez to Chuck D and Moby—describe their work.If Rhythm Science was about the flow of things, Sound Unbound is about the remix—how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound, Rhythm Science author Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work and compositional strategies in their own words. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound and digital media in an information-based society. The topics are as diverse as the contributors: composer Steve Reich offers a memoir of his life with technology, from tape loops to video opera; Miller himself considers sampling and civilization; novelist Jonathan Lethem writes about appropriation and plagiarism; science fiction writer Bruce Sterling looks at dead media; Ron Eglash examines racial signifiers in electrical engineering; media activist Naeem Mohaiemen explores the influence of Islam on hip hop; rapper Chuck D contributes “Three Pieces”; musician Brian Eno explores the sound and history of bells; Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno interview composer-conductor Pierre Boulez; and much more. “Press 'play,'” Miller writes, “and this anthology says 'here goes.'” The groundbreaking music that accompanies the book features Nam Jun Paik, the Dada Movement, John Cage, Sonic Youth, and many other examples of avant-garde music. Most of this content comes from the archives of Sub Rosa, a legendary record label that has been the benchmark for archival sounds since the beginnings of electronic music. To receive these free music files, readers may send an email to the address listed in the book.ContributorsDavid Allenby, Pierre Boulez, Catherine Corman, Chuck D, Erik Davis, Scott De Lahunta, Manuel DeLanda, Cory Doctorow, Eveline Domnitch, Frances Dyson, Ron Eglash, Brian Eno, Dmitry Gelfand, Dick Hebdige, Lee Hirsch, Vijay Iyer, Ken Jordan, Douglas Kahn, Daphne Keller, Beryl Korot, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Lanza, Jonathan Lethem, Carlo McCormick, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Moby, Naeem Mohaiemen, Alondra Nelson, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pauline Oliveros, Philippe Parreno, Ibrahim Quaraishi, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Nadine Robinson, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Alex Steinweiss, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, Saul Williams, Jeff E. Winner
Sound Within Sound: A Radical History of Composers in the 20th Century
by Kate MollesonA radical and compelling new history of 20th century composers, shining light on the sonic pioneers whose work transformed musical history.The twentieth century was the century of modernity. Classical music flourished, and yet when we reflect on the genre&’s history its central figures seem to share three characteristics: they were white, male and western. Sound Within Sound is the impassioned and exhilarating story of the composers who dared to challenge the conventional world of classical music in the twentieth century. Traversing the globe from Ethiopia and the Philippines to Mexico, Russia and beyond, Kate Molleson tells the stories of ten figures who altered the course of musical history, only to be sidelined and denied recognition during an era that systemically favoured certain sounds – and people – over others.A celebration of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance, Sound Within Sound is an energetic reappraisal of twentieth-century classical music that opens up the world far beyond its established centres, challenges stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shatters its traditional canon.
Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century
by Kate MollesonSound Within Sound presents an alternative history of 20th-century composers—nearly all of them women or composers of color—by a leading international music critic. Think of a composer right now. Was it a white man? Perhaps in old-fashioned clothing and wild hair? The music history we’re taught is one dominated by men, and even then, only a select few enter the zeitgeist. This conventional history perpetuates the myth of “great works” created by “genius” artists. Men who enjoyed institutional privilege during their lifetimes and have since been enshrined by an industry of publishers and record labels. But just because we haven’t heard of spectacular female composers doesn’t mean they weren’t creating music all the same. Profiling a dozen pioneering 20th-century composers—including American modernist Ruth Crawford Seeger (mother of Pete and Peggy Seeger), French electronic artist Éliane Radigue, Soviet visionary Galina Ustvolskaya, and Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou—acclaimed journalist and BBC broadcaster Kate Molleson reexamines the canon while bringing to life largely forgotten sonic revolutionaries whose dramatic lives and bursts of creativity played out against a backdrop of seismic geopolitical and social change. These composers, working at a remove from London, Paris, Vienna, and New York, were sidelined and ignored for systemic, structural reasons. This is a landmark alternative history of 20th-century composers; a radical, new, and truly global work of revisionist history. It is a campaigning book that challenges the status quo while introducing you to a world of groundbreaking music. Includes Black-and-White Photographs
Soundgarden: New Metal Crown
by Chris NicksonSoundgarden has hammered together the strands of so many different elements - seventies metal, hard rock, punk, goth-into an alloy that's stronger and harder than any of its constituents, and one which by its very nature stands a little bit beyond definition. Is it metal? Is it punk? Does it really matter? It is Soundgarden, playing their music. You get it or you don't. Soundgarden is, without doubt, the real thing. Where will they go now? They've taken metal to places it has never been before. They've melded it with punk in a manner so natural that the seams don't show. Badmotorfinger held the real glimmer of identity; Superunknown brought it into the light. Soundgarden isn't just the Next Big Metal Thing...they're the Next Big Thing.
Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture (Techniques of the Moving Image)
by Andrea J. KelleySoundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture is the first and only book to position what are called “Soundies” within the broader cultural and technological milieu of the 1940s. From 1940 to 1946, these musical films circulated in everyday venues, including bars, bowling alleys, train stations, hospitals, and even military bases. Viewers would pay a dime to watch them playing on the small screens of the Panoram jukebox. This book expands U.S. film history beyond both Hollywood and institutional film practices. Examining the dynamics between Soundies’ short musical films, the Panoram’s film-jukebox technology, their screening spaces and their popular discourse, Andrea J. Kelley provides an integrative approach to historic media exhibition. She situates the material conditions of Soundies’ screening sites alongside formal considerations of the films and their unique politics of representation to illuminate a formative moment in the history of the small screen.
Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)
by Shannon DrauckerCan the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.
Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science
by Peter PesicThe unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences, from ancient times to the present.Beginning in ancient Greece, Peter Pesic writes, music and sound significantly affected the development of the biomedical sciences. Physicians used rhythmical ratios to interpret the pulse, which inspired later efforts to record the pulse in musical notation. After 1700, biology and medicine took a &“sonic turn,&” viewing the body as a musical instrument, the rhythms and vibrations of which could guide therapeutic insight. In Sounding Bodies, Pesic traces the unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences. Pesic explains that music and sound provided the life sciences important tools for hearing, understanding, and influencing the rhythms of life. As medicine sought to go beyond the visible manifestations of illness, sound offered ways to access the hidden interiority of body and mind. Sonic interventions addressed the search for a new typology of mental illness, and practitioners used musical instruments to induce hypnotic states meant to cure both psychic and physical ailments. The study of bat echolocation led to the manifold clinical applications of ultrasound; such sonic devices as telephones and tuning forks were used to explore the functioning of the nerves. Sounding Bodies follows Pesic&’s Music and the Making of Modern Science and Polyphonic Minds to complete a trilogy on the influence of music on the sciences. Enhanced digital editions of Sounding Bodies offer playable music and sound examples.
Sounding Dissent: Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism (Music and Social Justice)
by Stephen MillarThe signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. As the public has overwhelmingly rejected a return to the violence of the Troubles (1968–1998), loyalist and republican groups have sought other outlets to continue their struggle. Music has long been used to celebrate cultural identity in the North of Ireland: from street parades to football chants, and from folk festivals to YouTube videos, music facilitates the continuation of pre-Agreement identity narratives in a “post-conflict” era. Sounding Dissent draws on original in-depth interviews with Irish republican musicians, contemporary audiences, and former paramilitaries, as well as diverse historical and archival material, including songbooks, prison records, and newspaper articles, to understand the history of political violence in Ireland. The book examines the hagiographic potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of republican martyrs, and demonstrates how musical performance and political song not only articulate experiences and memories of oppression and violence, but play a central role in the reproduction of conflict and exclusion in times of peace.
Sounding Emerging Media
by Claire FitchSounding Emerging Media details a practice-based approach to sonic art and electroacoustic composition, drawing on methodologies inspired by the production of electronic literature, and game development. Using the structural concepts identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the book is based around ideas related to labels such as Assemblage, Strata, Smooth and Striated Space, Temporal Space and, The Fold. The processes employed to undertake this research involved the creation of original texts, the development of frameworks for improvisation, the use of recordings within the process and implementation of techniques drawn from the practices of electroacoustic composition, and the use of ideas borrowed from electronic literature, publishing and game development. The results have helped to shape a compositional style which draws on these processes individually or collectively, drawing on practice often seen in game development, visual scores and composition using techniques found in electroacoustic music. Providing a journey through the landscape of emerging digital media, Sounding Emerging Media envisages a world where the composer/user/listener all become part of a continuum of collective artistry. This book is the ideal guide to the history and creation of audio for innovative digital media formats and represents crucial reading for both students and practitioners, from aspiring composers to experienced professionals.
Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 (New Material Histories of Music)
by Deirdre LoughridgeAn expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing “human” musicality from its “merely mechanical” simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the “human or machine” logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries. Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a “sound wave instrument” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers’ voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human.
Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas (Big Issues in Music)
by Jairo MorenoHow is Latin American music heard, by whom, and why? Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity. This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.
Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
by Royster Francesca T.Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.
Sounding Objects
by Carla ZecherOften abstracted by the aesthetic implications of music itself, musical instruments can be seen as physical signifiers apart from the music that they produce. In Sounding Objects, Carla Zecher studies the representation of musical instruments in French Renaissance poetry and art, arguing that the efficacy of these material objects as literary and pictorial images was derived from their physical characteristics and acoustic properties, as well as from their aesthetic product.Sounding Objects is concerned with ways in which musical culture provided poets with a rich, nuanced vocabulary for reflecting on their own art and its roles in courtly life, the civic arena, and salon society. Poets not only depicted the world of musical practice but also appropriated it, using musical instruments figuratively to establish their literary identities. Drawing on music treatises and archival sources as well as poems, paintings, and engravings, this unique study aims to enrich our understanding of the interplay of poetry, music, and art in this period, and highlights the importance of musical materiality to Renaissance culture. Disclaimer: Images removed at the request of the rights holder.