Robert Adlington (ed.): Sound Commitments. Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (2009)

The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era’s social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and “the Sixties” across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory “events,” performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the “Third World,” delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians’ response to the decade’s defining cultural shifts.

Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.

The book
* Explores the rich and complex encounter between avant-garde music and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
* Draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period
* Explores the relevance of avant-garde music to implementing social change

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2009
ISBN 019533664X, 9780195336641
Length 292 pages

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Trevor Pinch, Frank Trocco: Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2004)

Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new–an extraordinary rarity in musical culture–it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be–how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion–is the story told for the first time in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.

The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used–from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson–recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.

Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674016173, 9780674016170
Length 368 pages

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Steve Goodman: Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009)

Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza strip, and high frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.

Most theoretical discussions of sound and music cultures in relationship to power, Goodman argues, have a missing dimension: the politics of frequency. Goodman supplies this by drawing a speculative diagram of sonic forces, investigating the deployment of sound systems in the modulation of affect. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.

Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

Publisher    MIT Press, 2009
ISBN    0262013479, 9780262013475
Length    240 pages

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Roads, Pope, Piccialli, De Poli (eds.): Musical Signal Processing (1997)

Compiled by an international array of musical and technical specialists, this book deals with some of the most important topics in modern musical signal processing. Beginning with basic concepts, and leading to advanced applications, it covers such essential areas as sound synthesis (including detailed studies of physical modelling and granular synthesis) ,control signal synthesis, sound transformation (including convolution), analysis/resynthesis (phase vocodor, wavelets, analysis by chaotic functions), object-oriented and artificial intelligence representations, musical interfaces and the integration of signal processing techniques in concert performance.

Editors Curtis Roads, Stephen Travis Pope, Aldo Piccialli, Giovanni De Poli
Series Studies on New Music Research
Publisher Swets & Zeitlinger, 1997
ISBN 9026514824, 9789026514821
Length 477 pages

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Curtis Roads: Microsound (2004)

Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds.

Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections.

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262681544, 9780262681544
Length 409 pages

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Simon Emmerson (ed.): Music, Electronic Media, and Culture (2000)

Technology revolutionised the ways that music was produced in the twentieth century. As that century drew to a close and a new century begins a new revolution in roles is underway. The separate categories of composer, performer, distributor and listener are being challenged, while the sounds of the world itself become available for musical use. All kinds of sounds are now brought into the remit of composition, enabling the music of others to be sampled (or plundered), including that of unwitting musicians from non-western cultures. This sound world may appear contradictory – stimulating and invigorating as well as exploitative and destructive. This book addresses some of the issues now posed by the brave new world of music produced with technology.

Contents: Introduction, Simon Emmerson; Part One: Listening and interpreting: Through and around the acousmatic: the interpretation of electroacoustic sounds, Luke Windsor; Simulation and reality: the new sonic objects, Ambrose Field; Beyond the acousmatic: hybrid tendencies in electroacoustic music, Simon Waters; Part Two: Cultural noise: Plunderphonics, Chris Cutler; Crossing cultural boundaries through technology?, Simon Emmerson; Cacophony, Robert Worby; Part Three: New places, spaces and narratives: Art on air: a proile of new radio art, Kersten Glandien; ‘Losing touch’? the human performer and electronics, Simon Emmerson; Stepping outside for a moment: narrative space in two works for sound alone, Katharine Norman; Index.

Publisher Ashgate, 2000
ISBN 0754601099, 9780754601098
Length 252 pages

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Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974/1999)

Michael Nyman’s book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing which developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the post-war modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4’ 33’’ consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman’s book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass.

Second edition
Foreword by Brian Eno
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2002
ISBN 0521653835, 9780521653831
Length 196 pages

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Leigh Landy: What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard (1991)

“What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music?” is based on the premise that contemporary music is suffering from a distinct lack of attention. It inspects and evaluates what is happening to musical experimentation, where things might have gone wrong and what can be done to resolve the problem. Intended as a supplement to surveys of music of the last forty years, it discusses not only the problems of musical content, but also problems of an extra-musical nature. Today’s education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the ‘musical community’ in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.

Publisher Routledge, 1991
ISBN 3718651688, 9783718651689
Length 308 pages

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Leigh Landy: Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (2007)

The art of sound organization, also known as electroacoustic music, uses sounds not available to traditional music making, including pre-recorded, synthesized, and processed sounds. The body of work of such sound-based music (which includes electroacoustic art music, turntable composition, computer games, and acoustic and digital sound installations) has developed more rapidly than its musicology. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization proposes the first general foundational framework for the study of the art of sound organization, defining terms, discussing relevant forms of music, categorizing works, and setting sound-based music in interdisciplinary contexts.

Leigh Landy’s goal in this book is not only to create a theoretical framework but also to make sound-based music more accessible—to give a listener what he terms “something to hold on to,” for example, by connecting elements in a work to everyday experience. Landy considers the difficulties of categorizing works and discusses such types of works as sonic art and electroacoustic music, pointing out where they overlap and how they are distinctive. He proposes a “sound-based music paradigm” that transcends such traditional categories as art and pop music. Landy defines patterns that suggest a general framework and places the study of sound-based music in interdisciplinary contexts, from acoustics to semiotics, proposing a holistic research approach that considers the interconnectedness of a given work’s history, theory, technological aspects, and social impact.

The author’s ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk), the architecture of which parallels this book’s structure, offers updated bibliographic resource abstracts and related information.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262122928, 9780262122924
Length 303 pages

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David Toop: Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (1995/2001)

Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Lee Perry, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Brian Wilson are interviewed in this extraordinary work of sonic history that travels from the rainforests of amazonas to virtual Las Vegas, from David Lynch’s dream house, high in the Hollywood hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo.

Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris Exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. It goes on to comprehensively map a whole century of ambient music and its legacy.

Publisher Serpent’s Tail, 1995
ISBN 185242382X, 9781852423827
Length 306 pages

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Trevor Wishart: On Sonic Art (1985/1996)

In this newly revised book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film, sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.

a new and revised edition edited by Simon Emmerson
Edition 2, illustrated, revised
Publisher Routledge, 1996
ISBN 371865847X, 9783718658473
Length 357 pages

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Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 9-14 (1999-2004)

LMJ 9: “Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity and Technology in Music” (1999)
Contributors include: Nicolas Collins, Krystyna Bobrowski, Sergi Jordá. William Duckworth, Mark Trayle, Chris Brown, Justin Bennett, Lowell Cross, Daniel Goode, Fred Ho, Rajmil Fischman, David Dunn, René van Peer, William Osborne, Frederic Rzewski, David Cope, Roger Alsop, Ann Warde, Dante Tanzi, Greg Schiemer, Suguru Goto, Peter Manning, David Ryan, Sasan Rahmatian, John Bischoff, Guy van Belle. Plus notes by CD Contributors. Includes CD: “Power and Responsibility: Converted to Streaming Between Machines,” curated by Guy van Belle.

LMJ 10: “Southern Cones: Music out of Africa and South America” (2000)
Contributors include: Coriún Aharonián, Lucio Edilberto Cuellar Camargo, Carlos Palombini, Daniel Velasco, O’dyke Nzewi, George Lewis, Lukas Ligeti, Artemis Moroni, Jônatas Manzolli, Fernando Von Zuben and Ricardo Gudwin, Damián Keller, Neil McLachlan. Plus notes by CD Contributors. Includes CD: “Southern Cones: Music out of Africa and South America,” curated by Jürgen Bräuninger.

LMJ 11: “Not Necessarily ‘English Music’: Britain’s Second ‘Golden Age’” (2001)
After the first installment of Cool Britannia beguiled the 1960s with its peculiar conflation of Pop, Art, Fashion and Politics, musical experimentation flourished in the U.K. Styles of improvisation, minimalism, electronic music, performance art, political music and “amateur” music grew out of British art schools, universities and urban villages; styles neither as self-important as those of Europe nor as blithely technocratic as those of North America — a peculiarly “English Music” (and Scottish and Welsh). Includes Two-CD Set: “Not Necessarily ‘English Music,’” curated by David Toop.

LMJ 12: “Pleasure” (2002)
From its naughty lyric content to the pounding physicality of its sound, Pop music is unabashedly driven by the pleasure principle. “Serious” music, however, is usually perceived as more refined, genteel, or to put it another way, repressed. And the avant-garde has traditionally found itself in the peculiar position of accompanying bohemian, hedonistic lifestyles with defiantly itchy and uncomfortable music. But are pleasure and thoughtful invention necessarily at odds? Can there be no “bump and mind”? … LMJ 12 includes articles and personal reflections on the role of pleasure in all genres of music. Includes CD: “From Gdansk till Dawn: Contemporary Experimental Music from Eastern Europe,” curated by Christian Scheib and Susanna Niedermayr.

LMJ 13: “Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music” (2003)
Sound is encoded in grooves on vinyl, particles on tape and pits in plastic; it travels as acoustic pressure, electromagnetic waves and pulses of light. The rise of the DJ in the last two decades has signaled the arrival of the medium as the instrument — the crowning achievement of a generation for whom tapping the remote control is as instinctive as tapping two sticks together. Turntables, CD players, radios, tape recorders (and their digital emulations) are played, not merely heard; scratching, groove noise, CD glitches, tape hiss and radio interference are the sound of music, not sound effects. John Cage’s 1960 “Cartridge Music” has yet to enter the charts, but its sounds are growing more familiar. In LMJ13 authors contribute their thoughts on the role of recording and/or transmission in the creation, performance and distribution of music: Includes CD: “Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Recording, Transmission and Music,” curated by Philip Sherburne.

LMJ 14: “Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor” (2004)
Inspired by David Tudor and others, the experimental music community in the 1970s adopted a new working method based on seat-of-the-pants electronic engineering. The circuit — whether homemade, self-hacked or store-bought but scrutinized to death — became the score. A generation later, aspects of the Tudor aesthetic have spread well beyond the avant-garde: hip-hop, house and other forms of dance music and electronica share a similar obsession with the quirks intrinsic to specific pieces of audio gear. In this special volume of Leonardo Music Journal, authors consider all aspects of the work of David Tudor, the influence of Tudor’s ideas on their own work and/or the role of technological idiosyncrasies in their composition, performance or production. Includes CD: “David Tudor: Live Electronic Music,” curated by Ron Kuivila.

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Evan Selinger (ed.): Postphenomenology. A Critical Companion to Ihde (2006)

Postphenomenology is the first book devoted exclusively to the interpretation and advancement of prominent phenomenologist Don Ihde’s landmark contributions to history, philosophy, sociology, science, sound studies, and technology studies. Ihde has made a direct and lasting impact on the study of technological experience across the disciplines and acquired an international following of diverse scholars along the way, many of whom contribute to Postphenomenology, including Albert Borgmann, who characterizes Ihde as being “among the most interesting and provocative contemporary American philosophers.” The contributors situate, assess, and apply Ihde’s philosophy with respect to the primary themes that his oeuvre emphasizes. They not only clarify Ihde’s work, but also make significant contributions to the philosophy of technology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of science. A comprehensive response from Ihde concludes the volume.

Publisher SUNY Press, 2006
ISBN 0791467872, 9780791467879
Length 307 pages

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Allen Strange: Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls (1973)

The bible for analogue freaks and sounddesigners. Allan Strange’s book is perhaps the definitive text on modular synthesis methods, written from a standpoint that’s musically understandable, as opposed to requiring a part-background in electronic engineering to understand. Useful both as a textbook and a reference document, the book also contains numerous illustrations and diagrams of modules by Moog, ARP, Buchla et al.

Publisher W. C. Brown Co, 1973
ISBN 069703612X, 9780697036124
Length 160 pages

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Peter Manning: Electronic and computer music (2004)

This updated and expanded third edition of Peter Manning’s classic text, Electronic and Computer Music, deals with the development of the medium from its birth to the 21st century. The first section of the book, which remains essentially unchanged in this edition, covers electroacoustic music from its beginning at the turn of the century to 1945, the development of post-1945 ‘classical’ studios, development of voltage-controlled technology, and its commercial exploitation in tape works, live electronic music, and the early use of electronics in rock and pop music. Section two, Computer Music, is heavily revised and significantly expanded and treats the digital revolution from the early experiments during the late 1950s and early 1960s to the advanced systems of today. Emphasizing the functional characteristics of emerging digital technologies and their influence on the creative development of the medium, Manning covers key developments in both commercial and the non-commercial sectors.

Published by Oxford University Press US, 2004
ISBN 0195144848, 9780195144840
474 pages

Key terms:
empreints DIGITALes, electronic music, IRCAM, MIDI, musique concrete, Wergo, CSOUND, timbre, personal computer, MUSICn, computer music, digital-to-analog converter, Apple Macintosh, music workstation, Synclavier, Yamaha, analog synthesizer, ring modulator, Synket, CCRMA

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