Electronic Inspirations


Book Description

For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation.




The Creative Electronic Music Producer


Book Description

The Creative Electronic Music Producer examines the creative processes of electronic music production, from idea discovery and perception to the power of improvising, editing, effects processing, and sound design. Featuring case studies from across the globe on musical systems and workflows used in the production process, this book highlights how to pursue creative breakthroughs through exploration, trial and error tinkering, recombination, and transformation. The Creative Electronic Music Producer maps production's enchanting pathways in a way that will fascinate and inspire students of electronic music production, professionals already working in the industry, and hobbyists.




Teaching Electronic Music


Book Description

Teaching Electronic Music: Cultural, Creative, and Analytical Perspectives offers innovative and practical techniques for teaching electronic music in a wide range of classroom settings. Across a dozen essays, an array of contributors—including practitioners in musicology, art history, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance, and composition—reflect on the challenges of teaching electronic music, highlighting pedagogical strategies while addressing questions such as: What can instructors do to expand and diversify musical knowledge? Can the study of electronic music foster critical reflection on technology? What are the implications of a digital culture that allows so many to be producers of music? How can instructors engage students in creative experimentation with sound? Electronic music presents unique possibilities and challenges to instructors of music history courses, calling for careful attention to creative curricula, historiographies, repertoires, and practices. Teaching Electronic Music features practical models of instruction as well as paths for further inquiry, identifying untapped methodological directions with broad interest and wide applicability.




Push Turn Move


Book Description




Broadcasting Fidelity


Book Description

A landmark history of early radio in Germany and the quest for broadcast fidelity When we turn on a radio or stream a playlist, we can usually recognize the instrument we hear, whether it’s a cello, a guitar, or an operatic voice. Such fidelity was not always true of radio. Broadcasting Fidelity shows how the problem of broadcast fidelity pushed German scientists beyond the traditional bounds of their disciplines and led to the creation of one of the most important electronic instruments of the twentieth century. In the early days of radio, acoustical distortions made it hard for even the most discerning musical ears to differentiate instruments and voices. The physicists and engineers of interwar Germany, with the assistance of leading composers and musicians, tackled this daunting technical challenge. Research led to the invention in 1930 of the trautonium, an early electronic instrument capable of imitating the timbres of numerous acoustical instruments and generating novel sounds for many musical genres. Myles Jackson charts the broader political and artistic trajectories of this instrument, tracing how it was embraced by the Nazis and subsequently used to subvert Nazi aesthetics after the war and describing how Alfred Hitchcock commissioned a later version of the trautonium to provide the sounds of birds squawking and flapping their wings in his 1963 thriller The Birds. A splendid work of scholarship by an acclaimed historian of science, Broadcasting Fidelity reveals how the interplay of science, technology, politics, and culture gave rise to new aesthetic concepts, innovative musical genres, and the modern discipline of electroacoustics.




Handmade Electronic Music


Book Description

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Making Music


Book Description




I've Been Thinking . . .


Book Description

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[I've Been Thinking…] is beautiful...I felt your soul on these pages.” –Oprah Winfrey “If you are feeling stuck, lost, or you just need a pick-me-up, this is the book for you. Shriver’s wisdom will fill you up.” —Hoda Kotb, coanchor, The Today Show The ideal book for those seeking wisdom, guidance, encouragement, and inspiration on the road to a meaningful life. As a prominent woman juggling many roles, Maria Shriver knows just how surprising, unpredictable, and stressful everyday life can be. In this moving and powerful book, she shares inspiring quotes, prayers, and reflections designed to get readers thinking, get them feeling, get them laughing, and help them in their journey to what she calls The Open Field--a place of acceptance, purpose, and passion--a place of joy. I've Been Thinking . . . is ideal for anyone at any point in her life. Whether you feel like you've got it all together or like it's all falling apart--whether you're taking stock of your life or simply looking to recharge, this is the book you will turn to again and again. Spend the weekend reading it cover to cover, or keep it on your nightstand to flip to the chapter you need most. Like talking with a close friend, it's the perfect daily companion—an exceptional gift for someone looking to move forward in life with hope and grace.




Avant-Garde on Record


Book Description

An innovative contribution to music history, cultural studies, and sound studies, Avant-garde on Record revisits post-war composers and their technologically oriented brand of musical modernism. It describes how a broad range of figures (including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Claire Schapira, Anthony Braxton and Gunther Schuller) engaged with avant-garde aesthetics while responding to a rapidly changing, technologically fuelled, spatialized audio culture. Jonathan Goldman focuses on how contemporary listeners understood these composers' works in the golden age of LPs and explores how this reception was mediated through consumer-oriented sound technology that formed a prism through which listeners processed the 'music of their time'. His account reveals unexpected aspects of twentieth-century audio culture: from sonic ping-pong to son et lumière shows, from Venetian choral music by Stravinsky to the soundscape of Niagara Falls, from a Buddhist Cantata to an LP box set cast as a parlour game.




Presentation Zen


Book Description

FOREWORD BY GUY KAWASAKI Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the Net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.