Sound States


Book Description

By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to 'turn up the volume' on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life. The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist 'sonosphers' to Henri Chopin's electroacoustical audio-poames, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements--statements held only partially in check by meaning. The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.




Inner Sound


Book Description

In Inner Sound, author Jonathan Weinel traverses the influence of altered states of consciousness on audio-visual media, explaining how our subjective realities may change during states of dream, psychedelic experience, meditation, and trance.




History of the United States During Thomas Jefferson's Administrations (All 4 Volumes)


Book Description

The presidency of Thomas Jefferson began on March 4, 1801, when he was inaugurated as the third President of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1809. In domestic affairs Jefferson sought to put the principles of republicanism into action. In foreign affairs, the major developments were the acquisition of the gigantic Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, an embargo against trade with both Great Britain and France, and worsening relations with Britain as the United States tried to remain neutral in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars that engulfed Europe. Contents: Physical and Economical Conditions Popular Characteristics American Ideals The Inauguration Organization Legislation The Judiciary Debate Personalities The Spanish Court Toussaint Louverture Closure of the Mississippi Monroe's Mission Rupture of the Peace of Amiens The Louisiana Treaty Claim to West Florida Constitutional Difficulties The Louisiana Debate Louisiana Legislation Impeachments The Yazoo Claims The Trial of Justice Chase Quarrel with Yrujo Pinckney's Diplomacy Monroe and Talleyrand Cordiality with England Anthony Merry Jefferson's Enemies England and Tripoli Internal Improvement Monroe's Diplomacy Cabinet Vacillations The Florida Message The Two-Million Act John Randolph's Schism Madison's Enemies Domestic Affairs Burr's Schemes Escape Past Fort Massac Claiborne and Wilkinson Collapse of the Conspiracy The Berlin Decree Monroe's Treaty Rejection of Monroe's Treaty Burr's Trial The "Chesapeake" and "Leopard" Demands and Disavowals Perceval and Canning The Orders in Council No More Neutrals Insults and Popularity The Embargo The Mission of George Rose Measures of Defence The Rise of a British Party The Enforcement of Embargo The Cost of Embargo The Dos de Maio England's Reply to the Embargo Failure of Embargo Perplexity and Confusion Diplomacy and Conspiracy General Factiousness Repeal of Embargo Jefferson's Retirement




The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World


Book Description

"A lucid and passionate case for a more mindful way of listening to and engaging with musical, natural, and manmade sounds." —New York Times In this tour of the world’s most unexpected sounds, Trevor Cox—the “David Attenborough of the acoustic realm” (Observer)—discovers the world’s longest echo in a hidden oil cavern in Scotland, unlocks the secret of singing sand dunes in California, and alerts us to the aural gems that exist everywhere in between. Using the world’s most amazing acoustic phenomena to reveal how sound works in everyday life, The Sound Book inspires us to become better listeners in a world dominated by the visual and to open our ears to the glorious cacophony all around us.




Audio Culture, Revised Edition


Book Description

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. This new and expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers. Instead of focusing on some "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical. Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.




Presidents of the United States


Book Description

From George Washington to Barack Obama, Presidents of the United States covers the 43 men who have held the nation's highest office. This attractive book provides information about each U. S. president and audio clips of one or more defining quotation from each president. Presidents of the United States has a built-in control panel, with a numeric keypad and volume control. Each presidential quotation in the book has a numeric code. To hear the quotation, enter the code. Authentic presidential recordings were used, if available; in other cases, a voice actor recited the presidential quotation. The book presents more than 50 audio clips and 25 minutes total audio time.







Nonverbal Behavior and Communication


Book Description

First published in 1987. An attractive feature of nonverbal communication as a research area is that it has captured the interest of scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists with each discipline bringing to the area its peculiar theoretical and methodological perspectives and biases. Each of these disciplines also tend to have a favorite topic or problem area within the general domain of nonverbal communication. Along with the varying yet overlapping topical concerns that the different disciplines bring to the area of nonverbal communication are major differences in methodology. The sections into which the book is divided roughly organize the chapters in terms of their concerns with the bodily structures and zones that are involved in nonverbal behavior.




Federal Register


Book Description




Noise, Water, Meat


Book Description

An examination of the role of sound in twentieth-century arts. This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it—to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.