Sounding Composition


Book Description

In Sounding Composition Steph Ceraso reimagines listening education to account for twenty-first century sonic practices and experiences. Sonic technologies such as audio editing platforms and music software allow students to control sound in ways that were not always possible for the average listener. While digital technologies have presented new opportunities for teaching listening in relation to composing, they also have resulted in a limited understanding of how sound works in the world at large. Ceraso offers an expansive approach to sonic pedagogy through the concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves developing an awareness of how sound shapes and is shaped by different contexts, material objects, and bodily, multisensory experiences. Through a mix of case studies and pedagogical materials, she demonstrates how multimodal listening enables students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in relation to composing digital media, and in their everyday lives.




The Queer Composition of America's Sound


Book Description

In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification—especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality—in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.




Sonic Art


Book Description

Written by an active composer, performer and educator, Sonic Art: An Introduction to Electroacoustic Music Composition provides a clear and informative introduction to the compositional techniques behind electroacoustic music. It brings together theory, aesthetics, context and practical applications to allow students to start thinking about sound creatively, and gives them the tools to compose meaningful sonic art works. In addition to explaining the techniques and philosophies of sonic art, the book examines over forty composers and their works, introducing the history and context of notable pieces, and includes chapters on how to present compositions professionally, in performance and online. The book is supported by an online software toolkit which enables readers to start creating their own compositions. Encouraging a ‘hands on’ approach to working with sound, Sonic Art is the perfect introduction for anyone interested in electroacoustic music and crafting art from sounds.




Remixing Composition


Book Description

Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy challenges the longheld notion that the study and practice of composition has historically focused on words alone. Palmeri revisits many of the classic texts of composition theory from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, closely examining how past compositionists responded to “new media.” He reveals that long before the rise of personal computers and the graphic web, compositionists employed analog multimedia technologies in the teaching of composition. Palmeri discovers these early scholars anticipated many of our current interests in composing with visual, audio, and video texts. Using the concept of the remix, Palmeri outlines practical pedagogical suggestions for how writing teachers can build upon this heritage with digital activities, assignments, and curricula that meet the needs of contemporary students. He details a pluralist vision of composition pedagogy that explains the ways that writing teachers can synthesize expressivist, cognitive, and social-epistemic approaches. Palmeri reveals an expansive history of now forgotten multimodal approaches to composing moving images and sounds and demonstrates how current compositionists can productively remix these past pedagogies to address the challenges and possibilities of the contemporary digital era. A strikingly original take on the recent history of composition, Remixing Composition is an important work for the future of writing instruction in a digital age.




Digital Sound Studies


Book Description

The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive. As they demonstrate, incorporating sound into scholarship is thus not only feasible but urgently necessary. Contributors. Myron M. Beasley, Regina N. Bradley, Steph Ceraso, Tanya Clement, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, W. F. Umi Hsu, Michael J. Kramer, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Richard Cullen Rath, Liana M. Silva, Jonathan Sterne, Jennifer Stoever, Jonathan W. Stone, Joanna Swafford, Aaron Trammell, Whitney Trettien




The Rest Is Noise


Book Description

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.




The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts sound examples and links to further resources. The collection is organized around six main themes: Sounding Art: The notion of sounding art, its relation to sound studies, and its evolution and possibilities. Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing about sound. Listening and Memory: Listening from different perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and technologically mediated listening. Acoustic Spaces, Identities and Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound. Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute methodologically and epistemologically to historiography. Sound Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way we make and access music has changed. With contributions from leading scholars and cutting-edge researchers, The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art is an essential resource for anyone studying the intersection of sound and art.




The Digital Musician


Book Description

The Digital Musician is a textbook for creative music technology and electronic music courses. It provides an overview of sound properties, acoustics, digital music, and sound design as a basis for understanding the compositional possibilities that new music technologies allow. Creative projects allow students to apply key concepts covered in each chapter. Topics covered include hardware hacking, live coding, interactive music, sound manipulation and transformation, software instruments, networked performance, as well as critical listening and analysis. Features Readers Guides outline the major topics in each chapter Project boxes for both individuals and groups throughout each chapter Annotated Listening Lists for each chapter, with accompanying playlists on the companion website Recommended Further Reading and Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter Case studies of actual composers, with contributed projects Companion website includes reading lists, links to audio and video, and slides for use in the classroom.




Sound Mapping the New Testament


Book Description

In the ancient world, writings were read aloud, heard, and remembered. In contrast, modern exegesis assumes a silent text. For Margaret Lee and Brandon Scott, the disjuncture between ancient and modern approaches to literature obscures the beauty and meaning in writings such as the New Testament. As the structure of an ancient Greek composition derives first from its sounds, and not from the meaning of its words, sound analysis, analysis of the signifier and its audible dimension, are crucial to interpretation. Sound Mapping the New Testament explores writing technology in the Greco-Roman world, and uses ancient Greek literary criticism for descriptions of grammar as a science of sound and literary composition as a woven fabric of speech. Based on these perspectives and a close analysis of writings from the four Gospels, Paul, and Q, Lee and Scott advance a theory of sound analysis that enables modern readers to hear the New Testament afresh. This second edition includes a new introduction which reviews a decade of sound mapping scholarship.




Sound Pictures


Book Description

The second book of two, Sound Pictures traces the story of George Martin and the Beatles' incredible artistic trajectory after reaching the creative heights of Rubber Soul. As the bandmates engage in brash experimentation both inside and outside of the studio, creating 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. 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. Eventually, though, all roads lead Martin back to the Beatles.