music and technology
From the telephone to MP3 players – the impact of audio technologies on how we communicate, listen and make music is pervasive. But the vast literature on the phonograph, radio, “talkie” and the electronic media suffers from either technological determinism, scientism or cultural pessimism. Focusing on a selection of key audio media, this course will interrogate the terms and practices of sonic mediation within their respective cultural settings. It will examine constructions of audio technologies, consider historical and local variants in the uses of such technologies, and assess the role of audio technology in the making of modern sensibilities both “here” and “there.”
The Social Construction of Technology
Philip Brey: Theorizing Modernity and Technology, Thomas J.Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg, eds., Modernity and Technology. Cambridge, Mass., 2004: MIT Press: 33-71
Simon Frith: Art Versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music, Media, Culture & Society 8/3, 1986:263-279
Music and Technology I
René T.A.Lysloff and Leslie C.Gay, Jr., eds.: Music and Technoculture. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003
Music and Technology II
Timothy Taylor: Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2002
Sound/Copy/Event/Story
Rick Altman: The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound, Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992:15-31
Thomas
Levin:
The
Acoustic
Dimension,
Screen
25/3,
1984
Thomas Porcello: “Tails out”: Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic Representation of Technology in Music-Making, Ethnomusicology 42/3, 1998: 485-510
Alan Williams: Is Sound Recording Like a Language? Yale French Studies 60, 1980:51-66
Sound Reproduction and Listening
Jonathan Sterne: The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003
Magic, Mimesis and Utopia - The (Really) Fabulous Phonograph
Erica Brady: A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. University Press of Mississippi, 1999
Michael Taussig: The Talking Machine; His Masters Voice, in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993: 193-235
Audio Cassettes and the Embodied Listener
Dorothea Elizabeth Schulz: Praise in times of disenchantment: Griots, radios, and the politics of communication in Mali. PhD YALE UNIVERSITY, 1996
Modernism, Technology and Ideology
Georgina Born: Rationalizing Culture : IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994
The Studio as Creative Space
Albin Zak: The Poetics of Rock. Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001
The Studio as Fetish
Louise Meintjes: The Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003
City/Machine/Self - The Walkman
Shuhei Hosakawa: The Walkman Effect, Popular Music 4, 1984: 165-80
Michael Bull: Sounding Out the City:Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2000
First World Technology, Third World Subjects
Paul D. Greene: Sound Engineering in a Tamil Village: Playing Audio Cassettes as Devotional Performance, Ethnomusicology 43/3, 1999:459-89
R.Anderson Sutton: Interpreting Electronic Sound Technology in the Contemporary Javanese Soundscape, Ethnomusicology 40/2, 1996:249-68
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