Art of Immersive Soundscapes

Art of Immersive Soundscapes
Author: Pauline Margaret Minevich
Publisher: Canadian Plains Research Center
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780889772588

What is an immersive soundscape? It can be as simple as a recording made in a forest: leaves crunching underfoot, birds chirping, a squirrel chattering. Or it can be as complex as a movie soundtrack, which involves music but also uses many other sounds--to set the mood for the action and to literally put the viewer in the picture. Sound art defies categorization, and artists using this medium describe their work in many different ways: as sound installations, audio art, radio art, and music. The Art of Immersive Soundscapes provides a fascinating tour of contemporary sound art practices that comprises scholarly essays, artists' statements, and a DVD with sonic and visual examples. Included are perspectives from soundscape composition and performance, site-specific sound installation, recording, and festival curation. The book and accompanying DVD will appeal to a broad audience interested in music, sound, installation art, the environment, digital culture, and media arts. Importantly, it recognizes the pioneering place of Canadian sound artists within this international field.

Moravian Soundscapes

Moravian Soundscapes
Author: Sarah Justina Eyerly
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253047757

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

The Great Animal Orchestra

The Great Animal Orchestra
Author: Bernie Krause
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2012-03-19
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0316192392

A "passionate amalgam of science and autobiography" that will leave you hearing -- and seeing -- nature as never before (New York Times Book Review). Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth. Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren't vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged. From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales -- whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours -- to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet's deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm. The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

Art of Sound

Art of Sound
Author: Andrew Knight-Hill
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2023-12-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000964787

Bringing together a diverse group of world leading professionals across Post-Production Film Sound and Electroacoustic Music, Art of Sound explores the creative principles that underpin how sonic practitioners act to compose, tell stories, make us feel, and communicate via sound. Revealing new understandings through analysis of interdisciplinary exchanges and interviews, this book investigates questions of aesthetics, perception, and interpretation, unveiling opportunities for a greater appreciation of the artistry in sound practice which underpins both experimental electronic music and the world’s leading film and television productions. It argues that we can better understand and appreciate the creative act if we regard it as a constantly unfolding process of inspiration, material action, and reflection. In contrast to traditional notions, which imagine outputs as developed to reflect a preconceived creative vision, our approach recognises that the output is always emerging as the practitioner flows with their materials in search of their solution, constantly negotiating the rich networks of potential. This enables us to better celebrate the reality of the creative process, de-centring technologies and universal rules, and potentially opening up the ways in which we think about sonic practices to embrace more diverse ideas and approaches. Art of Sound provides insight into the latest developments and approaches to sound and image practice for composers, filmmakers, directors, scholars, producers, sound designers, sound editors, sound mixers, and students who are interested in understanding the creative potential of sound.

Aural Experience and Soundscape Management

Aural Experience and Soundscape Management
Author: Diana Grgurić
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2024-03-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1040022081

Since technological progress is characterized by the dual effects, positive and negative, it is precisely by sustaining the balance between such binaries that ecologically responsible resource management is restored as a solution for excessive human impact on the environment. Sound and music became relevant from the perspective of management, within the meaning of controlling their negative effects on human beings and their environment as well as utilizing them for meeting human needs. This book integrates the fields of technology, humanities, and social sciences and defines the challenges of noise control from the perspective of acoustic ecology. It discusses the concept of acoustic ecology applied to evoke sound and music management and design solutions for well-being. It will be equally useful for students of electrical engineering, music, and economics; equally challenging to those with a particular prior knowledge and practice; and as much as comprehensive and stimulative for those who are barely embarking upon a new adventure.

Digital Sound Studies

Digital Sound Studies
Author: Mary Caton Lingold
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822371995

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

Colloquium

Colloquium
Author: Thomas Gardner
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1782798943

In 2012, Thomas Gardner and Salomé Voegelin hosted a colloquium, entitled "Music - Sound Art: Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures", at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This colloquium dealt with the current fervent debate concerning the relationship between sound art and music. This book proposes the opening of the colloquium to a wider readership through the publication of a decisive range of the material that defined the event.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art
Author: Jane Grant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 888
Release: 2021-09-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190274077

Sound art has long been resistant to its own definition. Emerging from a liminal space between movements of thought and practice in the twentieth century, sound art has often been described in terms of the things that it is understood to have left behind: a space between music, fine art, and performance. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art surveys the practices, politics, and emerging frameworks of thought that now define this previously amorphous area of study. Throughout the Handbook, artists and thinkers explore the uses of sound in contemporary arts practice. Imbued with global perspectives, chapters are organized in six overarching themes of Space, Time, Things, Fabric, Senses and Relationality. Each theme represents a key area of development in the visual arts and music during the second half of the twentieth century from which sound art emerged. By offering a set of thematic frameworks through which to understand these themes, this Handbook situates constellations of disparate thought and practice into recognized centers of activity.

Current Directions in Ecomusicology

Current Directions in Ecomusicology
Author: Aaron S. Allen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2015-09-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317619528

AWARD WINNER OF THE 2018 SOCIETY OF ETHNOMUSICLOGY ELLEN KOSKOFF PRIZE This volume is the first sustained examination of the complex perspectives that comprise ecomusicology—the study of the intersections of music/sound, culture/society, and nature/environment. Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. They bring their specialized training to bear on interdisciplinary topics, both individually and in collaboration. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume—contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more—engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. As with any healthy ecosystem, the field of ecomusicology is dynamic, but this edited collection provides a snapshot of it in a formative period. Each chapter is short, designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, and includes extensive bibliographies; some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http://www.ecomusicology.info/cde/. An introduction and interspersed editorial summaries help guide readers through four current directions—ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual—in the field of ecomusicology.

Negotiated Moments

Negotiated Moments
Author: Gillian Siddall
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2016-03-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822374498

The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodríguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, François Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong