Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age critically analyzes a range of sounds on vocal and musical recordings, on the radio, in film, and in cartoons to show how sounds are used to ...persuade in subtle ways. Greg Goodale explains how and to what effect sounds can be "read" like an aural text, demonstrating this method by examining important audio cues such as dialect, pausing, and accent in presidential recordings at the turn of the twentieth century. Goodale also shows how clocks, locomotives, and machinery are utilized in film and literature to represent frustration and anxiety about modernity, and how race and other forms of identity came to be represented by sound during the interwar period. In highlighting common sounds of industry and war in popular media, Sonic Persuasion also demonstrates how programming producers and governmental agencies employed sound to evoke a sense of fear in listeners. Goodale provides important links to other senses, especially the visual, to give fuller meaning to interpretations of identity, culture, and history in sound.
Thi title tells the story of the iconic British facilities where many of the most important recordings of all time were made. It was written with the cooperation of the British APRS (Association of ...Professional Recording Services, headed by Sir George Martin) to document the history of the major British studios of the 1960s and 1970s and to help preserve their legacy. Each chapter focuses on a different studio (including Abbey Road, Olympic, and Trident), with complete descriptions of the studio's physical facilities and layout, along with listings of equipment and key personnel, as well as details about its best-known technical innovations and a discography of the major recordings done there.
Who produces sound and music? And in what spaces, localities and contexts? As the production of sound and music in the 21st Century converges with multimedia, these questions are critically addressed ...in this new edited collection by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound features 16 brand new articles by leading thinkers from the fields of music, audio engineering, anthropology and media. Innovative and timely, this collection represents scholars from around the world, revisiting established themes such as record production and the construction of genre with new perspectives, as well as exploring issues in cultural and virtual production.
Spoken word Smith, Jacob
2011., 20110108, 2011, 2011-02-07
eBook
From the 1940s to the 1970s, the phonograph industry experienced phenomenal growth, both in sales and in cultural influence. Along with hugely popular music recordings, spoken word LPs served a ...multitude of functions and assumed an important place in the American home. In this book, Jacob Smith surveys a diverse range of spoken word genres--including readings of classic works of literature and drama, comedy albums, children's records, home therapy kits, even erotica--to illuminate this often overlooked aspect of the postwar entertainment industry and American culture. A viable alternative to mainstream broadcasting, records gave their listeners control over what they could hear at home. Smith shows how the savvy industry used spoken word records to develop markets for children, African Americans, women, and others not well served by radio and television.
Chasing Sound Schmidt Horning, Susan
2013, 2013-12-15
eBook
In Chasing Sound, Susan Schmidt Horning traces the cultural and technological evolution of recording studios in the United States from the first practical devices to the modern multi-track studios of ...the analog era. Charting the technical development of studio equipment, the professionalization of recording engineers, and the growing collaboration between artists and technicians, she shows how the earliest efforts to capture the sound of live performances eventually resulted in a trend toward studio creations that extended beyond live shows, ultimately reversing the historic relationship between live and recorded sound.
A former performer herself, Schmidt Horning draws from a wealth of original oral interviews with major labels and independent recording engineers, producers, arrangers, and musicians, as well as memoirs, technical journals, popular accounts, and sound recordings. Recording engineers and producers, she finds, influenced technological and musical change as they sought to improve the sound of records. By investigating the complex relationship between sound engineering and popular music, she reveals the increasing reliance on technological intervention in the creation as well as in the reception of music. The recording studio, she argues, is at the center of musical culture in the twentieth century.
This book develops a sociological understanding of authorship and copyright, through a case study of bootlegging. Bootlegs are copies of recordings released without the permission of the rights ...holder. They hold a prominent position in the pantheon of popular music. Bootlegging constitutes the first academic treatment of the subject.
The colonial past through objects of sound
The Berlin Sound Archive ( Lautarchiv ) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the ...20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions.
With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge. The book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories.
Ebook available in Open Access.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
The music industry's ongoing battle against digital piracy is just the latest skirmish in a long conflict over who has the right to distribute music. Starting with music publishers' efforts to stamp ...out bootleg compilations of lyric sheets in 1929, Barry Kernfeld's Pop Song Piracy details nearly a century of disobedient music distribution from song sheets to MP3s. In the 1940s and '50s, Kernfeld reveals, song sheets were succeeded by fake books, unofficial volumes of melodies and lyrics for popular songs that were a key tool for musicians. Music publishers attempted to wipe out fake books, but after their efforts proved unsuccessful they published their own. Pop Song Piracy shows that this pattern of disobedience, prohibition, and assimilation recurred in each conflict over unauthorized music distribution, from European pirate radio stations to bootlegged live shows. Beneath this pattern, Kernfeld argues, there exists a complex give and take between distribution methods that merely copy existing songs (such as counterfeit CDs) and ones that transform songs into new products (such as file sharing). Ultimately, he contends, it was the music industry's persistent lagging behind in creating innovative products that led to the very piracy it sought to eliminate.
Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording ...technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.
The term 'record collecting' is shorthand for a variety of related practices. Foremost is the collection of sound recordings in various formats - although often with a marked preference for vinyl - ...by individuals, and it is this dimension of record collecting that is the focus of this book. Record collecting, and the public stereotypes associated with it, is frequently linked primarily with rock and pop music. Roy Shuker focuses on these broad styles, but also includes other genres and their collectors, notably jazz, blues, exotica and 'ethnic' music. Accordingly, the study examines the history of record collecting; profiles collectors and the collecting process; considers categories - especially music genres - and types of record collecting and outlines and discusses the infrastructure within which collecting operates. Shuker situates this discussion within the broader literature on collecting, along with issues of cultural consumption, social identity and 'the construction of self' in contemporary society. Record collecting is both fascinating in its own right, and provides insights into broader issues of nostalgia, consumption and material culture.
