Sound Object Lessons

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 793-829 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Abbate

Two brief film sequences, in which paper blowing down a street (The Informer, 1935) and a candle passed along a table (The Old Dark House, 1931) make sounds. Next to them lies an antique microphone. This article charts the genealogies, cultural resonances, and interactions of these sound objects, drawing on the history of sound and acoustic technologies, film music aesthetics, and music philosophy. The sound objects give expression to fables about hearing in the machine age (1870–1930), and they disenthrall the inaudible: a sign of modernity. They provoke us to consider technological artifacts not as embodying empirical truths, but as mischief-makers, fabulists, or liars; and to confront technological determinism's sway in fields such as sound studies and music and science, which has given rise to intellectual talismans that sidestep the complexities in interactions between humans, instruments, and technologies. To underline this dilemma I make a heuristic separation between imaginarium, sensorium, and reshaped hand. This separation contextualizes a return to the film sequences and their historical precedents, with an emphasis on their patrimony from sound-engineer improvisation, and as aesthetic negotiations with the microphone itself. The carbon microphone, invented in 1878, had delivered a shock to machine age imaginations; its history is largely untold, and is sketched here to suggest that a fuller history centered on microphonics would lie athwart conventional scholarly accounts of sound technologies, listening, and hearing ca. 1830–1930. The sound objects, finally, give voice to a vernacular philosophy of music's efficacy. They merit an ethical metaphysics, where metaphysical language, ironically, asks us to be attentive to mundane objects that have been disdained and overlooked.

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.


Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline Avila

Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity During Mexico’s Época de Oro is the first book-length study concerning the function of music in the prominent genres structured by the Mexican film industry. Integrating primary source material with film music studies, sound studies, and Mexican film and cultural history, this project closely examines examples from five significant film genres that developed during the 1930s through 1950s. These genres include the prostitute melodrama, the fictional indigenista film (films on indigenous themes or topics), the cine de añoranza porfiriana (films of Porfirian nostalgia), the revolutionary melodrama, and the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy). The musics in these films helped create and accentuate the tropes and archetypes considered central to Mexican cultural nationalism. Distinct in narrative and structure, each genre exploits specific, at times contradictory, aspects of Mexicanidad—the cultural identity of the Mexican people—and, as such, employs different musics to concretize those constructions. Throughout this turbulent period, these tropes and archetypes mirrored changing perceptions of Mexicanidad manufactured by the state and popular and transnational culture. Several social and political agencies were heavily invested in creating a unified national identity to merge the previously fragmented populace owing to the Mexican Revolution (1910–ca.1920). The commercial medium of film became an important tool in acquainting a diverse urban audience with the nuances of national identity, and music played an essential and persuasive role in the process. In this heterogeneous environment, cinema and its music continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity.


This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.


Author(s):  
David Neumeyer

This chapterpresents an overview of the coverage of this volume, which is about film music studies. It chronicles the development of film music studies as a discipline and suggests that its rise is associated with the commodity history of feature films. It describes the evolution of the application of music in motion pictures, from the silent films era to the present time. This chapteralso provides an outline of the chapters in the volume.


2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-374
Author(s):  
David Kennerley

AbstractMusic has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by evaluating different approaches that historians have taken to music, summarizes the important shifts in method that have recently taken place, and advocates for a performance-centered, contextualized framework that is attentive to the distinctive features of music as a medium. The second half examines avenues for future research into the historical connections between music and politics, focusing on four thematic areas—the body, emotions, space, and memory—and closes with some overarching reflections on music's use as a tool of power, as well as a challenge to it. Although for reasons of cohesion, this short article focuses primarily on scholarship on Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its discussion of theory and methods is intended to be applicable to the study of music and political culture across a broad range of periods and geographies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLARA HUNTER LATHAM

The rapid industrialisation and electrification that characterises the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the revolutionary and irreversible technologisation of sound. The ability to send sound great distances, through time and space, amplified the instability of sonic presence both inside and outside the body. Sound reproduction technologies such as gramophone and radio emphasise the questionable materiality of sound. Scholarship in the emerging field of sound studies has tended to focus on sound technologies that emerge in this period, promoting the axiom that the ear epitomises modern sensibility. Even before technological developments revolutionised sound, discourses surrounding the ear anticipated the collapse of scientific certainty that marks the modern age. Developments in sound technology can mask the severing of scientific measurement from musical aesthetics that coincided with the age of recording. If the study of sound in modernity has tended to focus on technological changes and bracket aesthetic questions, it is perhaps because the relationships among the science, technology and aesthetics of sound have not yet been adequately parsed.


Author(s):  
Piotr Fereński

Город как одно из важнейших явлений современного глобализированного мира является предметом исследования различных научных дисциплин. Это важный феномен для изучения истории цивилизации, процессов урбанизации, развития архитектуры, взаимоотношений между пространственным планированием и религиозными и политическими идеями, для исследования социальных и экономических изменений, городского образа жизни, истории искусства, а также для критики современного искусства. Элементарный анализ города присутствует также в области литературоведения, исследований звука и перформанса, психологии (восприятие пространства и его свойств), педагогики, политологии (с интересом к теме прямой демократии или же городских движений). Вопросы оптимизации моделей функционирования города важны для департаментов, ориентированных на транспорт и инфраструктуру (водоснабжение, газ и т. д.), а также подземное строительство (автостоянки, гаражи, тоннели, метро). В проектировании «умного города» участвуют и информатика, занимающаяся процессом создания новых коммуникационных технологий, и факультеты биологии или охраны окружающей среды, которые ведут исследовательскую и дидактическую деятельность в области «прикладной экологии» – отношений, возникающих между средой, непосредственно окружающей человека, и природой. Сегодня технологические инновации и творческая сила культуры являются ключом к развитию города. Однако что это значит для представителей гуманитарных наук? Какую пользу они могут принести в этой области? Городское пространство может быть показано ими как неоднородное место, полное постоянной напряжённости, столкновений, круговорота значений, ценностей, представлений, а также как область значительных социальных экспериментов. Я воспринимаю человеческие практики и человеческое творчество как то, что постоянно подвергается трансформации и постоянно требует новых прочтений. В своих поисках я часто выхожу за стены Академии и пытаюсь ощутить характер города, ощутить его пространство всеми своими чувствами. Я непосредственно наблюдаю образ жизни жителей, их повседневные практики. Я слушаю, что они говорят, и читаю, что они выражают на стенах домов. Это своеобразное блуждание по городу имеет целью запечатлеть то, что видно, а также то, что остаётся для нас на первый взгляд недоступным. Это собрание заметок, попытка визуальной и аудиозаписи окружающего мира, которые я затем пытаюсь структурировать и интерпретировать. Однако нам, академикам, нужно как экспертам «выходить» в город и по-другому – мы должны выступать в общественных дебатах и влиять на решения различных муниципальных учреждений, оказывать влияние на местную политику. Такова и дискуссия о роли университета в формировании городского пространства и жизни в городе.The city as one of the most important phenomena of the modern globalized world is the subject of investigations of various scientific disciplines. It is important phenomena for studies on the history of civilization, on urbanization processes, on the development of architecture, on the relationships between spatial planning and religious and political ideas, for studies on social and economic changes, for studies on urban ways of life, studies on the history of art, as well as critique of contemporary art. There are also elementary analyzes of a city in the field of literary studies, sound studies, performance studies, psychology (the perception of space and its properties), pedagogy, political science (interested in direct democracy or even urban movements). The issues of optimization of models of the city’s functioning are important for departments oriented on transport and infrastructure (water, gas etc.), as well as underground construction (car parks, garages, tunnels, metro). Informatics dealing with the process of creation of new communication technologies is involved in the design of “smart city”. The faculties of biology or environmental protection conduct research and didactic activities in the field of “applied ecology” – relations that occurring between the human environment and nature. Today technological innovation and creative power of culture are the key to the development of the city. However, what does it mean for the representatives of humanities? What can they bring to it? The city space then appears as a heterogeneous place, full of constant tensions, collisions, circulation of meanings, values, representations, as well as the field of great social experiments. I perceive the human practices and creations as something that is a subject to constant transformation and that constantly requires new readings. In my search, I often go beyond the walls of the academy and try to sense the character of the city and experience its space with all my senses. I keenly observe the ways of life of the inhabitants, their daily practices. I listen to what they say and read what they manifest on the walls of buildings. This peculiar wandering around the city is aimed at capturing what is visible, but also at reaching what remains inaccessible to us at first glance. It is a collection of notes, it is an attempt at visual and audio recording of the surrounding world, which I then try to structure and interpret. However, as experts, we academics need to “go out” to the city also in a different way – we must take the floor in public debates and have an influence on the decisions of various municipal institutions, have an impact on local politics. There is a discussion about the role of the university in shaping urban space and life in the city.


Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.


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