(Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and ‘the New Musicality’

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-124
Author(s):  
Matilde Nardelli
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Luciano Berio ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Noisy Images ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musique Concrete

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.

SOUND, MEANING AND MUSIC-DRAMA IN LACHENMANN'S DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN SCHWEFELHÖLZERN

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Laurence Osborn
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Cultural Baggage

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.

scholarly journals Progressive Social Movements and the Internet

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Public Sphere

Because of the field’s foundational concerns with both social power and media, communication scholars have long been at the center of scholarly thought at the intersection of social change and technology. Early critical scholarship in communication named media technologies as central in the creation and maintenance of dominant political ideologies and as a balm against dissent among the masses. This work detailed the marginalization of groups who faced restricted access to mass media creation and exclusion from representational discourse and images, alongside the connections of mass media institutions to political and cultural elites. Yet scholars also highlighted the ways collectives use media technologies for resistance inside their communities and as interventions in the public sphere. Following the advent of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, and the granting of public access to the Internet in 1991, communication scholars faced a medium that seemed to buck the one-way and gatekeeping norms of others. There was much optimism about the democratic potentials of this new technology. With the integration of Internet technology into everyday life, and its central role in shaping politics and culture in the 21st century, scholars face new questions about its role in dissent and collective efforts for social change. The Internet requires us to reconsider definitions of the public sphere and civil society, document the potentials and limitations of access to and creation of resistant and revolutionary media, and observe and predict the rapidly changing infrastructures and corresponding uses of technology—including the temporality of online messaging alongside the increasingly transnational reach of social movement organizing. Optimism remains, but it has been tempered by the realities of the Internet’s limitations as an activist tool and warnings of the Internet-enabled evolution of state suppression and surveillance of social movements. Across the body of critical work on these topics particular characteristics of the Internet, including its rapidly evolving infrastructures and individualized nature, have led scholars to explore new conceptualizations of collective action and power in a digital media landscape.

scholarly journals Media economically oriented tecnologies in mass media activity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Nikolaevna Kasperovich-Rynkevich
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Effective Mass ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Media ◽  
Industry Trends

This article explores cost-effective mass media technologies. The experience of the use of paid access to the media content of Belarus was studied, the author also made the forecast on its future functioning. The paper provides global media industry trends and focuses on the use of messagers to promote content and increase the target audience of mass media. The research used the methods of content analysis and a written survey. During the study the author revealed that the media economically oriented technologies help to make a profit through distribution of content and formation of a loyal mass media audience.

Epilogue

Dying City ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Tochterman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
Urban Crisis ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The 1960S

Assessing the landscape since the 1960s in the pages of Dissent, Marshall Berman noted that “things that happen in New York are beamed instantly all over America, indeed, the world, thanks to all the mass media that are located here. Facts become symbols instantly—often long before they are understood.” During the urban crisis, “New York came to symbolize ‘urban violence.’” These words appeared in the Fall 1987 issue, “In Search of New York,” after ten years of postcrisis restructuring under Mayor Edward Koch. ...

Electronic Music

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Musique Concrete

With the end of World War II came the rebirth of European radio. Government stations in both France and Germany established experimental studios for research, from which arose a new kind of music, “electronic music.” The station in France, Office de Radiodiffusion Télevision Française (ORTF), was directed by the engineer/composer Pierre Schaeffer and his partner, Pierre Henry, who called their musical creations musique concrète. In Germany the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio produced music through the process of “synthesis.” This chapter will explain the difference between the two approaches used to create electronic music with examples from the percussion solo and ensemble repertoire. Early experiments using wire recorders, test records, and tape recorders by composers Halim El-Dabh, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse precede the major electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mario Davidovsky, and the American composer Stephen Everett, whose use of computers in “real time” brings the reader into the next century.

Readymades

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Child
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jasper Johns ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Bicycle Wheel

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.

Beyond Media ‘Platforms’? Talkback, Radio, Technolgy and Audience

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Gould
Keyword(s):  
Audience Participation ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Commercial Radio ◽  
Open Line ◽  
Listener Participation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radio Programs ◽  
And Function

Technology has had an important influence on the constitution and participation of the commercial metropolitan radio audience. The introduction of ‘open-line’ radio from the 1960s was heralded as a novelty for audience participation in radio programming, but was hindered by technical impediments to the quality of telephone and radio recording technologies. In the 1990s, the advent of mobile telephony liberated talkback listeners from their anchoring in the domestic sphere. This article examines how successive media technologies have influenced the experience of commercial radio audiences from the 1960s through to the present. Acknowledging the increasing convergence between traditional media platforms and content, it considers whether newer technologies such as the internet are fundamentally altering the shape and function of listener participation in commercial metropolitan radio programs.

Moral Panics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chas Critcher
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Street Crime ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Culture Of Fear ◽  
Youth Subcultures

The concept of moral panic was first developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, principally by Stan Cohen, initially for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to youth subcultures as a social problem. Cohen provided a “processual” model of how any new social problem would develop: who would promote it and why, whose support they would need for their definition to take hold, and the often-crucial role played by the mass media and institutions of social control. In the early 1990s, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda produced an “attributional” model that placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes. The two models have subsequently been applied to a range of putative social problems which now can be recognized as falling into five principal clusters: street crime, drug and alcohol consumption, immigration, child abuse (including pedophilia), and media technologies. Most studies have been conducted in Anglophone and European countries, but gradually, the concept is increasing its geographical reach. As a consequence, we now know a good deal about how and why social problems come to be constructed as moral panics in democratic societies. This approach has nevertheless been criticized for its casual use of language, denial of agency to those promoting and supporting moral panics, and an oversimplified and outdated view of mass media, among other things. As proponents and opponents of moral panic analysis continue to debate the essentials, the theoretical context has shifted dramatically. Moral panic has an uncertain relationship to many recent developments in sociological and criminological thought. It threatens to be overwhelmed or sidelined by new insights from theories of moral regulation or risk, conceptualizations of the culture of fear, or the social psychology of collective emotion. Yet as an interdisciplinary project, it continues, despite its many flaws, to demand sustained attention from analysts of social problem construction.

The Personalization of Politics

2012 ◽  
Vol 644 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Lance Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Transnational Organizations ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Personal Action ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Personalization Of Politics

This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.

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