Kaleidophonic Modernity
Title | Kaleidophonic Modernity PDF eBook |
Author | Brett Brehm |
Publisher | Fordham Univ Press |
Pages | 207 |
Release | 2023-02-21 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1531501508 |
What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies. Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes. In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.
Transnationalizing Radio Research
Title | Transnationalizing Radio Research PDF eBook |
Author | Golo Föllmer |
Publisher | transcript Verlag |
Pages | 315 |
Release | 2018-09-30 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 3839439132 |
Transnationalizing Radio Research presents a theoretical and methodological guide for exploring radio's multiple »global ages«, from its earliest years through its recent digital transformations. It offers radio scholars theoretical tools and concrete case studies for moving beyond national research frames. It gives radio practitioners inspiration for production and archiving, and offers scholars from many disciplines new ways to incorporate radio's vital voices into work on transnational institutions, communities, histories and identities.
The Soundscape of Modernity
Title | The Soundscape of Modernity PDF eBook |
Author | Emily Thompson |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 518 |
Release | 2004-09-17 |
Genre | Architecture |
ISBN | 9780262701068 |
A vibrant history of acoustical technology and aural culture in early-twentieth-century America. In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era. Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston's Symphony Hall, New York's office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound—clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant—had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.
Matters of Gravity
Title | Matters of Gravity PDF eBook |
Author | Scott Bukatman |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 316 |
Release | 2003-07-21 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780822331193 |
The headlong rush, the rapid montage, the soaring superhero, the plunging roller coaster—Matters of Gravity focuses on the experience of technological spectacle in American popular culture over the past century. In these essays, leading media and cultural theorist Scott Bukatman reveals how popular culture tames the threats posed by technology and urban modernity by immersing people in delirious kinetic environments like those traversed by Plastic Man, Superman, and the careening astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Right Stuff. He argues that as advanced technologies have proliferated, popular culture has turned the attendant fear of instability into the thrill of topsy-turvydom, often by presenting images and experiences of weightless escape from controlled space. Considering theme parks, cyberspace, cinematic special effects, superhero comics, and musical films, Matters of Gravity highlights phenomena that make technology spectacular, permit unfettered flights of fantasy, and free us momentarily from the weight of gravity and history, of past and present. Bukatman delves into the dynamic ways pop culture imagines that apotheosis of modernity: the urban metropolis. He points to two genres, musical films and superhero comics, that turn the city into a unique site of transformative power. Leaping in single bounds from lively descriptions to sharp theoretical insights, Matters of Gravity is a deft, exhilarating celebration of the liberatory effects of popular culture.
A Word from Our Sponsor
Title | A Word from Our Sponsor PDF eBook |
Author | Cynthia B. Meyers |
Publisher | Fordham Univ Press |
Pages | 513 |
Release | 2013-12-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0823253767 |
During the “golden age” of radio, from roughly the late 1920s until the late 1940s, advertising agencies were arguably the most important sources of radio entertainment. Most nationally broadcast programs on network radio were created, produced, written, and/or managed by advertising agencies: for example, J. Walter Thompson produced “Kraft Music Hall” for Kraft; Benton & Bowles oversaw “Show Boat” for Maxwell House Coffee; and Young & Rubicam managed “Town Hall Tonight” with comedian Fred Allen for Bristol-Myers. Yet this fact has disappeared from popular memory and receives little attention from media scholars and historians. By repositioning the advertising industry as a central agent in the development of broadcasting, author Cynthia B. Meyers challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcasting history. Based largely on archival materials, A Word from Our Sponsor mines agency records from the J. Walter Thompson papers at Duke University, which include staff meeting transcriptions, memos, and account histories; agency records of BBDO, Benton & Bowles, Young & Rubicam, and N. W. Ayer; contemporaneous trade publications; and the voluminous correspondence between NBC and agency executives in the NBC Records at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Mediating between audiences’ desire for entertainment and advertisers’ desire for sales, admen combined “showmanship” with “salesmanship” to produce a uniquely American form of commercial culture. In recounting the history of this form, Meyers enriches and corrects our understanding not only of broadcasting history but also of advertising history, business history, and American cultural history from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Music, Sound and Space
Title | Music, Sound and Space PDF eBook |
Author | Georgina Born |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 375 |
Release | 2013-01-17 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 1107310555 |
Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.
Unmaking Sex
Title | Unmaking Sex PDF eBook |
Author | Anne E. Linton |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 265 |
Release | 2022-03-24 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1316511820 |
A landmark study in the history of sexuality which redefines thinking about sex and gender in nineteenth-century France and beyond.