The life and work of Maryanne Amacher are as vast as they are as yet unknown. Situated at the very onset of serious study of her papers, Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz offer a heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the bandwidth of the still unprocessed contents of the Amacher archive.0From personal notes and letters to program notes, manifesti, and unrealized project proposals, the documents are framed by longer interviews with Amacher that discuss corresponding periods of her life. The book's otherwise chronological organization leads readers carefully into Amacher's transforming musical thought, but the book also works strenuously against the definitive completism often associated with a ?collected writings.? Rather, Dietz and Cimini redouble the Archive's unprocessed status as the book's ethical mode of organization. This book is an invitation to an ongoing process that?because ongoing?must be encountered as provisional, promissory and open-ended. The book assembles staggeringly rich primary material and at the same time asks what it means to assemble those materials while the ground is still very much shifting under the question ?who was Maryanne Amacher?? Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be be of tremendous interest to theorists and practitioners in media and communications, urban design, contemporary art history, music studies, sound studies, film, radio, art criticism and performance studies?in short, the burgeoning configuration of disciplines that we might call an ?intermedial humanities.'

"We haven't even made it to breakfast!" Composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) often used this phrase to shorthand her critical and partial approach to knowledge production across the vast artistic, technical and scientific discourses with which she worked. The same could be said about her own musical thought, which encompassed original presentational formats in existing and speculative media and approaches to sound and listening that conjoined real and imagined social worlds. In these conjunctions, this book discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher's multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, hypothetical creatures and virtual, fictive or distanciated environments. These figurations guide interpretative study of six signal projects: Adjacencies (1965/1966); City-Links (1967-1988); Additional Tones (1976 / 1988), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980), Mini Sound Series (1985) and Intelligent Life (1980s) and countless sketches, notes and unrealized projects. The book explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play and narrative transport. This book also takes up Amacher's work as a guiding thread across shifting social discourses on life in the late 20th century U.S. Her projects convoked figurations of life and technoscience that could be partially and ironically accessed or conceptualized via complex auditory thresholds. This nascent feminist epistemology rooted in feminist science and technology studies centers biopolitical questions about difference and power in artistic and critical work that counts Amacher among its precedents"--

This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse. Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual. In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities. Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.

Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organised thematically, and ranging beyond elite, Western genres, it explores the work of diverse female composers from medieval to modern times, besides the familiar headline names. The book's prologue traces the development of scholarship on women composers over the past five decades and the category of 'woman composer' itself. The chapters that follow reveal scenes of flourishing creativity, technical innovation, and (often fleeting) recognition, challenging long-held notions around invisibility and neglect and dismissing clichés about women composers and their work. Leading scholars trace shifting ideas about composers and compositional processes, contributing to a wider understanding of how composers have functioned in history and making this volume essential reading for all students of musical history. In an epilogue, three contemporary composers reflect on their careers and identities.

The rise of a prominent auditory culture, reveals the degree to which sound art is lending definition to the 21st Century. And yet sound art still lacks related literature to compliment, and expand, the realm of practice. Background Noise sets out an historical overview, while at the same time shaping that history according to what sound art reveals - the dynamics of art to operate spatially, through media of reproduction and broadcast, and in relation to the intensities of communication and its contextual framework

"Her Noise is a season of exhibitions, performances and screenings that maps the activity of international artists whose practice involves the use of sound as a medium. This catalogue forms an invaluable resource, highlighting the often overlooked contribution of women artists to the development of genres as disparate as Fluxus, performance art, punk and sound-based installation."--BOOK JACKET.

One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music, tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch arranges, edits, and revises Tenney's hard-to-find writings into one indispensable collection. Selections focus on his fundamental concerns—"what the ear hears"—and include thoughts and ideas on perception and form, tuning systems and especially just intonation, information theory, theories of harmonic space, and stochastic (chance) procedures of composition.