During the twentieth century sound underwent a dramatic transformation as new technologies and social practices challenged conventional aural experience. As a result, sound functioned as a means to exert social, cultural, and political power in unprecedented and unexpected ways. The fleeting nature of sound has long made it a difficult topic for historical study, but innovative scholars have recently begun to analyze the sonic traces of the past using innovative approaches. Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction investigates sound as part of the social construction of historical experience and as an element of the sensory relationship people have to the world, showing how hearing and listening can inform people's feelings, ideas, decisions, and actions. The essays in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction uncover the varying dimensions of sound in twentieth-century history. Together they connect a host of disparate concerns, from issues of gender and technology to contests over intellectual property and government regulation. Topics covered range from debates over listening practices and good citizenship in the 1930s, to Tokyo Rose and Axis radio propaganda during World War II, to CB-radio culture on the freeways of Los Angeles in the 1970s. These and other studies reveal the contingent nature of aural experience and demonstrate how a better grasp of the culture of sound can enhance our understanding of the past.

It is undeniable that technology has made a tangible impact on the nature of musical listening. The new media have changed our relationship with music in a myriad of ways, not least because the experience of listening can now be prolonged at will and repeated at any time and in any space. Moreover, among the more striking social phenomena ushered in by the technological revolution, one cannot fail to mention music’s current status as a commodity and popular music’s unprecedented global reach. In response to these new social and perceptual conditions, the act of listening has diversified into a wide range of patterns of behaviour which seem to resist any attempt at unification. Concentrated listening, the form of musical reception fostered by Western art music, now appears to be but one of the many ways in which audiences respond to organized sound. Cinema, for example, has developed specific ways of combining images and sounds; and, more recently, digital technology has redefined the standard forms of mass communication. Information is aestheticized, and music in turn is incorporated into pre-existing symbolic fields. This volume - the first in the series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century - offers a wide-ranging exploration of the relations between sound, technology and listening practices, considered from the complementary perspectives of art music and popular music, music theatre and multimedia, composition and performance, ethnographic and anthropological research.

This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon

Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', ‘The Task of the Translator’ and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. This now legendary volume offers the best possible access to Benjamin’s singular and significant achievement, while Hannah Arendt’s introduction reveals how his life and work are a prism to his times.

This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon

Set in a near-future LA, a man falls in love with a beautiful android—but when she is kidnapped and sold piecemeal on the black market, he must track down her parts to put her back together. Bad luck for Eliot Lazar, he fell in love with an android, a beautiful C-900 named Iris Matsuo. That's the kind of thing that can get you killed in late 21th century Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter – anywhere except the man-made island of Avernus, far out in the Pacific, which is where Eliot and Iris are headed once they get their hands on a boat. But then one night Eliot knocks on Iris's door only to find she was kidnapped, chopped up, sold for parts. Unable to move on and unwilling to settle for a woman with a heartbeat, Eliot vows to find the parts to put Iris back together again—and to find the sonofabitch who did this to her and get his revenge. With a determined LAPD detective on his trail and time running out in a city where machines and men battle for control, Eliot Lazar embarks on a bloody journey that will take him to the edge of a moral precipice from which he can never return, from which mankind can never return. Judd Trichter's Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a science fiction love story that asks the question, how far will you go to save someone you love?

"Arved Ashby writes with a keen sense of the historical processes, ironies, and reversals that seem to characterize the ways that musicologists think about, and contemporary listeners experience, works and performance. This book is a major contribution to the burgeoning body of critical musicological literature on recordings; anybody interested in that field, or in the question of the 'artwork' in the contemporary world, needs to read this book--which fortunately, is a great pleasure to do."--Adam Krims, author of Music and Urban Geography "The relationship between classical music and recording is strangely conflicted: on the one hand recorded music is the perfect realization of aesthetic autonomy, on the other hand it commodifies music and transforms its role within society. Ashby's book offers a penetrating analysis of these cultural conflicts, showing how technological developments from the phonogram to the mp3 have changed our basic sense of what music is as well as the ways in which we consume it. What emerges from this sustained study of the relationship between technology and values is a view of classical musical culture that is both richer and truer to life."--Nicholas Cook, author of A Guide to Musical Analysis "Lively and persuasive. Ashby has the enviable, rare ability to lead the reader comfortably through highly complex material without oversimplifying. This is a must-read for composers, music theorists, performers, musicologists, critics, and anyone with an interest in classical music beyond the elementary level."--Jonathan Dunsby, author of Performing Music