"A lucid and passionate case for a more mindful way of listening to and engaging with musical, natural, and manmade sounds." —New York Times In this tour of the world’s most unexpected sounds, Trevor Cox—the “David Attenborough of the acoustic realm” (Observer)—discovers the world’s longest echo in a hidden oil cavern in Scotland, unlocks the secret of singing sand dunes in California, and alerts us to the aural gems that exist everywhere in between. Using the world’s most amazing acoustic phenomena to reveal how sound works in everyday life, The Sound Book inspires us to become better listeners in a world dominated by the visual and to open our ears to the glorious cacophony all around us.

Experience the sights and sounds of 1930s Brooklyn and Coney Island through the eyes—and ears—of a hearing boy and his deaf parents. A Brooklyn family takes an outing to Coney Island, where they enjoy the rides, the food, and the sights. The father longs to know how everything sounds. Though his son does his best to interpret their noisy surroundings through sign language, he struggles to convey the subtle differences between the "loud" of the ocean and the "loud" of a roller coaster. When the family drops in at the library after dinner, the boy makes a discovery. Perhaps the words he needs are within reach, after all. Myron Uhlberg's story, based on his own childhood experiences, covers the almost unique topic within children's books of children raised by deaf parents. Ted Papoulas beautifully and sensitively portrays the family's day and brings the whole experience to life for readers.

From Nirvana and R.E.M. to Green Day and Belly, alternative bands are dominating the airways. This book looks at the hottest bands on the alternative music scene--their history, influences, concert personas, and distinctive styles. This is their sound--the sound of drums pounding and guitars wailing--the sound of rock'n'roll. Includes 50 photos.

The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the ’notes themselves,’ in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.

The practice of blurring the line between score and sound design has transformed contemporary film soundscape by challenging not only the long-established hierarchical relationships between dialogue, music, and sound effects, but also the modes of perception shaped by classical soundtrack practices. The methods of this new trend rely on the language of contemporary popular and art music, producing soundtracks in which it is difficult to tell the difference between score and ambient sound, where pieces of electroacoustic music are merged with diegetic sound, sound effects are absorbed into the score or treated as music, and diegetic sound is treated as musique concr�te. In Sound Design is the New Score, Kulezic-Wilson explores theoretical, aesthetic, and sensuous dimensions of this new trend, providing a multifaceted portrait of a practice which recognizes the interconnectedness of all soundtrack elements and emphasizes their inherent musicality. The aesthetic concerns of this practice are illuminated through the concept of the aesthetics of reticence which rejects classical narrative and scoring conventions and uses integrated soundtrack strategies to create the space for mystery in art and for individuality in the cinematic experience. The book's emphasis on sensuous and musical aspects of this practice, informed by the feminist discourse on the erotics of art, challenges popular notions about sensory cinema, demonstrating that the sensuousness of film form and its soundscapes is more sophisticated than simply being the result of excessive sensory stimulation facilitated by the use of digital technology or the "intensified" aesthetics it inspires. The discussion is supported by a wide range of case studies from American Independent, Asian, Australian, and European cinemas, including films by Shane Carruth, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Harmony Korine, David Mich�d, Gus Van Sant, and Peter Strickland.

Critical analysis of nine theories of music, ancient and modern: 1. Chinese Theory 2. Hindoo Theory 3. Egyptian Theory 4. Grecian Theories 5. Arabic-Persian Theory 6. Scholastic Theories 7. Euler’s Theory 8. Herbert Spencer’s Theory 9. Helmholtz’s Theory Spiritual insights to the occult origin of sound and music: 1. Space and Time (Rest and Motion) 2. Vibrations 3. Colours and Forms 4. Internal Government 5. States of Mind

A meditation on how we listen for the voice of God within the soundscapes of our lives, and how we find our own voice.