Synopses & Reviews
"
Earth Sound Earth Signal is a mind-expanding, ear-opening book, at once a history of electromagnetism in the arts and a provocation to rethink the relationship between media and nature. With erudition and wit, Kahn tells the stories of artists, scientists, and engineers who have made audible the way our planet buzzes, crackles, hums, and whistles, from the ionosphere to the deepest depths of the oceans. The result is a strikingly original work about sound, aesthetics, politics, and the envinronment, from Henry David Thoreau to the Cold War to the age of global warming. It will haunt youand#151;in a good wayand#151;long after you read it." and#151;David Suisman, author of
Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music
"Douglas Kahn's Earth Sound Earth Signal delivers a dazzlingly innovative study of how avant-garde music and art have made the planet itself audible over the last 200 years: the soil, the air, the atmosphere, electromagnetic radiation, and wireless communications become objects of playful scientific inquiry and aesthetic enjoyment in works from Henry David Thoreau to Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Barry, and Joyce Hinterding. Earth Sound Earth Signal unfolds new histories of communication, of technology, of science, and of experimental aesthetics in a unique fusion of sharp-eyed scholarship with manifesto-style punch lines. At stake is not just aesthetics or history, but a new idea of planetary nature: Earth perceived through global and local waves, radiations, and energy flows that humans cannnot see but that become audible through media from rocks and winds to electronic circuitry. At a time when older notions of nature no longer grasp the new global technonatures and biocultures of the twenty-first century, Kahn's brilliantly insightful manifesto of 'Aelectrosonics' makes nature resonate anew in an entirely different key and at a different scale: It shows how Earth sings and the atmosphere makes music. This planetary techno-music is a must-hear for anyone interested in experimental aesthetics, environmentalism, or globalization." and#151;Ursula K. Heise, author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
"It is rare that the history of the arts and techno-sciences are so successfully blended as in Douglas Kahn's magisterial survey of how the perception of natural electromagnetic phenomena entered the scientific, artistic and popular imagination. Kahn documents the inquiries of Thomas Watson, Thoreau, scientists and amateurs in the 19th and 20th centuries and moves on to Alvin Lucier, John Cage and contemporary composers and scientific inquiry. This is a fundamental text for all collaborations between the arts and sciences today." and#151;Roger Malina, Professor of Art and Technology and Professor Of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas
"A fascinating tour through previously untold episodes in media arts history. From its theoretical moves to 'think energy' and attend to its lively presence in communications and the arts, to its fresh historical detail on experimental works by artists such as Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, Earth Sound Earth Signal should appeal broadly to scholars, artists, and enthusiasts of media and sound." and#151;Tara Rodgers, composer and author of Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound
and#160;
Review
"Another unmissable text in sound art research."
Synopsis
Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Grounded in the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing in telegraph lines and in the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard in telephone lines, the book moves through the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s, when the composer Alvin Lucier worked with the "natural electromagnetic sounds" present from "brainwaves to outer space," through the urban electromagnetism in the conceptual art of Robert Barry, to the energy scavenging drawings and antennas by the artist Joyce Hinterding. From the sounds of auroras at high latitudes and atmospheric electricity in the mountains, to underground music of earthquakes and nuclear explosions, to music bounced off the moon and the sounds of the sun, Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale through detailed discussions of artists and scientists such as Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Paul DeMarinis, Semiconductor, Thomas Ashcraft, Katie Paterson, Edmond Dewan, Ludwik Liszka and many others.
Synopsis
Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.
Synopsis
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Pressandrsquo; new Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound filmandmdash;these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and and#39;30s, the movement for new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of aesthetic orientations, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone-colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. It involved composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jandouml;rg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, Landaacute;szlandoacute; Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Pattesonandrsquo;s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts.
Synopsis
andldquo;The smartest book on the German roots of the music and media arts that happened once electricity joined sound to make music. With the advent of these innovative art forms, new technological possibilities were hacked, and recordings stopped repeating themselves and performed something new.andrdquo;andmdash;Douglas Kahn, author of
Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts and#160;
andldquo;Instruments for New Music is a fascinating story of the technological music instrumentarium that not only gives composers and improvisers new sounds and new ways to play but also engages all of us in new social and philosophical insights.andrdquo;andmdash;Pauline Oliveros, Composer and Professor of Practice,and#160;Department of the Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteand#160;
and#160;
andldquo;Every so often a book comes along with something new to say about a familiar topic. Through meticulous new research on electronic music in Germany during the Weimar Republic, Thomas Patteson recovers the forgotten history of the music. He provides the most detailed account we have of how electronic music became tainted by the Nazis and how Stockhausen rewrote its history in his Cologne studio. Incredible instruments were developed during this early periodandmdash;not least the trautonium used by Hitchcock to make the scary sounds of The Birds! This book shows how todayandrsquo;s sounds were born long before the age of electronics.andrdquo;andmdash;Trevor Pinch, author of Analog Days: The History and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer
About the Author
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is author or editor of several books, including Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999) and, most recently, Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (2011) and Mainframe Experimentalism (2012).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Thomas Watson: Natural Radio, Natural Theology
2. Microphonic Imagination
3. The Aeolian and Henry David Thoreauand#8217;s Sphere Music
4. The Aelectrosonic and Energetic Environments
5. Inductive Radio and Whistling Currents
6. Alvin Lucier: Brainwaves
7. Edmond Dewan and Cybernetic Hi-Fi
8. Alvin Lucier: Whistlers
9. From Brainwaves to Outer Space: John Cage and Karl Jansky
10. For More New Signals
11. Sound of the Underground: Earthquakes, Nuclear Weaponry, and Music
12. Long Sounds and Transperception
13. Pauline Oliveros: Sonosphere
14. Thomas Ashcraft: Electroreceptor
15. Black Sun, Black Rain
16. Star-Studded Cinema
17. Robert Barry: Conceptualism and Energy
18. Collaborating Objects Radiating Environments
19. Joyce Hinterding: Drawing Energy
20. Earth-in-Circuit
Notes
Index