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A “timely, informative, and fascinating” study of 8 inventions—and how they shaped our world—with “totally compelling” insights on little-known inventors throughout history (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction) In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines 8 inventions and reveals how they shaped the human experience: • Clocks • Steel rails • Copper communication cables • Photographic film • Light bulbs • Hard disks • Scientific labware • Silicon chips Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the w...
How is the Beatles' "Help!" similar to Stravinsky's "Dance of the Adolescents?" How does Radiohead's "Just" relate to the improvisations of Bill Evans? And how do Chopin's works exploit the non-Euclidean geometry of musical chords? In this groundbreaking work, author Dmitri Tymoczko describes a new framework for thinking about music that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from medieval polyphony to contemporary rock. Tymoczko identifies five basic musical features that jointly contribute to the sense of tonality, and shows how these features recur throughout the history of Western music. In the process he sheds new light on an age-old question: what makes music sound good? A Geometry ...
The Geometry of Musical Rhythm: What Makes a "Good" Rhythm Good? is the first book to provide a systematic and accessible computational geometric analysis of the musical rhythms of the world. It explains how the study of the mathematical properties of musical rhythm generates common mathematical problems that arise in a variety of seemingly dispara
What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Darwin and Spencer. Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology....
In Sounds as They Are, author Richard Beaudoin recognizes the often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music and analyzes these sounds using a bold new theory of inclusive track analysis (ITA). In doing so, he demonstrates new expressive, interpretive, and embodied possibilities and also uncovers insidious inequalities across music studies and the recording industry, including the silencing of certain sounds along lines of gender and race.
Seeing Voices explores the phenomenon of music created in a signed language and argues that music can exist beyond sound and the sense of hearing, instead involving all of our senses, including vision and touch. Using a blend of tools from music theory, cognitive science, musicology, and ethnography, author Anabel Maler presents the history of music in Deaf culture from the early nineteenth century, contextualizes contemporary Deaf music through ethnographic interviews with Deaf musicians, and provides detailed analyses of a wide variety of genres of sign language music.
Flow theorizes the rhythm of the rapping voice at the intersection of music, speech, and poetry. Author Mitchell Ohriner addresses pressing questions in theories of musical rhythm and meter through a combination of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading.
Analyzing the Music of Living Composers (and Others) is a collection of essays that grew out of the 2010 annual meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The stated purpose was to apply traditional music-analytic techniques, as well as new, innovative techniques, to describing the music of composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The goal was to take steps toward making the music of our time a bit less impenetrable for our colleagues, students and other listeners by showing how it follows, varies, and sometimes controverts the organizational schemes of older music. This collection includes chapters analyzing music of older eras as well, including a number that throw light on the analysis of recent music in unexpected ways, and there are also several chapters that propose innovative analytic approaches to recent popular music and jazz.
The way rhythm is taught in Western classrooms and music lessons is rooted in a centuries-old European approach that favors metric levels within a grand symmetrical grid. Swinglines encourages readers to experience rhythms, even gridded ones, as freewheeling affairs irrespective of the metric hierarchy. It shows that rhythms traditionally framed as "deviations" and "non-isochronous" have their own identities. They are coherent products of precise musical thought and action. Rather than situating them in the neither-here-nor-there, author Fernando Benadon takes a more inclusive view, one where isochrony and metric grids are shown as particular cases within the universe of musical time.
To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually? Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from bot...