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Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in 'Switched-on Bach', this text conveys the consequences of a technology that would provide the soundtrack for a chapter in cultural history.
Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have yet to fully internalize the cultural and aesthetic consequences of these shifts. Tracing the emergence of what Jeremy Wade Morris calls the “digital music commodity,” Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture considers how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular music’s meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologies—Winamp, metadata, Napster...
This book presents reflexive first-hand accounts from the authors of major book-length ethnographies, recounting how they generated their key ideas in the practice of field research. This volume provides a fresh approach to teaching qualitative research by encouraging students to think creatively and theoretically in the field.
Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating towards cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity-endeavors considered to be more 'real' and 'genuine.' Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities...
In Off Key, Kay Dickinson offers a compelling study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood. Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, Off Key also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged "failures" have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself. A provocative and politically-conscious look at music-image relations, Off Key will appeal to students and scholars of film music, cinema studies, media studies, cultural studies, and labor history.
This major essay collection takes a fresh look at how differences among people matter for music and musical thought.
"We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that fewer than 2 percent of software developers in the FOSS world were women. How is it that an intellectual community of activists so open in principle to one and all -a community that prides itself for its enlightened politics and its commitment to social change - should have such a low rate of participation by women? This book is an ethnographic investigation of efforts to improve the diversity in software and hackerspace communities, with particular attention paid to gender diversity advocacy"--
The first in-depth study of one of the most influential movements of contemporary popular music
This book tells the story of the Mwandishi band; the author examines the ingredients that would come to form this band's sound. He analyzes the group's instrumentation, their use of electronics, and their transformation of the studio into a compositional tool.
Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People brings together scholars, artists, composers, and musical instrument designers in an exploration of modular synthesis, an unusually multifaceted musical instrument that opens up many avenues for exploration and insight, particularly with respect to technological use, practice, and resistance. Through historical, technical, social, aesthetic, and other perspectives, this volume offers a collective reflection on the powerful connections between technology, creativity, culture, and personal agency. Ultimately, this collection is about creativity in a technoscientific world and speaks to issues fundamental to our everyday lives and experiences, by ...