Books by Andy Birtwistle
Liner notes and artwork from the Start Here series of audio cassette tapes No.s 1 -7. Part of a k... more Liner notes and artwork from the Start Here series of audio cassette tapes No.s 1 -7. Part of a knowledge exchange project investigating the contemporary use of 'obsolete' technology and dated media formats.
Cinesonica: sounding film and video explores previously neglected and under-theorised aspects of ... more Cinesonica: sounding film and video explores previously neglected and under-theorised aspects of film and video sound, drawing on detailed case study analyses of Hollywood cinema, art cinema, animated cartoons, and avant-garde film and video. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the soundtrack, and breaking away from the focus on narrative and signification that has tended to dominate the study of film sound, the book examines the way in which sound's materiality figures within audiovisual experience.
Papers by Andy Birtwistle
FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, Feb 27, 2017
One feminist thinker most influential to Barad's work is of course Donna Haraway, whose groundbre... more One feminist thinker most influential to Barad's work is of course Donna Haraway, whose groundbreaking, Marxist-informed feminist science studies have highlighted non-human agentialit y from the 19 80s onwards, cf. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 19 80s" (19 87); "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Par tial Perspectives" (19 8 8); Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium. Female-Man©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (1997); The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003); and, most recently, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2 016). Karen Barad herself addresses her indebtedness to Donna Haraway in Barad 2012a, p. 12. 4) See, for instance, Barret t and Bolt 2013;
In a recently published collection on materiality in art Petra Lange-Berndt asks, “what does it m... more In a recently published collection on materiality in art Petra Lange-Berndt asks, “what does it mean to give agency to the material, to follow the material and to act with the material” (2015:13). My article attempts to consider this question, focusing on the work of a number of musicians and composers who have chosen to engage creatively with the sounds produced by obsolete – or near obsolete – technologies of sound recording and reproduction. Every sound technology has the capacity to generate as well reproduce sound: in the case of the wax cylinder or shellac disc, surface noise is generated by physical contact between the recording medium and the needle/stylus, and with magnetic tape noise is created by the oxides used to make the tape. We might think of these sounds as the sound of technology itself – a sounding of each medium’s material and technological bases. Historically these sounds have usually been treated a problem, and successive waves of technological innovation have ...
Resonance, 2021
This article attempts to lend an ear to the compact audio cassette: a key feature of the domestic... more This article attempts to lend an ear to the compact audio cassette: a key feature of the domestic soundscape from its introduction in the early 1960s until its gradual obsolescence in the first decades of the 21st century. The piece aims to provide a new perspective on the cassette by way of a discussion of the Start Here tapes project: a series of seven artist audio cassette tapes released in 2016 and 2017. Applying a practice-based methodology to a study of objects that are intimate and well known, the project seeks to foreground the material agency of the cassette by making work that reflexively references material objecthood. The article examines what is at stake politically in this focus on materiality, and considers the way creative forms of reflexivity might have renewed ethical and political value within a ecopolitical or biopolitical context.
Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2021
This article examines the work of the film-maker and composer Jack Ellitt (1902–2001) who remains... more This article examines the work of the film-maker and composer Jack Ellitt (1902–2001) who remains something of an enigmatic and marginal figure in historical accounts of British documentary cinema. Research on Ellitt has so far focused on two key aspects of his life and career: firstly, his association with the New Zealand-born film-maker and artist Len Lye, and secondly, his pioneering work as a composer of electro-acoustic music. However, little research been undertaken on the work that he produced during the three decades he spent working as a documentary director in the British film industry, beginning in the early 1940s and ending with his retirement in the 1970s. He was a member of the remarkable generation of film-makers associated with the British documentary movement, and a composer whose radical experiments with recorded sound might well have secured him a more prominent place in the history of experimental music than is currently the case. Focusing on films made by Ellitt...
Choice Reviews Online, 2011
List of tables and figures Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: sound, signification and mat... more List of tables and figures Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: sound, signification and materiality 2. Sound source object 3. The sound of technology 4. Strange sounds 5. Mickey-mousing 6. Organised sound References Selected filmography and videography Selected audio recordings Selected film and video distribution sources
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, dra... more The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, drawing on analyses of key films and interview material to explore his use of sound, music and voice. Smith’s films often engage self-reflexively with how sound creates or accepts meaning within an audiovisual context. Influenced by structural film practice of the 1960s and 1970s, and underpinned by a Brechtian concern with the politics of representation, Smith’s often humorous work both foregrounds and deconstructs the sound-image relations at work in dominant modes of cinematic representation. This analysis of Smith’s work identifies the political dynamic of the filmmaker’s use of sound, and addresses what is at stake—for both Smith and his audience—in the self-reflexive concern with audiovisual modes of representation. Examined within this context are Smith’s creative focus on the production of meaning and how this relates to aspects of musicality and abstraction in his work.
The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, 2016
This chapter considers how the blurring of sound design and music, often seen as a feature of con... more This chapter considers how the blurring of sound design and music, often seen as a feature of contemporary cinema, developed within earlier forms of cinematic expression. Focusing on British documentary cinema, Andy Birtwistle examines innovative uses of sound in documentary filmmaking, paying particular attention to forms of cinematic musique concrete that emerged following early experimentation with film sound technology in the 1930s. Considering key works by directors Basil Wright and Geoffrey Jones, and composers Walter Leigh, Daphne Oram and Tristram Cary, the chapter considers the ways in which filmmakers and composers working in documentary have manipulated and organized recorded sound, producing forms of electracoustic practice that prefigure and parallel the radical developments that took place in modern music after World War II.
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Books by Andy Birtwistle
Papers by Andy Birtwistle
Performed at the Wintersound Festival, Sidney Cooper Gallery Canterbury, 13 January 2018.
Video recording by Nick Furze.