Sound Recording

Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.
Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the occurrences of life movingly interwoven with memories, associations, desires, and reflections. Readers are brought into a tender map of contemporary urban experience and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener includes parallel drawings based on the original audio recordings and appears as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code in the book.

In some social mammals, loud calling not only serves to advertise ownership of a territory and attract mates but also plays a vital role in allowing social companions to maintain contact when they are separated by long distances. Under these circumstances, individuals that are not territory owners but that call in the context of social cohesion or mate attraction could risk inviting escalated contests from territorial competitors. Here we present observations and playback experiments demonstrating that nomadic male lions (Panthera leo) do not roar despite the likely importance of roaring in maintaining social ties with other males in their coalition, on which their subsequent reproductive success depends. Instead, roaring is confined to males that are resident in prides and prepared to escalate in contest situations. Roaring is a flexible behaviour that is sensitive to temporal changes in status; resident males remain silent outside of their territories even when presented with playbacks of unfamiliar males roaring, and nomadic males start roaring only when they are taking over a pride. Our study suggests that individuals of social species may avoid givingimportant long-distance signals in circumstances where it would pay them to conceal their presence from eavesdroppers.

I have been working in the field of radio art, and through creative practice have been considering how the convergence of new media technologies has redefined radio art, addressing the ways in which this has extended the boundaries of the art form. This practice-based research explores the rich history of radio as an artistic medium and the relationship between the artist and technology, emphasising the role of the artist as a mediator between broadcast institutions and a listening public. It considers how radio art might be defined in relation to sound art, music and media art, mapping its shifting parameters in the digital era and prompting a consideration of how radio appears to be moving from a dispersed ‘live’ event to one consumed ‘on demand’ by a segmented audience across multiple platforms. Exploring the implications of this transition through my radio practice focuses upon the productive tensions which characterise the artist’s engagement with radio technology, specifically between the autonomous potentialities offered by the reappropriation of obsolete technology and the proliferation of new infrastructures and networks promised by the exponential development of new media. Switch Off takes as its overarching theme the possible futures for FM radio, incorporating elements from eight ‘trace’ stations, produced as a series of radio actions investigating these tensions. Interviews have been conducted with case study subjects Vicki Bennett, Anna Friz, LIGNA, Hildegard Westerkamp and Gregory Whitehead, whose work was chosen as being exemplary of the five recurrent facets of radio arts practice I have identified: Appropriation, Transmission, Activism, Soundscape and Performance. These categories are derived from the genealogy of experimental radiophonic practice set out in Chapter One.

As ethnomusicologists we have always made and used recordings as part of our research yet we have seldom questioned this central methodology beyond stating that we make and use recordings ‘for our own research purposes’. This special issue explores the potential for the use of archival recordings as a central part of research to provide a more equitable and enduring outcome for the benefit of cultural heritage communities as well as for ethnomusicological scholarship. As such, we argue for a fairer ethnomusicology, in which access to knowledge—often encapsulated in recordings—is facilitated for all, with ethnomusicologists taking responsibility for their own part in this important process.

Sonograms are images produced by sound; more specifically, they are produced by ultrasound—sound waves vibrating at frequencies well above the range of what humans can hear, but suitable for producing maps below surfaces such as skin or oceans. Long before scientific devices transduced vibrating air waves into graphics, cultural devices such as voices, instruments, pens and parchment, transmitted sounds in the form of love songs that had an ultrasonic function to produce sonograms that mapped subjects and objects of desire. This essay unites musicology’s concerns with the discursive force of organized sound, and sound studies’ concern with the discursive force sonic environments, recording formats, and media networks, to consider how the widely transmitted medieval song Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai  by Jaufre Rudel, with its famous refrain of amor de lonh  (“love from afar”) and evocations of the Saracen kingdom, reverberates across time and space to map subjects and objects of desire below skin and across oceans. The first half of the essay examines Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai  in the context the transcultural sound networks, medieval notions of global geography, and the material formatting of songs. The second half of this essay turns to two modern-day resoundings of Jaufre’s song of distant love:  these are the 1977 recording by the Clemencic Consort directed by René Clemencic; and the 2000 opera by Finish composer Kaija Saariaho called L’amour de loin with a libretto by the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf.  In both cases the song, and the medieval legend that sprung from it, are sonically reimagined to express twentieth-century strife in the Middle East.  Thus while the notes of Jaufre’s medieval song have all but disappeared from these reformattings, its ultrasonic function continues to produce sonograms of desire born of distance.

In 1928, missionaries of the China Inland Mission (CIM), an interdenominational missionary society founded in Britain in 1865, established their first station in Yunnan's northwestern Nujiang, a border region renowned for its ethnic diversity and spectacular river gorge. 1 Since then not only Christian doctrine but also congregational hymn singing have been introduced to the Lisu, an ethnic group of over one million people who reside mainly in China's southwestern Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, in Myanmar's Kachin and Shan states, in northern Thailand, and in India's northeastern Arunachal Pradesh. 2 Ddoqmuq mutgguat (literally, "songs of praise"), a majority of which were translated from gospel songs from the northern United States by Philip P. Bliss, Ira D. Sankey, and other Evangelical composers, constitute the majority of Lisu hymns. 3 Characterized by The author is grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for funding her fieldwork that forms the basis for this article, as well as to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany for supporting the follow-up fieldwork in Myanmar and for the completion of this article. The author extends her gratitude to the editors of Yale Journal of Music & Religion and to the two anonymous reviewers for the helpful feedback.

In this paper, a new approach for automatic audio classification using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is presented. Training is performed onto each audio class individually, whilst during the test phase each test recording is projected onto the several training matrices. Experiments demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed approach were performed for musical instrument classification. Several perceptual features as well as MPEG-7 descriptors were measured for 300 sound recordings consisting of 6 different musical instrument classes. Subsets of the feature set were selected using branch-and-bound search, in order to obtain the most discriminating features for classification. Several NMF techniques were utilized, namely the standard NMF method, the local NMF, and the sparse NMF. The experiments demonstrate an almost perfect classification (classification error 1.0%), outperforming the state-of-the-art techniques tested for the aforementioned experiment.

It is currently common practice for sound engineers to record digital music using high-resolution formats, and then down sample the files to 44.1kHz for commercial release. This study aims at investigating whether listeners can perceive differences between musical files recorded ...

The article takes its basis in D.W. Winnicott's theories of play and transitional space to argue that Stagnation-era sound recordings and animated films found a devoted audience of both adults and children because, like Winnicott's good-enough mother or therapist, they created the conditions for playing: they did not merely narrate play, but also embodied, invited, and enacted it. Fishzon looks closely at the performative and analytic functions of Vladimir Vysotskii's popular musical adaptation of Alisa v strane chudes (Alice in Wonderland, 1977), which employed and served as a play framework or analytic session. Vysotskii's broadly circulated, well-known work enabled Brezhnev-era citizens to dream a new habitus and ideology at a time when irony and playing were becoming increasingly difficult. While opportunities for paradox narrowed in Soviet official discourse and printed fiction after the Thaw, children's records and animated films shaped critical imaginations and made space for subjectivity.

The main object of this paper is the composition Seven Circles completed in 1959 by Danish composer Else Marie Pade. It is the first piece of purely electronic music composed in Denmark. The paper has three primary focuses which are first: the evolution of electronic music that leads up to Seven Circles, second: Pade and the production of the piece itself, and third: how the techniques used by Pade point out the way towards the electronic music we know today.

The article argues that if a sound artist while exploring a city as a site for artistic research does not remain a listener but instead registers his or her presence in the phenomenological development of the artwork by intervening and participating in the urban sound environment, the outcome can transcend mere impression of the urban space and become a critical reflection of the dynamic relationship between the artist and the city.

The most popular expression of poetry in Urdu and Persian, the ghazal is known as much as a poetic form as it is as a genre of music. The ghazal has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth and fourteenth century due to works of Persian poets like Rumi and Hafiz. Indian poets started writing ghazal in Urdu and Persian in the eighteenth century.

"A white dog with brown ears sits in front of a gramophone, head directed to its brass-horn and slightly tilted to one side. The original painting was purchased in 1899, along with its full copyright, by the emerging Gramophone Company from the artist Francis Barraud".

Paper about Francis Barraud's "His Master's Voice" painting, appeared at Antennae Journal Issue 23 Winter 2012, that explores the assumptions portrayed in the artwork about human and dog perception.

http://www.antennae.org.uk/back-issues-2012/4583477699

This article considers the impact of time-based signal processors on the shape of alternative rock recordings. The concept of musical shape is considered here as both textural and gestural. In this instance, texture pertains to the interactions between the component parts of a multitrack recording and gesture relates to applications of processing by the recordist. Drawing on examples by the Jesus and Mary Chain, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mazzy Star and My Bloody Valentine, the impact of time-based signal processors on the shape of the recordings is elucidated. Scholars, including many of those involved in the Art of Record Production forum, 1 have established the recording studio/workplace, sound recording and production technology, recordists, as well as techniques/process as being the contextual cornerstones of record production study. However, the foregrounding of these factors in music analysis is less common, and to that end my method has focused less on social aspects and reception – that is, how audiences, critics and cultural commentators respond to recordings – and more on the impact of these oft-overlooked factors on the music itself. In popular musicology and music analysis, work focusing on technological and/or processual matters is still in its infancy, due in part to what Stephen Cottrell (2010) has noted as the relatively recent development of phonomusicological

Herewith the little known (and authenticated) story of how the world's most famous trademark first came to the US and Canada. New documentation and illustrations indicate that previous accounts of the early history of Barraud's famous painting were somewhat incomplete. Now also included is the first explanation of how anti-counterfeiting devices (or techniques) were applied to the discs themselves. When did Emile Berliner see the original British painting - read here and know for sure. Whose permission was needed, and secured?

Until 1948, high-quality recording involved cutting a live performance directly to wax or lacquer-coated discs, songs were recorded from beginning to end with no simple means of correcting mistakes short of re-recording the entire piece, playing time on a 78 RPM disc was four minutes, and electric guitars were essentially amplified acoustics. That

Colonial knowledge production has left an archival echo. Between the hissing and crackling of old shellac records and wax cylinders, voices can be heard that speak, announce, musick, whisper, chant, narrate, sing, and criticize. These recordings were produced by linguists, musicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, or laypeople, sometimes a century ago, often in asymmetric situations of knowledge production. Today, most of these recordings are trapped in archives where they have been received and configured as specimens. Speakers, who were seen as 'native informants' , are often irreversibly absented from the archival catalogues. Textual contents of recorded speech and song rarely surface in the catalogues of the archives. The collaborative nature of knowledge production is perpetually concealed, and archives often keep quiet about the colonial, violent context of their making. This figuring of acoustic collections as archival objects is durable; it has both shaped the recordings and indelibly watermarked their form and content (Hamilton et al. 2002; Quijano 2007; Stoler 2009). Yet sound recordings are specific archival documents. They allow interested listeners to revisit acoustic traces that resonate with the very moment of their making. While the recorded voice is mediated, what may be heard in a recording often differs from what can be read in the transcription, or from what appears in the catalogue of the archive. A striking example of this chasm between what is catalogued and what is audible appears in the collection of the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch, which was recorded in the Kalahari in 1908 as part of an attempt to document 'Bushman languages'. Pöch's recordings were published by the Phonogrammarchiv Wien in 2003 (Schüller 2003). The booklet that comes with the CDs describes recording no. 20 on CD 1 as 'Speech' , spoken by Bushmen, recorded in 1908, in a place Pöch called Kxau, in the vicinity of Ghanzi, British Betchuana Land (now Botswana; Schüller 2003: 36). On this recording, almost drowned out by crackle and hiss, one can hear the faint voice of a man speaking German with a thick Austrian accent, first in English, then in Afrikaans:

Apresentamos neste trabalho uma introdução às definições de onda sonora, vibração e estudo do movimento harmônico tal como definições musicais de melodia e harmonia. Descrevemos o processo histórico da divisão numérica do intervalo musical e apresentamos os questionamentos sobre sua aceitação devido à limitação do ouvido humano em perceber tons diferentes. Utilizando uma visão analítica sobre esses aspectos e considerando a evolução musical, mostramos que a gama musical a qual possui o maior número de frações de denominadores baixos é ideal para exprimir a música que a percepção humana, em geral, é capaz de discernir. Repetimos esta característica para investigar e comparar a percepção musical para duas espécies de pássaros e relacioná-las à percepção musical humana.

'Loud' is the word that most easily springs to mind when one describes the soundtrack of the archetypal Hindi film. The main purpose of sound is to heighten the melodrama, to imbue the hero with a mythic aura through blood-and-thunder dialogue. What, then, is the role of sound effects in the composite soundtrack and how are they conceived? Drawing from conversations with several sound professionals and filmmakers, Gautam Pemmaraju gives us an insider's view of effects production and aesthetics during the analogue era of sound production in Hindi cinema. From the age of the talkies he takes us through the dubbing era to the digital age, when technology brought about a radically different tone, texture and timbre to contemporary sounds.

Practices of collecting are constrained by media circumstances. To show how changing media circumstances can occasion changes in collecting practices, this article explores one case study, an iOS app developed by a Phish fan to allow streaming audio of fan-made recordings of Phish concert performances. Such practices are part of a history of unofficial music collecting that parallels the history of recorded sound. This case study shows how one collecting community's practices evolved in the context of changing media conditions: from cassette tape to CD-R to MP3 to streams (and a parallel motion from print to online message boards to app). This progression illustrates the ways that different ways of listening to and accessing recorded music afford different possibilities of collecting music, different links between listener and music, and different relationships among listeners. More precisely, Phish concert recordings, which lent themselves to collection when circulated on cassette, are no longer available to collect when they circulate as streaming media, because streaming is characterized by a relationship of access rather than possession. Among devoted fans, streaming recordings provoke a cultural emphasis on knowledge about music, rather than accumulation of recordings. My argument is rooted in prevailing theories of collecting, which situate collecting as a component of consumer culture emerging from the capitalist expansion stimulated by 19th-century mass production. Ultimately, I argue that when an object of collecting is displaced by changing media conditions, new collecting practices emerge to fill the void. In 2013, a 19-year-old software developer released a free iOS app that upended the practices and meanings of collecting recorded music. Alec Gorge's PhishOD obviated the collecting of fan-made live recordings of one American rock band and exposed the possibility that collecting practices are

Motivated by Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that advances in technology serve to alter sense perceptions, and that it is the role of artists to be aware of such changes, the author explores intersections and contrasts among five different approaches to the subject and practice of ear training in the context of sound recording technology, with attention to how these approaches serve to expand and challenge traditional ear training pedagogy and what these changes to tradition reveal about how sound recording technology has altered our sense perceptions.

Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever recombinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay does not side with either position but identifies and critiques the common understanding and fundamental assumptions that make these two, opposed positions possible in the first place. The investigation of this matter is divided into two main parts. The first considers the traditional understanding of technologically enabled reproduction and the often unquestioned value it invests in the concept of originality. It does so by beginning with a somewhat unlikely source, Plato's Phaedrus—a dialogue that, it is argued, originally articulates the original concept of originality that both determines and is reproduced in the theories and practices of sound recording. The second part of the essay demonstrates how the audio mash-up deliberately intervenes in this tradition, advancing a fundamental challenge to the original understanding and privilege of originality. In making this argument, however, the essay does not endeavor to position the mash-up as anything unique or innovative. Instead, it demonstrates how mash-ups, true to their thoroughly derivative nature, plunder, reuse, and remix anomalies that are already available in and constitutive of
recorded music.

Dans l’histoire de la musique populaire occidentale de la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle, bien que le savoir-faire technique et les infrastructures nécessaires à la production des artefacts culturels constituent un domaine périphérique pour lequel le fan de base ne conçoit, à priori, que peu d’intérêt, il existe deux lieux mythiques dont le nom est connu, à minima, de tout amateur de rock. Je veux, bien sûr, parler des studios d’Abbey Road, dans lesquels les Beatles ont élaboré leur oeuvre, et du studio de Sun Records, considéré comme « la grotte de
la nativité » (ou la « Mecque » au choix) du Rock ‘n’ Roll pour les séances d’enregistrement d’Elvis Presley réalisées entre juillet 1954 et juillet 1955, séances appelées couramment : Sun Sessions.
Si les séances d’Abbey Road sont remarquablement documentées en témoigne l’ouvrage Recording The Beatles qui, jour après jour, nous permet de suivre, dans leurs moindres détails techniques, toutes les séances des Beatles, il en est tout autrement du travail réalisé au cours des Sun Sessions. Il existe, en effet, un monde entre une institution comme les studios d’Abbey Road, propriétés de la multinationale EMI, institution vénérable et prestigieuse, et une jeune entreprise de taille modeste dans le sud des États-Unis aux prises avec les problèmes quotidiens de gestion d’une « start-up ». Ainsi, hormis Sam Phillips, le
propriétaire du studio, le personnel administratif se réduisait à Marion Kessler, une secrétaire embauchée à mi-temps, son agenda personnel représentant, peu ou prou, le seul document permettant d’élaborer une chronologie « fiable » des évènements.
Ce mémoire a donc pour origine ce constat étonnant : bien que les acteurs ayant participé à cette aventure aient vécu jusqu’à peu et, qu’au cours de leur vie, de nombreuses interviews se soient attachées à retranscrire l’histoire et le déroulement des mythiques séances, il n’existe aucune certitude sur de nombreux points techniques. Une question aussi simple, par exemple, que de connaitre la composition exacte d’un setup type d’une séance d’enregistrement d’Elvis Presley (nombre, spécificités et emplacements des micros, effets utilisés, modus operandi de la chaîne du son) reste encore aujourd’hui sans réponse. Cet état de fait est d’autant plus surprenant, d’ailleurs, que Sam Phillips a réalisé plusieurs interviews pour des magazines professionnels dédiés aux ingénieurs du son. C’est donc à une véritable
« enquête » que nous nous livrerons afin de définir non pas une « vérité », mais de proposer différents scénarios techniquement plausibles suivant les possibilités factuelles qui se dégageront de l’étude des sources. Pour symboliser le flou qui entoure ces séances, le « faux mystère » du slapback, technique de production d’un écho en utilisant deux magnétophones, nous a semblé un exemple probant autour duquel organiser notre mémoire.

From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.

Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.

Galilée aborde l’étude physique de l’acoustique dans un court passage des Discorsi, son dernier ouvrage. Pourtant son père Vincenzo, musicien et théoricien, avait écrit plusieurs textes sur le sujet. Galilée étudie la nature vibratoire des sons et affirme que leur hauteur est liée au nombre de vibrations. Dans l’incapacité de les compter, il n’utilise pas le terme « fréquence », mais une périphrase «  nombre de vibrations dans le même temps ». Et il imagine deux expériences pour illustrer sa théorie : l’une repose sur l’analogie entre les vibrations sonores et les ondes à la surface de l’eau, et l’autre sur l’observation des traces laissée sur une plaque de laiton par le frottement sonore d’un outil tranchant. Ces traces (« virgules ») sont espacées, et Galilée établit une corrélation entre les variations des espacements et la hauteur du son produit. Cette expérience doit lui permettre de démontrer la relation qu’il  propose. Cependant l’analyse qu’il en fait est partiellement erronée alors que sa théorie est juste. De nos jours, largement imprégnés du système technique du phonographe, nous pouvons, en reproduisant cette expérience,  comprendre les raisons qui sont à l’origine de ces erreurs. Il reste néanmoins que Galilée est le précurseur de la représentation graphique des vibrations qui sera à la fin du  XIXème siècle à l’origine des procédés d’enregistrement des sons.

Resumen: La grabación sonora comercial es un producto, un documento y un objeto acústico-musical, mientras que la portada es su rostro y carta de recomendación. Más aún, la iconografía de las carátulas de discos puede derivar en ejemplos destacados de publicidad inteligente.
Como caso de estudio se explican ejemplos destacados del corpus total de grabaciones integrales de Iberia de Isaac Albéniz publicadas en el ámbito internacional, cuyas portadas han buscado crear un nicho de mercado por medio de representaciones visuales relacionadas con el espíritu de la música que, aunque sigue siendo la misma, conforme se satura el mercado, las ediciones publicadas incluyen una carátula atractiva cada vez más alejada de los tópicos visuales.
En definitiva, es importante realizar estudios especializados, sobre grabaciones con embalajes destacados, que muestren modelos redituables que permitan generar ventas a los sellos independientes en el espectro comercial de la música clásica dentro mercado discográfico actual.

Palabras claves: Iconografía musical, Musicología, Discografía, Iberia de Albéniz


Abstract: A commercial sound recording is a product, a document, and an acoustic-musical object, while the album’s cover lends it its look and functions like a business card. Moreover, the iconography applied on cover can manifest itself in eye-catching illustrations of clever advertising. 
This case study examines outstanding examples of cover art all belonging to a select group of complete recordings of Isaac Albéniz’s piano series, Iberia, published in a great variety of places around the world. The cover art intended to create a niche market through visual representations related to the spirit of the music, and for the very same reason, as soon as the market is saturated, each new edition offers more and more attractive covers increasingly distant from the previously established visual conventions. 
As a consequence, the argument is put forward that it is essential to produce specialized studies on recordings with special packaging. In addition, this new market presents us with profitable models that allow the independent labels to build a revenue in the commercial spectrum within the current classical music recording industry.

Keywords: Musical Iconography, Musicology, Discography, Albéniz’s Iberia

Contemporary Indian films, in their essentially digitalised realms, incorporate techniques such as the location-based multitrack “sync” recording, and surround sound design that reorder the organization of cinematic sound. These practices contrast with the earlier mono- or stereo formats by reconfiguring the linear construct of a soundtrack to produce a spatially evocative sonic environment that engages the listener with a more life-like auditory experience of the fictional site. Using significant examples from post-2000 Indian films, this article shows how earlier production practices are being replaced by “sync” sound recording and surround sound mixing with a richly spatial arrangement of site-specific ambience. The article argues that these layers of ambient sounds lead to audiences establishing their embodied experience of presence in regards to the fictional site via auditory spatial cognition and immersion in a cinematic soundscape. By situating contemporary sound production practices within the various trajectories of Indian cinema, this article contributes to the broader field of research on the key developments in constructing spatial environments for cinema.

The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and production. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.

Since their 19th-century rediscovery, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas became a milestone both in the educational for violin and in virtuosos’ repertoires. This two-fold destination engendered a series of binary oppositions, which seem to have profoundly influenced the fortune of the collections.
This paper inquiries into the Italian reception of Sonatas and Partitas in the late 20th century, focusing on two specific oppositions. Firstly, the internal structure of Sonatas and Partitas let performers and organisers conceive them as a coherent collection, or as a series of distinct pieces suitable for showing performers’ technical and musical skills. Secondly, both collections could be oppositely considered as the latest violin masterwork of the Baroque era or as the first witness of modern instrumental technique.
The aim is to show how diverse premises entailed different reception-phenomena, in the complex web of Italian performers, concert life, and the ​broader discographic market.

This paper focuses on how I collect and curate sound recordings, particularly the 78rpm shellac format. It deals with the motivating forces behind why I collect sound recordings and how I situate them in their appropriate historical context - through curated exhibitions, blog writing and reissue projects. I touch upon curating methodology involving sound and how the reissue "package" can function as a physical site in a similar way to an exhibition space. I also draw attention to the importance of sound recordings as an active, living history in an Australian context, and why we should do more to share and disseminate them.