An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity. Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might. Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises. An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world—and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.

People are chemical machines, yet we (and some other animals) develop a sense of beauty. Why and how did it evolve? How is it formed? This book answers these questions from the perspective of scientists with deep knowledge of the arts. It interweaves experimental sciences with the histories of art, architecture, music, dance, speech, literature, and food. Although we perceive each of our senses to be dramatically different, the authors show them all to be similar under the hood—similar in how they function and in how they shape our aesthetic experience. The authors cover many fields, and do not assume the reader has any special knowledge or expertise. They avoid jargon, equations and formulae, and begin every discussion at an introductory level. However, introductory does not mean elementary. This is a broad knife that cuts deep.

On interpreting musical phenomena in terms of mental function

This edition of the guide to audio has been expanded to include the latest on digital audio technology and features new sections on multimedia, the Web, surround sound and mastering.

About "Uninformed Conscience" John F. Kavanaugh, S.J. says "If a nation or church forms its people to accept assertions blindly, without supporting evidence, it will form a community not of moral agents but of menaces. They may be sincere, but they will be sincere menaces." [AMERICA, June 21-28, 2010, pg 9] Conscience speaks to the meaning of Eucharist. If we buy in to the Eucharistic Theology of the Cosmic Christ, we must be open to the vital coinage of death. The multiplication of many from one is the miracle of divine/ human hypostasis, the miracle of the largesse of symbiotic life. The amplification of life speaks to the truth that less is more, that unless the seed dies there is no flourishing and amplification of life. Individuality resources multiplicity even as multiplicity resources individuality; spirituality is resurrection-consciousness, the energy of prevision and provision that does not die but transforms and transfers into multiplicity. Resurrection is the consciousness of self-reflective vitality. About Eucharist, right as grain says it best. It is in dying that we live; it is in giving that we receive; that we become one with Other-the personal oneness of Eucharist in the Cosmic Christ. Wisdom is Eucharistic consciousness, the intentional embrace of transformation. In mindfulness we become the "good seed" that greens the greater abundance of life. The greening of life from the dying seed informs the adage "better to give than receive." And so must be our individual relationship with each other and nature. What Self Donation Is is about living the fulfilled, abundant life of informed conscience, not by blind submission to cultural death as imposed by worldview blindness of staticism and centrism. Faith in absolutism is blind; openness to evolution is visionary. Absolutism misinforms conscience and cultures premature death; transformation informs and matures open life.