This book transforms phenomenology, music, technology, and the cultural arts from within. Gathering contributions by performing artists, media technology designers, nomadic composers, and distinguished musicological scholars, it explores a rich array of concepts such as embodiment, art and technology, mindfulness meditation, time and space in music, self and emptiness, as well as cultural heritage preservation. It does so via close studies on music phenomenology theory, works involving experimental music and technology, and related cultural and historical issues. This book will be of considerable interest to readers from the fields of sound studies, science and technology studies, phenomenology, cultural studies, media studies, and sound art theory. This book is equally relevant and insightful for musicians, composers, media artists, sound artists, technology designers, and curators and arts administrators from the performing and visual arts.

This book transforms phenomenology, music, technology, and the cultural arts from within. Gathering contributions by performing artists, media technology designers, nomadic composers, and distinguished musicological scholars, it explores a rich array of concepts such as embodiment, art and technology, mindfulness meditation, time and space in music, self and emptiness, as well as cultural heritage preservation. It does so via close studies on music phenomenology theory, works involving experimental music and technology, and related cultural and historical issues. This book will be of considerable interest to readers from the fields of sound studies, science and technology studies, phenomenology, cultural studies, media studies, and sound art theory. This book is equally relevant and insightful for musicians, composers, media artists, sound artists, technology designers, and curators and arts administrators from the performing and visual arts.

Listening and Voice is an updated and expanded edition of Don Ihde's groundbreaking 1976 classic in the study of sound. Ranging from the experience of sound through language, music, religion, and silence, clear examples and illustrations take the reader into the important and often overlooked role of the auditory in human life. Ihde's newly added preface, introduction, and chapters extend these sound studies to the technologies of sound, including musical instrumentation, hearing aids, and the new group of scientific technologies which make infra- and ultra-sound available to human experience.

Max van Manen offers an extensive exploration of phenomenological traditions and methods for the human sciences. It is his first comprehensive statement of phenomenological thought and research in over a decade. Phenomenology of practice refers to the meaning and practice of phenomenology in professional contexts such as psychology, education, and health care, as well as to the practice of phenomenological methods in contexts of everyday living. Van Manen presents a detailed description of key phenomenological ideas as they have evolved over the past century; he then thoughtfully works through the methodological issues of phenomenological reflection, empirical methods, and writing that a phenomenology of practice offers to the researcher. Van Manen’s comprehensive work will be of great interest to all concerned with the interrelationship between being and acting in human sciences research and in everyday life.

The Beatles and the Beatlesque address a paradox emanating from The Beatles’ music through a cross-disciplinary hybrid of reflections, drawing from both, musical practice itself and academic research. Indeed, despite their extreme stylistic variety, The Beatles’ songs seem to always bear a distinctive identity that emerges even more in similar works by other artists, whether they are merely inspired, derivative or explicitly paying homage. The authors, a musicologist and music producer, emphasize the importance of record production in The Beatles' music in a way that does justice not only to the final artifacts (the released songs) but also to the creative process itself (i.e., the songs "in the making"). Through an investigation into the work of George Martin and his team, as well as The Beatles themselves, this text sheds light on the role of the studio in shaping the group's eclectic but unique sound. The chapters address what makes a song “Beatlesque”, to what extent production choices are responsible for developing a style, production being understood not as a mere set of technicalities, but also in a more conceptual way, as well as the aesthetics, semiotics and philosophy that animated studio activity. The outcome is a book that will appeal to both students and researchers, as well as, of course, musicophiles of all kinds.

Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to Žižek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice. The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

New and expanded edition of the now classic study in the phenomenology of sound.