Overview

This Handbook explores and critiques a new sonic reality – one which unearths new narratives that chart embryonic practices from the early twentieth century that have developed in parallel with accepted narratives of electronic music. Today’s musical and artistic practices within technology-based music represent radical changes in production, engagement and dissemination of all sonic arts for composers, musicians, listeners, media content creators and casual music users. Constant everyday exposure to electronic or processed sounds influences our listening skills and listening intentionality, and our ideas of what constitutes valuable sound experiences have expanded radically. What are we listening to? How and why? This new reality is also more inclusive, and technology-borne music now appears as the new folk music – unwritten, improvised and finding its own relevance unfettered by the traditional hierarchies of taste. It is also where black and Asian technology-based experimental music is emerging with its own sonic genealogy, where music is no longer limited to sound only but can be more fruitfully seen as a branch of media arts, combining diverse materials, techniques and tools into more holistic experiences.

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9781032554204

Table of Contents

Reviews

An incredibly comprehensive and much-needed addition to the conversation surrounding music technology, this volume is a profound and fascinating reframing of electronic and experimental music history through the lens of composers, performers, practices, concepts, instruments, and communities that have been completely ignored or otherwise severely overlooked in the traditional academic discourse. I highly recommend this for anyone who listens outside of the norm. - Sarah Davachi, musicologist, composer and performer of technology-based music. Histories calcify. This applies to experimental art forms and new technologies as much as it does to more conservative fields. Every so often ideas have to be refreshed, revised, returned to a state of fluidity. This well-curated book is one of those agents of change, dealing as it does with legacies of techno-mysticism, noise as disruption, ethnomusicological field recording, prototypes of net communication, technology as politics and overlooked figures whose significance has only recently been recognised. To apply a Pauline Oliveros maxim to the entire volume, the question is not 'what am I hearing' but 'how am I listening'? - David Toop, musician, author, Emeritus professor, London College of Communication

Author Information

Jøran Rudi was educated at New York University and pioneered the digital development of music in Norway as composer, studio director (NOTAM 1993–2019), technologist and historian. He is currently the Leverhulme Professor at the University of Huddersfield. Monty Adkins is a composer and professor of electronic music at the University of Huddersfield. He has worked extensively on the tape archive of Roberto Gerhard and has published four edited collections on the composer’s work. He is currently leading an Arts and Humanities Research Council research project investigating the electronic music of Ernest Berk.

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