Material Culture and Electronic Sound

by Frode Weium (Editor), Tim Boon (Editor)

Overview

This eighth volume of the Artefacts series explores how material culture has affected music and sound. Presented are a collection of essays exploring technological innovations and their effects on musical culture. Contributors include composers, performers, musicologists, and scientists, providing diverse insights into the nature of music. With a foreword by renowned British producer Brian Eno, Material Culture and Electronic Sound examines what has happened as a result of technology and music crossing paths.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944466084
Publisher:	Smithsonian Institution Press
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Pages:	293
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Frode Weium is a curator at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Osloand PhD candidate at the Department of History and Classical Studies, Norwegian Universityof Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. His permanent exhibitionsinclude A Sound Mind in a Sound Body (2003), Music Machines (2009), and Instrument:Stories of Science (2011). He has also contributed to temporary exhibitions on music andacoustics. He was editor of the museum book series Volund from 2000 to 2003. Over thelast few years, he has written several articles on music technology, focusing on the historyof early electronic musical instruments (such as the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot,and the Trautonium) and investigating broader questions about the relationship betweentechnology and culture. His PhD project concerns the introduction and reception ofelectronic musical instruments in Norway. In 2007 he organized the twelfth Artefactsmeeting in Oslo. Contact Frode Weium at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology,Kjelsåsveien 143, 0491 Oslo, Norway, [e-mail].

Tim Boon is head of research and public history at the Science Museum, London.His exhibitions include Health Matters (1994), Making the Modern World (2000), andOramics to Electronica (2011). He was curator of the Icebreaker concert performancesof Brian Eno’s Apollo in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings.He has a long-standing personal interest in music—he even built his own synthesizer inthe 1980s—and has recently begun to develop academic interests in this area. His firstbook, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (WallflowerPress) was published in 2008. He is currently running the Science Museum’s PublicHistory project, which is experimenting with participatory exhibitions with the aim ofdeveloping more effective displays on the history of science and technology. ContactTim Boon at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD, [e-mail].

Table of Contents

Foreword by Brian Eno
Introduction by Tim Boon and Frode Weium
Chapter 1: Bellowphones and Blowed Strings: The Auxeto-Instruments of Horace Short and Charles Algernon Parsons
Chapter 2: Artefacts in Performance
Chapter 3: Technology and authenticity: the reception of the Hammond organ in Norway
Chapter 4: Mimics, menaces or new musical horizons? Musicians’ attitudes towards the first commercial drum machines and samplers
Chapter 5: The Magnetic Tape Recorder. Recording Aesthetics in the New Era of Schizophonia
Chapter 6: Stockhausen meets King Tubby's: the stepped filter and its influence as a musical instrument on two different styles of music
Chapter 7: The Oramics Machine: The Lost Legacy of British Electronic and Computer Music?
Chapter 8: Musical instruments and user interfaces in two centuries
Chapter 9: Austrian pioneers of the electrification of musical instruments
Chapter 10: New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments Rediscovered

Editorial Reviews

Material Culture and Electronic Sound explores how material culture has affected music and sound more generally. Technological innovations in music originally created to solve specific problems sometimes resulted in broadly changing the landscape or music more generally. Boon and Weium offer an anthology of 10 scholarly papers that provide case studies of technological innovations and their effects on musical culture. Contributors include composers, performers, musicologists, and scientists, providing diverse insights into the nature of music. The emphasis clearly is more on music than sound generally, although one paper on the magnetic tape recorder reaches a bit farther out.

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