The guitar is one of the most evocative instruments in the world. It features in music as diverse as heavy metal, blues, indie and flamenco, as well as Indian classical music, village music making in Papua New Guinea and carnival in Brazil. This cross-cultural popularity makes it a unique starting point for understanding social interaction and cultural identity. Guitar music can be sexy, soothing, melancholy or manic, but it nearly always brings people together and creates a common ground even if this common ground is often the site of intense social, cultural, economic and political negotiation and contest.This book explores how people use guitars and guitar music in various nations across the world as a musical and symbolic basis for creating identities. In a world where place and space are challenged by the pace of globalization, the guitar provides images, sounds and styles that help define new cultural territories. Guitars play a crucial part in shaping the commercial music industry, educational music programmes, and local community atmosphere. Live or recorded, guitar music and performance, collecting and manufacture sustains a network of varied social exchanges that constitute a distinct cultural milieu.Representing the first sustained analysis of what the guitar means to artists and audiences world-wide, this book demonstrates that this seemingly simple material artefact resonates with meaning as well as music.

The soundtrack to Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros.(tm) Wii is packed with melodic, syncopated themes that sound great on the piano With this officially licensed sheet music collection, pianists can dazzle friends and family by playing 17 familiar themes from the beloved video game. The arrangements in this Easy Piano edition are moderately streamlined compared to those in the separately published Intermediate-Advanced edition, yet they retain a full and impressive sound. Titles: Title Theme * Ground Theme * Underground Theme * Underwater Theme * Desert Theme * Castle Theme * Airship Theme * Koopa Battle * Castle Boss Battle * Toad House * Enemy Course * Invincible Theme * Staff Credit Roll * World 1 Map * Player Down * Game Over * Ending Demo.

A thrilling and tumultuous, behind-the-scenes account of house music in NYC. The Beat, the Scene, the Sound follows DJ Disciple and his behind-the-scenes account of how DJs, promoters, fans, and others transformed house music from a DIY project into an international sensation-dive into the glitzy clubs, underground parties, and the diverse communities who made up the scene amidst the tumult of 1980s/90s-era NYC-between the fall of disco and the rise of EDM. The book unearths many untold stories of the era. When house first rose to prominence in the 1980s, it brought people together-Palladium, Paradise Garage, Tunnel, Zanzibar, Studio 54, and other clubs were going strong. But as DJ Disciple established himself in the scene, he witnessed it shatter. During the crack-cocaine epidemic, he literally dodged bullets bringing his records to and from clubs at night. HIV/AIDS and homophobia threw up fear-based partitions. Then, mayors worked to close the clubs. House music was pushed underground and then abroad to the UK and Europe. Disciple and many other DJs sought to regain a footing in the United States, but that only became possible with the rise of commercialized EDM. With dozens of interviews and historic photographs, The Beat, the Scene, the Sound shows what is possible when you bring people together and what can unravel when you split them apart.

Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for the first time in "Analog Days," a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.

The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used--from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson--recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.

Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in "Switched-On Bach," from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, "Analog Days" conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city's subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output - which began with the organ and ended with visual art - have kept Tudor a puzzle. Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The pristine snap of the LinnDrum. The bottom-heavy beats of the Roland 808. The groundbreaking samples of the E-MUSP-1200. All these machines-and their weirder, wilder-sounding cousins-changed composition, recording, and performance habits forever. Their distinctive sounds and styles helped create new genres of music, like hip hop and EDM. But they altered every musical style, from mainstream pop to heavy metal to jazz. Dan LeRoy traces the drum machine from its low-tech beginnings in the Fifties and Sixties to its evolution in the Seventies and its ubiquity in the Eighties, when seemingly overnight, it infiltrated every genre of music. Drum machines put some drummers out of work, while keeping others on their toes. They anticipated virtually every musical trend of the last five decades: sequencing, looping, sampling, and all forms of digital music creation. But the personalities beneath those perfect beats make the story of drum machines a surprisingly human one-told here for the very first time.

Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The pristine snap of the LinnDrum. The bottom-heavy beats of the Roland 808. The groundbreaking samples of the E-MUSP-1200. All these machines-and their weirder, wilder-sounding cousins-changed composition, recording, and performance habits forever. Their distinctive sounds and styles helped create new genres of music, like hip hop and EDM. But they altered every musical style, from mainstream pop to heavy metal to jazz. Dan LeRoy traces the drum machine from its low-tech beginnings in the Fifties and Sixties to its evolution in the Seventies and its ubiquity in the Eighties, when seemingly overnight, it infiltrated every genre of music. Drum machines put some drummers out of work, while keeping others on their toes. They anticipated virtually every musical trend of the last five decades: sequencing, looping, sampling, and all forms of digital music creation. But the personalities beneath those perfect beats make the story of drum machines a surprisingly human one-told here for the very first time.

FutureDJs: How to DJ is the ideal resource for anyone interested in the alchemy of mixing records. Perfect for the aspiring student with no prior knowledge as well as DJs looking to extend their skills and explore new genres. This complete guide covers all the technical foundations for DJ-ing in any genre or style, from fundamental skills such as beat-matching right through to using effects, scratching and beat-juggling. Featuring clear step-by-step instructions, stunning diagrams, at-a-glance guides to genres and packed with comments from professional DJs, this book will inspire and guide you through the creative and thrilling techniques required to become a FutureDJ. Every skill can be practised over and over in a range of genres from House, Techno and Trance to Grime, Trap, Hip-hop and Drum and Bass. "At last, a comprehensive and authentic book on the art of DJ-ing. The FutureDJs team have delivered a must-have book for anyone aspiring to become a DJ or enhance their existing skills." Mark Brown (Cr2 Records) "This brilliant handbook will help you to develop your skills, musical understanding and sense of what makes DJ-ing unique, exciting and important as a modern musical skill. Dig in and enjoy." Dr Pete Dale

The Process That Is the World grapples with John Cage not just as a composer, but as a philosopher advocating for an ontology of difference in keeping with the kind posited by Gilles Deleuze. Cage's philosophy is not simply a novel method for composition, but an extensive argument about the nature of reality itself, the construction of subjects within that reality, and the manner in which subjectivity and a self-creative world exist in productive tension with one another. Over the course of the study, these themes are developed in the realms of the ontology of a musical work, performance practices, ethics, and eventually a study of Cagean politics and the connection between aesthetic experience and the generation of new forms of collective becoming-together. The vision of Cage that emerges through this study is not simply that of the maverick composer or the "inventor of genius," but of a thinker and artist responding to insights about the world-as-process as it extends through the philosophical, artistic, and ethical registers: the world as potential for variance, reinvention, and permanent revolution.

The music industry is a rapidly evolving field, with new creative approaches and technological advances combining to catalyse and inspire innovations. Innovation in Music 2015 (InMusic'15) was an international conference organised by KES International and hosted by Anglia Ruskin University over the 7th to 9th June 2015 in Cambridge, UK. Innovation in Music broadly represents all aspects of innovation in the field of music, particularly encompassing music performance, audio technology, music production and the commercial music industries. The conference acted as a forum for industry experts and professionals to mix with researchers and academics to report on the latest advances and exchange ideas. Award-winning industry experts including David Wrench, Tim Exile, Peter Jenner, Mandy Parnell, Gary Bromham, Bryan Martin and Simon Gogerly contributed to the conference keynote presentations. This volume includes articles developed from presentations delivered

LEON THEREMIN led a life of flamboyant musical invention laced with daring electronic stealth. A creative genius and prolific inventor, Theremin launched the field of electronic music virtually singlehandedly in 1920 with the musical instrument that bears his name. The theremin -- the only instrument that is played without being touched -- created a sensation worldwide and paved the way for the modern synthesizer. Its otherworldly sound became familiar in sci-fi films and even in rock music. This magical instrument that charmed millions, however, is only the beginning of the story.

As a Soviet scientist, Theremin surrendered his life and work to the service of State espionage. On assignment in Depression-era America, he became the toast of New York society and worked the engines of capitalist commerce while passing data on U.S. industrial technology to the Soviet apparat. Following his sudden disappearance from New York in 1938, Theremin was exiled to a Siberian labor camp. He subsequently vanished into the top-secret Soviet intelligence machine and was presumed dead for nearly thirty years. Using the same technology that lay behind the theremin, he designed bugging devices that eavesdropped on U.S. diplomatic offices and stood at the center of a pivotal cold war confrontation. Throughout his life, Theremin developed many other electronic wonders, including one of the earliest televisions and multimedia devices that anticipated performance art and virtual reality by decades.

In this first full biography of Leon Theremin, Albert Glinsky depicts the inventor's nearly one-hundred-year life span as a microcosm of the twentieth century. Theremin is seen at the epicenter of most of themajor events of the century: the Russian Revolution, two world wars, America's Great Depression, Stalin's purges, the cold war, and perestroika. His life emerges as no less than a metaphor for the divergence of communism and capitalism.

Theremin blends the whimsical and the treacherous into a chronicle that takes in everything from the KGB to Macy's store windows, Alcatraz to the Beach Boys, Hollywood thrillers to the United Nations, Joseph Stalin to Shirley Temple. Theremin's world of espionage and invention is an amazing drama of hidden loyalties, mixed motivations, and an irrepressibly creative spirit.

(Book). Here's your complete guide to using MIDI synthesizers, samplers, soundcards, sequencers, computers and more The MIDI Companion shows how a MIDI system or systems for a wide range of situations can be assembled quickly, easily and trouble-free. Describes how to synchronize MIDI sequencers, drum machines, multitrack equipment, SMPTE-based equipment, and other MIDI instruments. Describes each and every MIDI code and the techniques used in transmitting these codes between various MIDI devices. Explains how to get the most out of any musical situation that calls for the use of synthesizers and electronic musical instruments. This totally new edition includes more information on the actual applications and musical uses for MIDI. A complete chapter devoted to General MIDI, plus the charts for GM sounds. Two additional new chapters on The MIDI Studio and MIDI And The Personal Computer. New diagrams, updated diagrams, new graphics. Profusely illustrated with pictures, photographs and diagrams, and also includes a detailed glossary.

How To Make A Noise-perhaps the most widely read book about synthesizer programming-is a comprehensive, practical guide to sound design and synthesizer programming techniques using subtractive (analog) synthesis, frequency modulation synthesis, additive synthesis, wave-sequencing, and sample-based synthesis. The book looks at programming using examples from six software synthesizers: Cameleon 5000 from Camel Audio, Rhino 2 from BigTick, Surge from Vember Audio, Vanguard from reFX, Wusikstation from Wusik dot com, and Z3TA+ from Cakewalk. Simon Cann is a musician and writer based in London. He is author of Cakewalk Synthesizers: From Presets to Power User, Building a Successful 21st Century Music Career, and Sample This (with Klaus P Rausch). You can contact Simon through his website: www.noisesculpture.com.

Electroacoustic music, a flourishing medium for over half a century, remains today, in a wide array of technological forms, one of the major areas of creative activity in music. However, it has long been overlooked in theoretical studies--possibly in part because it does away with traditional scores and notation. In this landmark collection, a group of distinguished composers and theorists who have actively worked in the field present detailed analyses of important electroacoustic works while also demonstrating some recent approaches to the analysis of the music of this medium. Included here are discussions of such significant works as Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge "(1955/56), Iannis Xenakis' "Diamorphoses" (1957), and Jean-Claude Risset's "Contours" (1982). Overall, the collection aims to elucidate the sonic design of each of the electroacoustic music works under investigation, using its best examples as a lens through which to examine an unduly neglected genre.

Demonstrating recent techniques in the analysis of electroacoustic music, the volume also considers various compositional approaches as well as computer applications that have become an irreplaceable tool in the composing of this music. So little has been written about this 20th-century art form that Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives is at once a fresh, bold step forward in musicology and analysis.

(Book). This is the most comprehensive and insightful study ever published on the pioneers of electric blues guitar including the great Chicago, Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, Texas and West Coast bluesmen. Rollin' and Tumblin' offers extensive interviews with some of the world's most famous blues guitarists, and poignant profiles of historical blues figures. Following a sweeping portrait of blues guitar history, the book features such players as T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins and many more.

Push: Software Design and the Cultural Politics of Music Production shows how changes in the design of music software in the first decades of the twenty-first century shaped the production techniques and performance practices of artists working across media, from hip-hop and electronic dance music to video games and mobile apps. Emerging alongside developments in digital music distribution such as peer-to-peer file sharing and the MP3 format, digital audio workstations like FL Studio and Ableton Live introduced design affordances that encouraged rapid music creation workflows through flashy, "user-friendly" interfaces. Meanwhile, software such as Avid's Pro Tools attempted to protect its status as the "industry standard," "professional" DAW of choice by incorporating design elements from pre-digital music technologies. Other software, like Cycling 74's Max, asserted its alterity to "commercial" DAWs by presenting users with nothing but a blank screen. These are more than just aesthetic design choices. Push examines the social, cultural, and political values designed into music software, and how those values become embodied by musical communities through production and performance. It reveals ties between the maximalist design of FL Studio, skeuomorphic design in Pro Tools, and gender inequity in the music products industry. It connects the computational thinking required by Max, as well as iZotope's innovations in artificial intelligence, with the cultural politics of Silicon Valley's "design thinking." Finally, it thinks through what happens when software becomes hardware, and users externalize their screens through the use of MIDI controllers, mobile media, and video game controllers. Amidst the perpetual upgrade culture of music technology, Push provides a model for understanding software as a microcosm for the increasing convergence of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and techno-utopianism that has come to define our digital lives.

A comprehensive text and reference that covers all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, synthesis techniques, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, synthesizer architecture, system interconnection, and psychoacoustics. The Computer Music Tutorial is a comprehensive text and reference that covers all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, synthesis techniques, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, synthesizer architecture, system interconnection, and psychoacoustics. A special effort has been made to impart an appreciation for the rich history behind current activities in the field. Profusely illustrated and exhaustively referenced and cross-referenced, The Computer Music Tutorial provides a step-by-step introduction to the entire field of computer music techniques. Written for nontechnical as well as technical readers, it uses hundreds of charts, diagrams, screen images, and photographs as well as clear explanations to present basic concepts and terms. Mathematical notation and program code examples are used only when absolutely necessary. Explanations are not tied to any specific software or hardware. The material in this book was compiled and refined over a period of several years of teaching in classes at Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Naples, IRCAM, Les Ateliers UPIC, and in seminars and workshops in North America, Europe, and Asia.

In this new edition of the classic text on the history and evolution of electronic music, Peter Manning extends the definitive account of the medium from its birth to include key developments from the dawn of the 21st century to the present day. After explaining the antecedents of electronic music from the turn of the 20th century to the Second World War, Manning discusses the emergence of the early 'classical' studios of the 1950s, and the subsequent evolution of more advanced analogue technologies during the 1960s and '70s, leading in turn to the birth and development of the MIDI synthesizer. Attention then turns to the characteristics of the digital revolution, from the pioneering work of Max Mathews at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1950s to the wealth of resources available today, facilitated by the development of the personal computer and allied digital technologies. The scope and extent of the technical and creative developments that have taken place since the late 1990s are considered in an extended series of new and updated chapters. These include topics such as the development of the digital audio workstation, laptop music, the Internet, and the emergence of new performance interfaces. Manning offers a critical perspective of the medium in terms of the philosophical and technical features that have shaped its growth. Emphasizing the functional characteristics of emerging technologies and their influence on the creative development of the medium, Manning covers key developments in both commercial and the non-commercial sectors to provide readers with the most comprehensive resource available on the evolution of this ever-expanding area of creativity.

From the swelling synths of Depeche Mode to the dance-friendly grooves of Thomas Dolby and from the power ballads of Journey to the New Power Generation of Prince the music of the '80s was infused with the sound of keyboards. You'll learn:THU How technological developments in keyboards helped artists such as Erasure Human League Peter Gabriel Kraftwerk Bruce Hornsby Frank Zappa and Jam and Lewis create entirely new sounds a and how their production tricks can help you make great music today.THU How to recreate the sounds of the '80s using the soft synths and recording software you already have on your computer.THU The breakdowns of the piano and keyboard parts for stadium rockers by Night Ranger Journey and Bon Jovi.

The electronic medium allows any audible sound to be contextualized as music. This creates unique structural possibilities as spectrum, dynamics, space, and time become continuous dimensions of musical articulation. What we hear in electronic music ventures beyond what we traditionally characterize as musical sound and challenges our auditory perception, on the one hand, and our imagination, on the other. Based on an extensive listening study conducted over four years, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the experience of electronic music. It pairs artistic practice with theories from a range of disciplines to communicate how this music operates on perceptual, conceptual, and affective levels. Looking at the common and divergent ways in which our minds respond to electronic sound, it investigates how we build narratives from our experience of electronic music and situate ourselves in them.

A History of Rock Music: The Rock & Roll Era is a celebration of the roots of rock & roll and its emergence as the soundtrack to teenage rebellion and a liberatingly raucous, joyous and rebellious music for one especially fortunate generation. The book is a lovingly detailed examination of the pre-Beatles 1950's era of classic rock & roll, with special attention devoted to the music's varied musical influences, most notably the Blues, Country & Western, Gospel Music, Boogie-Woogie and Rhythm & Blues. It is both a detailed history and a musical appreciation of America's greatest artistic gift to the world.