‘Sonic intimacy’ is a key concept through which sound, human and technological relations can be assessed in relation to racial capitalism. What is sonic intimacy, how is it changing and what is at stake in its transformation, are questions that should concern us all. Through an analysis of alternative music cultures of the Black Atlantic (reggae sound systems, jungle pirate radio and grime YouTube music videos), Malcolm James critically shows how sonic intimacy pertains to modernity’s social, psychic, spatial and temporal movements. This book explores what is urgently at stake in the development of sonic intimacy for human relations and alternative black and anti-capitalist public politics.

Political campaigning affects numerous realms under the communication umbrella with each channel seeking to influence as many individuals as possible. In higher education, there is a growing scholarly interest in communication issues and subjects, especially on the role of music, in the political arena. Music and Messaging in the African Political Arena provides innovative insights into providing music and songs as an integral part of sending political messages to a broader spectrum of audiences, especially during political campaigns. The content within this publication covers such topics as framing theory, national identity, and ethnic politics, and is designed for politicians, campaign managers, political communication scholars, researchers, and students.

The Hispanic rite, a medieval non-Roman Western liturgy, was practiced across the Iberian Peninsula for over half a millennium and functioned as the most distinct marker of Christian identity in this region. As Christians typically began every liturgical day throughout the year by singing a vespertinus, this chant genre in particular provides a unique window into the cultural and religious life of medieval Iberia. The Hispanic rite has the largest corpus of extant manuscripts of all non-Roman liturgies in the West, which testifies to the importance placed on their transmission through political and cultural upheavals. Its chants, however, use a notational system that lacks clear specification of pitch and has kept them barred from in-depth study. Text, Liturgy and Music in the Hispanic Rite is the first detailed analysis of the interactions between textual, liturgical, and musical variables across the entire extant repertoire of a chant genre central to the Hispanic rite, the vespertinus. By approaching the vespertini through a holistic methodology that integrates liturgy, melody, and text, author Raquel Rojo Carrillo identifies the genre's norms and traces the different shapes it adopts across the liturgical year and on different occasions. In this way, the book offers an unprecedented insight into the liturgical edifice of the Hispanic rite and the daily experience of Christians in medieval Iberia.

What happens in our unconscious minds when we listen to, produce or perform popular music? The Unconscious - a much misunderstood concept from philosophy and psychology - works through human subjects as we produce music and can be traced through the music we engage with. Through a new collaboration between music theorist and philosopher, Smith and Overy present the long history of the unconscious and its related concepts, working systematically through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, to theorists such as Deleuze and Kristeva. The theories offered are vital to follow the psychological complexity of popular music, demonstrated through close readings of individual songs, albums, artists, genres, and popular music practices. Among countless artists, Listening to the Unconscious draws from Prince to Sufjan Stevens, from Robyn to Xiu Xiu, from Joanna Newsom to Arcade Fire, from PJ Harvey to LCD Sound System, each of whom offer exciting inroads into the fascinating worlds of our unconscious musical minds. And in return, theories of the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of popular music.

Most die-hard Brazilian music fans would argue that Getz/Gilberto, the iconic 1964 album featuring "The Girl from Ipanema," is not the best bossa nova record. Yet we've all heard "The Girl from Ipanema" as background music in a thousand anodyne settings, from cocktail parties to telephone hold music. So how did Getz/Gilberto become the Brazilian album known around the world, crossing generational and demographic divides? Bryan McCann traces the history and making of Getz/Gilberto as a musical collaboration between leading figure of bossa nova Joao Gilberto and Philadelphia-born and New York-raised cool jazz artist Stan Getz. McCann also reveals the contributions of the less-understood participants (Astrud Gilberto's unrehearsed, English-language vocals; Creed Taylor's immaculate production; Olga Albizu's arresting, abstract-expressionist cover art) to show how a perfect balance of talents led to not just a great album, but a global pop sensation. And he explains how Getz/Gilberto emerged from the context of Bossa Nova Rio de Janeiro, the brief period when the subtle harmonies and aching melodies of bossa nova seemed to distill the spirit of a modernizing, sensuous city. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

""Is there jazz in China?"" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.

What is the difference between an echo and a reverberation? How do you calculate the best note to whistle in a toilet?Where do you best place microphones for that perfect recording? In this fascinating little book, musician Steve Marshall explores the subject of acoustics. From decibels to dolphins, stereo to surround, this book will appeal to singers, musicians, architects, biologists, and anyone who ever wanted to know more about the wonderful world of sound.

From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, Hungarian composer Gyoergy Ligeti went through a remarkable period of stylistic transition, from the emulation of his fellow countryman Bela Bartok to his own individual style at the forefront of the Western-European avant-garde. Through careful study of the sketches and drafts, as well as analysis of the finished scores, Metamorphosis in Music takes a detailed look at this compositional evolution. Author Benjamin R. Levy includes sketch studies created through transcriptions and reproductions of archival material-much of which has never before been published-providing new, detailed information about Ligeti's creative process and compositional methods. The book examines all of Ligeti's compositions from 1956 to 1970, analyzing little-known and unpublished works in addition to recognized masterpieces such as Atmospheres, Aventures, the Requieim, and the Chamber Concerto. Discoveries from Ligeti's sketches, prose, and finished scores lead to an enriched appreciation of these already multifaceted works. Throughout the book, Levy interweaves sketch study with comments from interviews, counterbalancing the composer's own carefully crafted public narrative about his work, and revealing lingering attachments to older forms and insights into the creative process. Metamorphosis in Music is an essential treatment of a central figure of the musical midcentury, who found his place in a generation straddling the divide between the modern and post-modern eras.

Sonic Writing explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. Studying the domains of instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording under the rubrics of material, symbolic, and signal inscriptions of sound, the book describes how these historical techniques of sonic writing are implemented in new digital music technologies. With a scope ranging from ancient Greek music theory, medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence, it provides a theoretical grounding for further study and development of technologies of musical expression. The book draws a bespoke affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the importance of instrument design in the study of new music and projecting how new computational technologies, including machine learning, will transform our musical practices. Sonic Writing offers a richly illustrated study of contemporary musical media, where interactivity, artificial intelligence, and networked devices disclose new possibilities for musical expression. Thor Magnusson provides a conceptual framework for the creation and analysis of this new musical work, arguing that contemporary sonic writing becomes a new form of material and symbolic design--one that is bound to be ephemeral, a system of fluid objects where technologies are continually redesigned in a fast cycle of innovation.

Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou's African origins, transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits, rituals, structure, and music of the region's religions sheds light on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement. At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of Haiti's creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou's Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the songs of Rasin Figuier's Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman's Guede, legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor's Miami label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are analyzed with a method dubbed "Vodou hermeneutics" that harnesses history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou songs.

Using cine-ethnomusicology as a focus, Cineworlding introduces readers to ways of thinking eco-cinematically. Screens are omnipresent, we carry digital cinema production equipment in our pockets, but this screen-based technological revolution has barely impacted social science scholarship. Mixing existential phenomenological fiction about social science digital cinema research practice followed by theoretical reflection and discussion of methods, this book has emerged from a decade-long inquiry into cineworlding and a desire to help others produce digital media to engage creatively with the digital networks that surround us.

Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art. It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to "uncuration": untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution. Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.

Sonic Rupture applies a practitioner-led approach to urban soundscape design, which foregrounds the importance of creative encounters in global cities. This presents an alternative to those urban soundscape design approaches concerned with managing the negative health impacts of noise. Instead, urban noise is considered to be a creative material and cultural expression that can be reshaped with citywide networks of sonic installations. By applying affect theory the urban is imagined as an unfolding of the Affective Earth, and noise as its homogenous (and homogenizing) voice. It is argued that noise is an expressive material with which sonic practitioners can interface, to increase the creative possibilities of urban life. At the heart of this argument is the question of relationships: how do we augment and diversify those interconnections that weave together the imaginative life and the expressions of the land? The book details seven sound installations completed by the author as part of a creative practice research process, in which the sonic rupture model was discovered. The sonic rupture model, which aims to diversify human experiences and urban environments, encapsulates five soundscape design approaches and ten practitioner intentions. Multiple works of international practitioners are explored in relation to the discussed approaches. Sonic Rupture provides the domains of sound art, music, creative practice, urban design, architecture and environmental philosophy with a unique perspective for understanding those affective forces, which shape urban life. The book also provides a range of practical and conceptual tools for urban soundscape design that can be applied by the sonic practitioner.