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.

Understanding Video Game Music develops a musicology of video game music by providing methods and concepts for understanding music in this medium. From the practicalities of investigating the video game as a musical source to the critical perspectives on game music - using examples including Final Fantasy VII, Monkey Island 2, SSX Tricky and Silent Hill - these explorations not only illuminate aspects of game music, but also provide conceptual ideas valuable for future analysis. Music is not a redundant echo of other textual levels of the game, but central to the experience of interacting with video games. As the author likes to describe it, this book is about music for racing a rally car, music for evading zombies, music for dancing, music for solving puzzles, music for saving the Earth from aliens, music for managing a city, music for being a hero; in short, it is about music for playing.

You'll never listen to music the same way again Producer, audio engineer, and author Bobby Owsinski takes you behind-the-scenes of 20 of the biggest modern pop and hip-hop hits of the 21st century. Using a technique refined after years of listening to songs under the microscope of the studio, each song analysis by Bobby describes exactly how the song was constructed and why it was a hit, examining in detail the song form, the arrangement, the sound, and the production. This is a valuable must-have for everyone who loves music, musicians learning about arrangements, producers wanting to learn how hits are constructed, audio engineers analyzing the sounds of the hits, songwriters looking inside a hit's secrets, and fans who love facts and trivia about their favorite artists. Every song analysis has numerous "listen to" moments pointing out small but significant changes in the arrangement or sound that you might not have noticed before. Plus you'll get all the song facts never found all in one place like release date, songwriters, recording studio information, number of units sold, and chart position.

Includes: Beautiful (Christina Aguilera) * Born This Way (Lady Gaga) * Call Me Maybe (Carly Rae Jepsen) * Crazy In Love (Beyonce) * Crazy (Gnarls Barkley) * Drop It Like It's Hot (Snoop Dogg) * Firework (Katy Perry) * Get the Party Started (P nk) * Grenade (Bruno Mars) * I Gotta Feeling (The Black Eyed Peas) * In da Club (50 Cent) * Lights (Ellie Goulding) * Poker Face (Lady Gaga) * Sexy and I Know It (LMFAO) * SexyBack (Justin Timberlake) * Super Bass (Nicki Minaj) * Turn Me On (David Guetta) * Umbrella (Rihanna) * We Are Young (fun.) * Written in the Stars (Tinie Tempah).

Explore the fascinating history of the Muscle Shoals Sound.

This work presents 12 of the most volatile ethical issues facing the music industry. Real-life examples depict both sides of each controversy, and the list of resources provides tools for readers who wish to pursue the controversies further. Primary sources including court cases and excerpts from speeches help students build critical thinking skills in current issues, persuasive writing, and debate classes.

Among the controversies noted is the growing oligopoly of a few multinational music companies and the independent labels that are attempting to survive this market dominance. Drug abuse and violence depicted in music is discussed, as is its influence on young listeners. These issues and many more are discussed in detail as the authors outline the controversial topics of the music industry.

Although there have been two main perspectives on the nature of music through systematic and cultural musicology, music informatics has emerged as an interdisciplinary research area which provides a different idea on the nature of music through computer technologies. Structuring Music through Markup Language: Designs and Architectures offers a different approach to music by focusing on the information organization and the development of XML-based language. This book aims to offer a new set of tools on for practical implementations and a new investigation into the theory of music.

Istanbul is home to a multimillion dollar transnational music industry, which every year produces thousands of digital music recordings, including widely distributed film and television show soundtracks. Today, this centralized industry is responding to a growing global demand for Turkish, Kurdish, and other Anatolian ethnic language productions, and every year, many of its top-selling records incorporate elaborately orchestrated arrangements of rural folksongs. What accounts for the continuing demand for traditional music in local and diasporic markets? How is tradition produced in twenty-first century digital recording studios, and is there a "digital aesthetics" to contemporary recordings of traditional music? In Digital Traditions: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul's Recording Studio Culture, author Eliot Bates answers these questions and more with a case study into the contemporary practices of recording traditional music in Istanbul. Bates provides an ethnography of Turkish recording studios, of arrangers and engineers, studio musicianship and digital audio workstation kinesthetics. Digital Traditions investigates the moments when tradition is arranged, and how arrangement is simultaneously a set of technological capabilities, limitations and choices: a form of musical practice that desocializes the ensemble and generates an extended network of social relations, resulting in aesthetic art objects that come to be associated with a range of affective and symbolic meanings. Rich with visual analysis and drawing on Science & Technology Studies theories and methods, Digital Tradition sets a new standard for the study of recorded music. Scholars and general readers of ethnomusicology, Middle Eastern studies, folklore and science and technology studies are sure to find Digital Traditions an essential addition to their library.

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.

It is clear that the digital age has fully embraced music production, distribution, and transcendence for a vivid audience that demands more music both in quantity and versatility. However, the evolving world of digital music production faces a calamity of tremendous proportions: the asymmetrically increasing online piracy that devastates radio stations, media channels, producers, composers, and artists, severely threatening the music industry. Digital Tools for Computer Music Production and Distribution presents research-based perspectives and solutions for integrating computational methods for music production, distribution, and access around the world, in addition to challenges facing the music industry in an age of digital access, content sharing, and crime. Highlighting the changing scope of the music industry and the role of the digital age in such transformations, this publication is an essential resource for computer programmers, sound engineers, language and speech experts, legal experts specializing in music piracy and rights management, researchers, and graduate-level students across disciplines.

The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music establishes EDM's place on the map of popular music. The book accounts for various ambiguities, variations, transformations, and manifestations of EDM, pertaining to its generic fragmentation, large geographical spread, modes of consumption and, changes in technology. It focuses especially on its current state, its future, and its borders - between EDM and other forms of electronic music, as well as other forms of popular music. It accounts for the rise of EDM in places that are overlooked by the existing literature, such as Russia and Eastern Europe, and examines the multi-media and visual aspects such as the way EDM events music are staged and the specificity of EDM music videos. Divided into four parts - concepts, technology, celebrity, and consumption - this book takes a holistic look at the many sides of EDM culture.

Awarded a Certificate of Merit at the ARSC Awards for Excellence 2018 In the past two decades digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we think about, make and use popular music. From the production of multimillion selling pop records to the ubiquitous remix that has become a marker of Web 2.0, the emergence of new music production technologies have had a transformative effect upon 21st Century digital culture. Sonic Technologies examines these issues with a specific focus upon the impact of digitization upon creativity; that is, what musicians, cultural producers and prosumers do. For many, music production has moved out of the professional recording studio and into the home. Using a broad range of examples ranging from experimental electronic music to more mainstream genres, the book examines how contemporary creative practice is shaped by the visual and sonic look and feel of recording technologies such as Digital Audio Workstations.

This is an introduction to basic music technology, including acoustics for sound production and analysis, Fourier, frequency modulation, wavelets, and physical modeling and a classification of musical instruments and sound spaces for tuning and counterpoint. The acoustical theory is applied to its implementation in analogue and digital technology, including a detailed discussion of Fast Fourier Transform and MP3 compression. Beyond acoustics, the book discusses important symbolic sound event representation and software as typically realized by MIDI and denotator formalisms. The concluding chapters deal with globalization of music on the Internet, referring to iTunes, Spotify and similar environments. The book will be valuable for students of music, music informatics, and sound engineering.

This book explores how the rise of widely available digital technology impacts the way music is produced, distributed, promoted, and consumed, with a specific focus on the changing relationship between artists and audiences. Through in-depth interviewing, focus group interviewing, and discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how digital technology has created a closer, more collaborative, fluid, and multidimensional relationship between artist and audience. Artists and audiences are simultaneously engaged with music through technology-and technology through music-while negotiating personal and social aspects of their musical lives. In light of consistent, active engagement, rising co-production, and collaborative community experience, this book argues we might do better to think of the audience as accomplices to the artist.

Videos featuring opera singers were initially released in the mid 1980s. This companion volume to Opera Mediagraphy: Video Recordings and Motion Pictures (Greenwood, 1993) indexes opera singers on video and film in concert, recital, and non-operatic feature film and includes VHS videotape, optical video laser disc, CD-ROM, and DVD recordings. Liturgical works, such as masses, and symphonies are also included. Arranged alphabetically, each film entry includes a rating, cites reviews, includes film production information, and lists the film's contents and performers. Films and singers are cross-referenced throughout. Researchers and opera fans alike will appreciate the various features that make this work easy to reference. The alphabetical entries are supplemented by three separate indexes that cross reference data by conductor and pianist, by director and producer, and by production type. An appendix lists distributors and provides available address information including e-mail and website locations.

The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music offers a state-of-the-art cross-section of the most field-defining topics and debates in computer music today. A unique contribution to the field, it situates computer music in the broad context of its creation and performance across the range of issues - from music cognition to pedagogy to sociocultural topics - that shape contemporary discourse in the field.
Fifty years after musical tones were produced on a computer for the first time, developments in laptop computing have brought computer music within reach of all listeners and composers. Production and distribution of computer music have grown tremendously as a result, and the time is right for this survey of computer music in its cultural contexts. An impressive and international array of music creators and academics discuss computer music's history, present, and future with a wide perspective, including composition, improvisation, interactive performance, spatialization, sound synthesis, sonification, and modeling. Throughout, they merge practice with theory to offer a fascinating look into computer music's possibilities and enduring appeal.

This book uncovers how music experience-live and recorded-is changing along with the use of digital technology in the 2000s. Focussing on the Nordic region, this volume utilizes the theory of mentalization: the capacity to perceive and interpret what others are thinking and feeling, and applies it to the analysis of mediated forms of agency in popular music. The rise of new media in music production has enabled sound recording and processing to occur more rapidly and in more places, including the live concert stage. Digital technology has also introduced new distribution and consumption technologies that allow record listening to be more closely linked to the live music experience. The use of digital technology has therefore facilitated an expanding range of activities and experiences with music. Here, Yngvar Kjus addresses a topic that has a truly global reach that is of interest to scholars of musicology, media studies and technology studies.

Though the book ranks as an admirable exercise in rigorous scholarship, the prevailing tone is that of an informal conversation. That's what keeps you turning the pages. Serious record collectors will find that this book . . . will make them see--and hear--their disks in a wholly new perspective. The New York Times The first book of its kind ever published, Edison, Musicians, and the Phonograph presents the candid opinions of a wide variety of musicians--from those performing when the phonograph was first used to present-day artists--about the recording process, its effects, and its validity. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews, John and Susan Harvith have constructed a detailed picture of how musicians and technicians view the ramifications of recording, a picture that reveals a dichotomy between our public perception of the recorded music as truly representative and the performers' frequent mistrust of the medium.

"Ruppli always packs his books with every conceivable convenience, with the researcher in mind. Thus, we find complete listings of every LP and EP issued by Savoy and its subsidiaries, and also all records leased or purchased by Savoy, including, Bop, Dee Gee, Discovery, National, Jewell, Hi-Lo, and Signal. An artist index is the final helpful touch." Goldmine Magazine

Refining Sound is a practical roadmap to the complexities of creating sounds on modern synthesizers. As author, veteran synthesizer instructor Brian K. Shepard draws on his years of experience in synthesizer pedagogy in order to peel back the often-mysterious layers of sound synthesis one-by-one. The result is a book which allows readers to familiarize themselves with each individual step in the synthesis process, in turn empowering them in their own creative or experimental work. The book follows the stages of synthesis in chronological progression, starting readers at the raw materials of sound creation and ultimately bringing them to the final "polishing" stage. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the synthesis process, culminating in a last chapter that brings everything together as the reader creates his/her own complex sounds. Throughout the text, the material is supported by copious examples and illustrations as well as by audio files and synthesis demonstrations on a related companion website. Each chapter contains easily digestible guided projects (entitled "Your Turn" sections) that focus on the topics of the corresponding chapter. In addition to this, one complete project will be carried through each chapter of the book cumulatively, allowing the reader to follow - and build - a sound from start to finish. The final chapter includes several sound creation projects in which readers are given types of sound to create as well as some suggestions and tips, with final outcomes is left to readers' own creativity. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning to create sounds on a synthesizer is to understand exactly what each synthesizer component does independent of the synthesizer's numerous other components. Not only does this book thoroughly illustrate and explain these individual components, but it also offers numerous practical demonstrations and exercises that allow the reader to experiment with and understand these elements without the distraction of the other controls and modifiers. Refining Sound is essential for all electronic musicians from amateur to professional levels of accomplishment, students, teachers, libraries, and anyone interested in creating sounds on a synthesizer.

Thousands of people try to make it as freelancers in the music and audio industries. Most of them fail, and not because they lack talent or the will to succeed. They fail because no matter how much training they've received or how hard they've practiced, they don't know how to face the challenges that await them in the real world. No matter how much technical or musical skill aspirants may have acquired, there is always a huge gap in their understanding of how that world works. Do they understand how to behave in a professional environment? When to talk and when to listen? What about developing a personal work ethic, a support system, and a reasonable set of immediate and future plans to make goals into realities? In his dual role as a successful music and audio freelancer of over 30 years and a tenured college professor, Jim Klein not only has the knowledge of what it takes to succeed as a freelancer in the competitive field of music and audio, but the understanding of exactly what the new aspirant needs to know to take on that world. Klein has crafted his advice into a book that is detailed, complete, and easy to understand. The book also includes interviews with successful music and audio freelancers, such as legendary producer Howard Benson (Kelly Clarkson, Santana, Daughtry), producer/engineer Kevin Killen (Peter Gabriel, U2, Elvis Costello), bassist Julie Slick, and others.

THE TIMES & UNCUT MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR Critically-acclaimed and bestselling author Paul Morley's long-awaited biography of Factory Records co-founder and Manchester icon Tony Wilson. A BOOK OF THE YEAR SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, MOJO, LOUDER THAN WAR 'Compelling . . . befitting its extraordinary subject.' BRIAN ENO 'Bracing and often surprisingly tender . . . the perfect monument.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Via Morley's magical prose Tony Wilson comes back to life . . . inspiring.' RICHARD RUSSELL Tony Wilson was a man who became synonymous with his beloved city. As the co-founder of the legendary Factory Records and the Hacienda, he appointed himself a custodian of Manchester's legacy of innovation and change, becoming a cultural pioneer for the North. To Paul Morley, he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, inventive broadcaster, self-deprecating chancer, publicity seeker, loyal friend. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book. From Manchester with Love is the biography of a man who changed the world around him through sheer force of personality. In the cultural theatre of Manchester, Tony Wilson broke in and took centre stage. 'An immersive experience . . . very moving indeed.' MIRANDA SAWYER, OBSERVER 'Not just a "biog" but the story of a city's history and culture and a unique and disappearing figure.' STUART MACONIE, NEW STATESMAN 'Morley's biography is as illuminating on Wilson's strange ability to hold others in his orbit, even after his death, as it is on the story of his life.' THE SPECTATOR 'The man/myth Wilson died aged 57 in 2006, but here he burns on fantastically bright.' UNCUT