Body as Instrument explores how musicians interact with movement-controlled performance systems, producing sounds imbued with their individual physical signature. Using motion tracking technology, performers can translate physical actions into sonic processes, creating or adapting novel gestural systems that transcend the structures and constraints of conventional musical instruments. Interviews with influential artists in the field, Laetitia Sonami, Atau Tanaka, Pamela Z, Julie Wilson-Bokowiec, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Mark Coniglio, Garth Paine and The Bent Leather Band expose the transformational impact of motion sensors on musicians' body awareness and abilities. Coupled with reflection on author-composed works, the book analyses how the body as instrument metaphor informs relationships between performers, their bodies and self-designed instruments. It also examines the role of experiential design strategies in developing robust and nuanced gestural systems that mirror a performer's movement habits, preferences and skills, inspiring new physical forms of musical communication and diverse musical repertoire.

From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, struggles with illness, and of the enduring power of song.

Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O’Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world-famous—living a rock-star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II’s photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions.

In Rememberings, O’Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother’s Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad’s memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.

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.

Wilfrid Mellers is a composer, musician and author. Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. This is his classic book on Beethoven.

Through a transnational, comparative and multi-level approach to the relationship between youth, migration, and music, the aesthetic intersections between the local and the global, and between agency and identity, are presented through case studies in this book. Transglobal Sounds contemplates migrant youth and the impact of music in diaspora settings and on the lives of individuals and collectives, engaging with broader questions of how new modes of identification are born out of the social, cultural, historical and political interfaces between youth, migration and music. Thus, through acts of mobility and environments lived in and in-between, this volume seeks to articulate between musical transnationalism and sense of place in exploring the complex relationship between music and young migrants and migrant descendant's everyday lives.

Drown out petty complaints with Tiny Violin! This kit includes everything you need to quell those crocodile tears:Plays music: plays a sad tune when the strings button is pressed downViolin replica: Includes a 3 4/5" replica of a real violin with mini bow and chinrestDisplay stand: An elegant vinyl stand included to store and display your violinIllustrated mini book: Includes a 32-page mini book about the origins of "tiniest violin" Perfect gift: humorous gag gift or stocking stuffer