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The Oramics Machine: The Lost Legacy of British Electronic and Computer Music
No full textThis eighth volume of the Artefacts series explores how material culture has affected music and sound. Technological innovations in music that were originally created to solve existing problems have ended up expanding the range of what can be done musically and changing the landscape of music. Boon and Weium present 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 because technology and music crossed paths
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Stockhausen meets King Tubby's: the stepped filter and its influence as a musical instrument on two different styles of music
No full textNew and Rediscovered Musical Instruments Rediscovered
No full textAn essay describing the production and context of 'New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments' (edited by David Toop, first published in 1974), with an analysis of the motivation that led the various contributors to the book - Hugh Davies, Evan Parker, Max Eastley, Paul Lytton, Paul Burwell and David Toop - to invent and construct new instruments. The context includes references to organology, musicology, painting and ethnomusicology
Popular entertainers, radio hobbyist and film composers. Alternative (pre)histories of electronic music
No full textThe origin of electronic music is usually presented as a tale of forward-looking inventors, musicians and composers wanting to explore new musical possibilities. As expressed by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escriván in their Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music: ‘A rich history underlies electronic music, full of radical inventors, pioneering composers and daring innovators’ (2007:2). Among the leading figures of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘prehistory’ of electronic music, are musicians and composers such as Ferrucio Busoni and Edgard Varése. In this paper, however, I will focus on other groups of actors that are not so often described as radical, pioneering or daring. To what extent and in what ways did groups such as popular entertainers, radio hobbyist and film composers contribute to the early development and understanding of electronic music? I will concentrate on the period between approximately 1930 and 1950.
Popular entertainers were among the first to make use of the new electronic musical instruments developed during the first half of the twentieth century. Artists such as Joseph Whitely (Musaire) in Britain, Darius Cittanova in France and Samuel Hoffman (Hal Hope) in the US demonstrated the theremin and the ondes martenot at cinemas, theatres and restaurants (we may also include Leon Theremin here). In addition to playing popular tunes, they showed how the instruments could imitate different sounds – from the sound of seagulls to the voice of Mickey Mouse. Even though these entertainers were hardly concerned with the exploration of timbre or microtonal music, they played an important role in making people (more or less) accustomed to electronic sounds.
From the early 1930s there were also numerous radio amateurs and electronics hobbyists building their own electronic musical instruments. Radio magazines in Europe and the US printed construction guides explaining how to make a theremin or a trautonium. This practice may be seen as the beginnings of an experimental DIY culture in electronic music. It can be compared to the building of musical synthesizers and circuit bending. The story of how Robert Moog – inventor of the Moog synthesizer – started his career building and selling Theremins is illustrating.
The introduction of sound film opened up new possibilities for experimenting with electronic musical instruments. During the 1930s and 1940s, film composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich in Russia, Oskar Sala in Germany and Miklos Rozsa and Franz Waxman in the US used instruments such as the theremin, the trautonium and the novachord to create new sound effects. In particular, the electronic howl of the theremin seemed suitable as an illustration of fear, darkness, anxiety and psychological disturbance. This in turn influenced how the early electronic musical instruments and theirs sounds were perceived in general.
As Mark Brend has pointed out in The Sound of Tomorrow ‘there is a version of history that says that electronic music filtered down from the arid, imposing mountains of serious academic culture into the gentle foothills of pop music’ (2012:viii). By examining how popular entertainers, radio hobbyist and film composers contributed to the early development and understanding of electronic music, I wish to bring in an alternative perspective. One of the aims of this paper is also to direct attention to the mutual relationship between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ electronic music
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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