Steven Mithen – The Singing Neanderthals

„The basic problem of studying the origins of language is, to understate matters, language leaves few fossils.“ – Edmund Blair Bolles.
In „The Singing Neanderthals“ Steven Mithen, professor of Archaeology at the University in Reading, summarizes his views of the co-evolution of music and language in the history of our species. Drawing evidence from many areas [...]

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Leigh Landy – The Art Of Sound Organization

On the recent conference „recycling_sampling_jamming“ held in Berlin in February this year, Leigh Landy spoke on the subject of sampling in music. Unfortunately I was ill during the course of the festival but the lectures are still available in mp3 format here for those who missed it like me. His keynote was particularly entertaining and [...]

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Richard Taruskin – The Danger of Music

No doubt, Richard Taruskin is America’s most controversial musicologist. He has sparked many furious debates about topics like historically correct early music performances, the political connotations of John Adams opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” or the lack of moral concerns in the 20th century avant-garde. The first half of Taruskin’s collection of essays “The Danger [...]

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Barbara Flückiger – Sound Design

This massive work is now considered the reference book in the area of film sound design in the german speaking world. Swiss researcher Barbara Flückiger does not deliver a to-do-book of practicle tricks and tipps for sound designers but provides nothing less than a ‘philosophy of sound design’ if I’m allowed to name it like [...]

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David Rothenberg & Marta Ulvaeus – The Book of Music & Nature

This Book collects writings from a variety of authors: included are, among others, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, Steve Lacy, Michael Ondaatje, Pauline Oliveros, David Toop, Francesco Lopez, Toru Takemitsu and Bernie Krause, to name a few. Here starts my problem with this publication: the sources are of such variety that the [...]

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Theo van Leeuwen – Speech, Music, Sound

Theo van Leeuwen worked as a film and television producer and used to play  jazz before he studied linguistics and became the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology in Sydney. He is now regarded a key figure in the field of social semiotics. Dispite that, his book “Speech, Music, Sound” is [...]

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Jean-Luc Nancy – Listening

Holding this book in my hands, I wondered what the cover illustration had to do with the subject of listening. One can see a baroque Venus lying on a bed while a boy whispers something in her ear. There is a young man on the left side leaning over his shoulder to listen in on [...]

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Stuart Sim – Manifesto for Silence

In Cairo, biggest city on the african continent, noise levels from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. average at about 85 decibels, at central squares even noises often reach 95 decibel, the New York Times recently reports. For Stuart Sim, Professor of Critical Theory in the Deptartment of English Studies at the University of Sunderland, this [...]

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Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner – Audio Culture

An almanach packed with essays and writings of such different sources like early modern music pioneers Russolo, Varèse, and Cage next to DJ Spooky and Kim Cascone, the book traces back many cross references in all strains of the musical avant-garde be it experimental, minimal, improvised, electronic or from the DJ culture. A must on [...]

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Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue – Sonic Experience, A Guide To Everyday Sounds

In a word: this book is very rewarding reading: loaded with indepth theory and surprising new concepts about the classification of sound phenomena, it took 10 years to translate this work into english. Nothing for someone new to philosophical considerations about music, sound and  noise, nevertheless the best summary in this area I know so [...]

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