Sonic Time Machines
Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Amsterdam University Press
Published:25th Apr '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. Sonic Time Machines aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, "sonicity," a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.
"The devotion to method in Sonic Time Machines is impressive, and one encounters it without even opening the book, as the cover — adorned with wave form — is an oscillogram and spectrogram representing a sound file of the author articulating SONIC TIME MACHINES. One wouldn’t expect anything less from Ernst, whose intellectual trajectory and work has been to constitute that which he calls media archaeology. Unlike his other texts, however, Sonic Time Machines attends to this conceptual arrangement more directly. The cover represents one of the key strengths of the book: Sonic Time Machines is itself an act of media archaeology, the wave form serving as a background diagram under the title of the book, capturing the combination of method and theory that finds itself ever-present in the pages of the volume." - Review Essay To the Technical Media Themselves, Aidan Erasmus, University of the Western Cape, Kronos 43
- "Sonic Time Machines offers many highly original and provoking insights that will undoubtedly contribute greatly to contemporary media archaeology and, regardless of Ernst’s own reservations, toward the field of sound studies." - Journal of Sonic Studies
- "Sonic Time Machines offers highly original and stimulating insight into a media and techonocultural theory that is developed through sound and sonic articulations." - Jens Gerit Papenburg, Twentieth-Century Music
ISBN: 9789089649492
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
184 pages