Making Noise and Reading Noise
Review of Making Noise by Hillel Schwartz in the special “Noise” issue of Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture.
This large volume convinces that noise has always been a hot topic, from the very birth of the universe, through the gestation of human culture, right on down the line to the present. But what Schwartz omits is as telling as what he includes.
September 2013
Radio Before and After Radio Waves
Paper given at ISSTC 2013, the annual convocation of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design, Ireland.
Radio was born in a brilliant burst of activity by amateur technicians, radiophonic artists, and Utopian thinkers (Khlebnikov, Weil, Marinetti, Arnheim), before being colonised as valuable property by private companies or as sovereign territory by state authorities. But where has radio gone in today’s digital world? This paper provides a particular definition of radio as both spectral and ubiquitous, allowing us to plot a through line from past to future forms.
August 2013
"The Garden of Adumbrations": Reimagining Environmental Composition
Paper published in the journal Organised Sound.
R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape, predicated on a schizophonic engagement with sound, and Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, based on an acousmatic relationship, have been the dominant approaches for those composing with environmental sounds. This paper critiques the ideologies behind these systems, instead suggesting an approach that uses Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome as a generative metaphor.
December 2012