Selected Resources
Pink Noises by
Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement. Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, "performance novels," sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns. Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)
Call Number: ML82 .R65 2010ISBN: 9780822346739Publication Date: 2010-03-23
The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music by
The theme of this Research Companion is 'connectivity and the global reach of electroacoustic music and sonic arts made with technology'. The possible scope of such a companion in the field of electronic music has changed radically over the last 30 years. The definitions of the field itself are now broader - there is no clear boundary between 'electronic music' and 'sound art'. Also, what was previously an apparently simple divide between 'art' and 'popular' practices is now not easy or helpful to make, and there is a rich cluster of streams of practice with many histories, including world music traditions. This leads in turn to a steady undermining of a primarily Euro-American enterprise in the second half of the twentieth century. Telecommunications technology, most importantly the development of the internet in the final years of the century, has made materials, practices and experiences ubiquitous and apparently universally available - though some contributions to this volume reassert the influence and importance of local cultural practice. Research in this field is now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Technological developments are embedded in practices which may be musical, social, individual and collective. The contributors to this companion embrace technological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and social approaches and a host of hybrids ¿ but, most importantly, they try to show how these join up. Thus the intention has been to allow a wide variety of new practices to have voice ¿ unified through ideas of 'reaching out' and 'connecting together' ¿ and in effect showing that there is emerging a different kind of 'global music'.
Call Number: ML1380 .R76 2018ISBN: 1472472918Publication Date: 2018-05-10
Sex Sounds by
An investigation of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s, with detailed case studies of "electrosexual music" by a wide range of creators. In Sex Sounds, Danielle Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music's origin myth-that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively-Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies-examining music that ranges from Schaeffer's musique concr te to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle-Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the social and cultural impact sex has had on audible creative practices. Sofer argues that "electrosexual music" has two central characteristics- the feminized voice and the "climax mechanism." Sofer traces the historical fascination with electrified sex sounds, showing that works representing women's presumed sexual experience operate according to masculinist heterosexual tropes, and presenting examples that typify the electroacoustic sexual canon. Noting electronic music history's exclusion of works created by women, people of color, women of color, and, in particular Black artists, Sofer then analyzes musical examples that depart from and disrupt the electroacoustic norms, showing how even those that resist the norms sometimes reinforce them. These examples are drawn from categories of music that developed in parallel with conventional electroacoustic music, separated-segregated-from it. Sofer demonstrates that electrosexual music is far more representative than the typically presented electroacoustic canon.
Call Number: ML1092 .S64 2022ISBN: 0262045192Publication Date: 2022-07-05
Re-Sisters by
From the acclaimed author of Art Sex Music comes a vital meditation on womanhood, creativity and self-expression, and a revelatory exploration into the lives of three visionary artists.
Call Number: NX164.W65 T88 2022ISBN: 0571362184Publication Date: 2022-10-25
The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music by
Musicians are always quick to adopt and explore new technologies. The fast-paced changes wrought by electrification, from the microphone via the analogue synthesiser to the laptop computer, have led to a wide range of new musical styles and techniques. Electronic music has grown to a broad field of investigation, taking in historical movements such as musique concrète and elektronische Musik, and contemporary trends such as electronic dance music and electronica. The first edition of this book won the 2009 Nicolas Bessaraboff Prize as it brought together researchers at the forefront of the sonic explorations empowered by electronic technology to provide accessible and insightful overviews of core topics and uncover some hitherto less publicised corners of worldwide movements. This updated and expanded second edition includes four entirely new chapters, as well as new original statements from globally renowned artists of the electronic music scene, and celebrates a diverse array of technologies, practices and music.
Call Number: ML1380 .C36 2017ISBN: 1107133556Publication Date: 2017-11-09
Emergency Noises by
Art history traditionally concentrates on the visual. Sound has either been ignored or has been appreciated in a highly selective manner within a different discipline: music. This book is about recent attempts by artists trained in (West) Germany to provoke listening experiences to awaken the senses. Their work is revolutionary in artistic terms and in what it reveals about human relations, especially concerning issues of gender. The main focus of the book is to explore a gendered reading of the unity between the visual and the aural, a strand most prominently expressed within sound art in the period from the beginning of the 1960s to the 1980s. The book juxtaposes sources that have not been considered in conjunction with each other before and questions sound art's premise: is it a separate field or a novel way of understanding art? The study also opens up sound art to gender considerations, asking if the genre possesses the capacity to disrupt conventional, gendered role models and facilitate alternative possibilities of self-definition and agency across genders. Emergency Noises brings to light the work of underrepresented female artists and explores new intersections of sound, art and gender.
Call Number: NX650.S68 N69 2017ISBN: 3034319878Publication Date: 2017-09-01
