Tutorial : public engagement through audio internet experiments

This tutorial paper details experiences of four public engagement projects that have communicated acoustic science to lay audiences using web experiments. Recent developments in personal computers, the Internet and software platforms offers new and exciting opportunities for engaging publics because technologies routinely allow the reproduction of sound. The projects are psychoacoustic experiments run via the Internet (there are an increasing number of psychology experiments mediated via the web)

The Contractual Reallocation of Procreative Resources and Parental Rights: The Natural Endowment Critique

This article inquires into the meaning and value of contract as a principle for ordering technologically assisted human reproduction. The article seeks to provide an analytically sound definition of this contractual option for ordering the new reproductive technologies, an accurate statement of its current legal status, and an assessment of its theoretical cogency and political and practical appeal. The purpose of the article is the clarification and critique of contract-based proposals for a new legal ordering of human reproduction. On a more general level, it seeks to contribute to a sound conceptual framework for the ongoing discussion of the legal implications of new reproductive technologies

Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality, and Labor Among Live Sound Engineers

This dissertation ethnographically represents the work of three live sound engineers and the profession of live sound reinforcement engineering in the New York City metropolitan area. In addition to amplifying music to intelligible sound levels, these engineers also amplify music in ways that engage the sonic norms associated with the pertinent musical genres of jazz, rock and music theater. These sonic norms often overdetermine audience members' expectations for sound quality at concerts. In particular, these engineers also work to sonically and visually mask themselves and their equipment. Engineers use the term “transparency” to describe this mode of labor and the relative success of sound reproduction technologies. As a concept within the realm of sound reproduction technologies, transparency describes methods of reproducing sounds without coloring or obscuring the original quality. Transparency closely relates to “fidelity,” a concept that became prominent throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to describe the success of sound reproduction equipment in making the quality of reproduced sound faithful to its original. The ethnography opens by framing the creative labor of live sound engineering through a process of “fidelity.” I argue that fidelity dynamically oscillates as struggle and satisfaction in live sound engineers’ theory of labor and resonates with their phenomenological encounters with sounds and social positions as laborers at concerts. In the first chapter, I describe my own live sound engineering at Jazzmobile in Harlem. The following chapter analyzes the freelance engineering of Randy Taber, who engineers rock and music theater concerts throughout New York City. The third chapter investigates Justin Rathbun’s engineering at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers theater production of “Porgy and Bess.” Much of engineering scholarship privileges the recording studio as the primary site of technological mediation in the production of music. However, this dissertation ethnographically asserts that similar politics and facilities of technological mediation shape live performances of music. In addition, I argue that the shifting temporal conditions of live music production reveal the dynamism of the sound engineers’ personhood on the shop floors of the live music stage

Computer music playback quality: digital audio reproduction versus synthesized sound

The music we hear played back via computer controlled media is generated by one of two technologies: digital audio, which is a waveform reproduction of the original sound source recorded and played back through digital means, and musical instrument digital interface or MIDI, which communicates a set of performance instructions to a synthesiser chip which generates playback in real-time. The ability to distinguish synthesized sound from digital reproductions of original sound sources is tested through a set of listening tests conducted on music technology undergraduate students. Research findings indicate that certain synthesizers and soundcards are able to produce high quality synthesized sound that is perceived to be as good as the original instrument timbres

Media authenticity and authority in Mauritius: On the mediality of language in religion

In this article I suggest that the rapidly growing interest in the intersection of linguistic anthropology and media needs to be accompanied by a deeper investigation of the mediality of language. Discussing Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in religious events revolving around the recitation of devotional poetry, this paper explores how language as a medium converges and interacts with media technologies of other kinds. I suggest that the oscillation between a foregrounding of the medium and its phenomenological withdrawal characterizes the functioning of both linguistic mediation and other media technologies and provides a comparative dimension to examine their interplay

Psychology Meets Archaeology: Psychoarchaeoacoustics for Understanding Ancient Minds and Their Relationship to the Sacred

How important is the influence of spatial acoustics on our mental processes related to sound perception and cognition? There is a large body of research in fields encompassing architecture, musicology, and psychology that analyzes human response, both subjective and objective, to different soundscapes. But what if we want to understand how acoustic environments influenced the human experience of sound in sacred ritual practices in premodern societies? Archaeoacoustics is the research field that investigates sound in the past. One of its branches delves into how sound was used in specific landscapes and at sites with rock art, and why past societies endowed a special significance to places with specific acoustical properties. Taking advantage of the advances made in sound recording and reproduction technologies, researchers are now exploring how ancient social and sacred ceremonies and practices related to the acoustic properties of their sound environment. Here, we advocate for the emergence of a new and innovative discipline, experimental psychoarchaeoacoustics. We also review underlying methodological approaches and discuss the limitations, challenges, and future directions for this new field

Ecological Validity of Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) Techniques for the Perception of Urban Sound Environments

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) is a simulated technology used to deliver multisensory information to people under different environmental conditions. When IVR is generally applied in urban planning and soundscape research, it reveals attractive possibilities for the assessment of urban sound environments with higher immersion for human participation. In virtual sound environments, various topics and measures are designed to collect subjective responses from participants under simulated laboratory conditions. Soundscape or noise assessment studies during virtual experiences adopt an evaluation approach similar to in situ methods. This paper aims to review the approaches that are utilized to assess the ecological validity of IVR for the perception of urban sound environments and the necessary technologies during audio–visual reproduction to establish a dynamic IVR experience that ensures ecological validity. The review shows that, through the use of laboratory tests including subjective response surveys, cognitive performance tests and physiological responses, the ecological validity of IVR can be assessed for the perception of urban sound environments. The reproduction system with head-tracking functions synchronizing spatial audio and visual stimuli (e.g., head-mounted displays (HMDs) with first-order Ambisonics (FOA)-tracked binaural playback) represents the prevailing trend to achieve high ecological validity. These studies potentially contribute to the outcomes of a normalized evaluation framework for subjective soundscape and noise assessments in virtual environment

Laughing matter: Charles Cros, from paléophone to monologue

Nineteenth-century poet, savant and inventor Charles Cros is a figure whose endeavours were exceptionally wide-ranging. They include a proposed instrument which would be the first of its kind capable of recording sound (the ‘paléophone’); treatises on photography and interplanetary communication; poetry, and a body of comic monologues which belong to the current of fumisme. This article argues that Cros's monologues are subtly inflected by his interest in the faculty of speech and technologies of sound reproduction. While they do not explicitly evoke such technologies, they show an acute sensitivity to the quirks and accidents of the spoken word to which neither dramatic convention nor indeed norms of social discourse attribute sense. It is this ill-formed matter, amounting to a kind of discursive ‘noise’, which allows Cros to offer a wry commentary on the pretensions of a fin-de-siècle culture preoccupied with the strategizing of utterance and the production of an objectified record of the spoken word

Beyond sound effects: Designing sound for the American theatre in the 1970s

This dissertation investigates the engagement between American theatre and sound reproduction technologies in the 1970s. Through an analysis of Abe Jacob’s sound design for Broadway and productions created by experimental theatre practitioners such as Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and the Wooster Group, I explore how these productions extended formal theatre sound design practice in response to the advent of the recording and reproduction technologies, from microphones, loudspeakers, phonograph, tape recorders, and later digital computers. Although live theatre never had the resources to invest in technical research projects, it was very adept at adapting the latest innovations from other fields. I contend that the development of sound technologies not only shaped the formal innovations in electronic music composition, recordings, radio, and film, but that it compelled theatre artists to incorporate sound as a constituent part of the overall scenography. Tracing the way the sound was dramatized and staged, each chapter sounds out a pairing of the changes in design processes alongside the new approaches to the practice of listening and sound making in the age of mechanical and electronic (re)production: namely, Abe Jacob’s rock and roll sound system and Broadway’s mediatic resistance; Robert Wilson’s auditory landscape and sound event; Richard Foreman’s use of a tape machine to create sound objects; and the Wooster Group’s use of sound to foreground different modes of listening. The conclusion reflects upon my own sound design for Ping Chong and encapsulates the influences of sound technologies on theatre discussed in previous chapters. While the discourse of theatre sound is mostly comprised of step-by-step sound design instructional textbooks, this dissertation focuses not only on the type and variety of sounds made but also the artistic rationale behind the creative process by combining analyses of dramatic texts, production history, newspaper reviews, interviews and video recordings. Even though these new practices of sound in theatre were driven by sound technologies, this study reveals that the artistic rationale behind the creative process played an important role in transforming the technology to meet the needs of the production. Ultimately, by providing an account that interrelates the development of sound technology with its users from different artistic fields, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of sound in theatre and opens up the approaches to designing sound beyond its causal and semantic strictures of sound effect