Sounding Objects
Music studies engages with processes of performance, time, and liveness that have the possibility to animate objects and emanate lives, stories, and communities out of material items. These essays emerge out of a focus on a particular material object—past, present, or past-and-present.
By Ryan Blakeley
In January 2019, Warner Music Group signed a twenty-album contract with the artist Endel. And then in May 2023, Endel came to an agreement with Universal Music Group to collaborate with the label’s artists. These major record label deals would be impressive under any circumstances, but what’s… Read More
By Adriana Helbig
On May 14, 2017, while waiting to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin was filmed playing two Soviet-era popular tunes on a grand piano: Solov’ev Sodoy’s “Evening Song,” a famous melody in St. Petersburg (the song’s lyrics refer to the city by its Soviet-era… Read More
By María Edurne Zuazu
Acoustic hailing devices (AHDs) are high-intensity directional sound systems that produce narrow sound beams with very loud, high sound pressure levels that can be aimed at particular locations: that is, directed to target specific auditors. They are optimized to project intelligible voice messages as well as impactful, attention-commanding warning and… Read More
By Catherine Provenzano
When the German software company Celemony premiered the first market-ready version of Melodyne at the North American Music Merchants (NAMM) conference in Anaheim, California, in 2000, music software buyers and enthusiasts responded to the product tepidly, and with a bit of confusion. Melodyne’s engineering team had envisioned and designed the… Read More
by Rebekah Ahrendt Back in the summer of 2012, I was researching a French-language theater troupe that worked in The Hague at the turn of the eighteenth century. I ran across a short article written by the great theater historian Jan Fransen in the 1938 issue of the… Read More