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A techno-cognitive look at how new technologies are shaping the future of musicking. “Musicking” encapsulates both the making of and perception of music, so it includes both active and passive forms of musical engagement. But at its core, it is a relationship between actions and sounds, between human bodies and musical instruments. Viewing musicking through this lens and drawing on music cognition and music technology, Sound Actions proposes a model for understanding differences between traditional acoustic “sound makers” and new electro-acoustic “music makers.” What is a musical instrument? How do new technologies change how we perform and perceive music? What happens when composers build instruments, performers write code, perceivers become producers, and instruments play themselves? The answers to these pivotal questions entail a meeting point between interactive music technology and embodied music cognition, what author Alexander Refsum Jensenius calls “embodied music technology.” Moving between objective description and subjective narrative of his own musical experiences, Jensenius explores why music makes people move, how the human body can be used in musical interaction, and how new technologies allow for active musical experiences. The development of new music technologies, he demonstrates, has fundamentally changed how music is performed and perceived.

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone “color”, “wet” acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, “the illusory stuff of our dreams.” This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both “classical” and “popular” music. These range, in “classical” music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in “popular” music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.

In Composition and Cognition, renowned composer and theorist Fred Lerdahl builds on his careerlong work of developing a comprehensive model of music cognition. Bringing together his dual expertise in composition and music theory, he reveals the way in which his research has served as a foundation for his compositional style and how his intuitions as a composer have guided his cognitively oriented theories. At times personal and reflective, this book offers an overall picture of the musical mind that has implications for central issues in contemporary composition, including the recurrent gap between method and result, and the tension between cognitive constraints and utopian aesthetic views of musical progress. Lerdahl's succinct volume provides invaluable insights for students and instructors, composers and music scholars, and anyone engaged with contemporary music.

Wie wirklich ist musikalische Praxis und was hat sie mit dem alltäglichen Leben zu tun? Eva-Maria Houben zeigt, dass sich das Musizieren verändert, sobald dessen Sinn nicht in der zweckorientierten Produktion von Arbeitsergebnissen, sondern im Musizieren als Beschäftigung und um des Spielens willen gefunden wird. Musikalische Praxis ist prinzipiell unabgeschlossen. So bleibt das Tun auf Wiederholung ausgerichtet und befreit von Perfektion, Produktivität, Zweckgebundenheit. Sinn wird in der jeweiligen Situation, am spezifischen Ort, im Beziehungsgeschehen selbst erlebt. Musikalische Praxis kann so zur »Lebensform« und dabei eine eigene Wirklichkeit werden.

Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.The history of listening must be constructed from the narratives of myth and fiction,'silent'arts such as painting, the resonance of architecture, auditory artefacts and nature. In such contexts, sound often functions as a metaphor for mystical revelation, forbidden desires, formlessness, the unknown, and the unconscious. As if reading a map of hitherto unexplored territory, Sinister Resonance deciphers sounds and silences buried within the ghostly horrors of Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, M.R. James and Edgar Allen Poe, Dutch genre painting from Rembrandt to Vermeer, artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Juan Munoz, and the writing of many modernist authors including Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce.

Covers much of the acoustics a student needs, without mathematics or scientific background.Choice Outstanding Academic Title A survey of intervals and scales, tone pitch, loudness and time in Western music raises many questions about the hearing mechanism and throws doubt on the conventional role of harmonics. James Beament's account of how musical sounds are coded by the ear and the brain's processing units, provides answers to most of these questions. It concludes that music started with simple instruments which voices imitated, and that the need to know sound direction determined the characteristics of hearing. This book will interest students, practising musicians and music psychologists, and assumes no scientific knowledge. The late ProfessorSir JAMES BEAMENT was a distinguished scientist and musician, who taught and examined music students at Cambridge University.