Sound Ideas Music, Machines, and Experience Aden Evens Table of Contents		$23.50 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4537-X ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4537-4 $70.50 Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4536-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4536-7
A highly original approach to the philosophy of musical experience. As record collectors and file swappers know, the experience of music—making it, marketing it, listening to it—relies heavily on technology. From the viola that amplifies the vibrations of a string to the CD player that turns digital bits into varying voltage, music and technology are deeply intertwined. What was gained—or lost—when compact discs replaced vinyl as the mass-market medium? What unique creative input does the musician bring to the music, and what contribution is made by the instrument? Do digital synthesizers offer unlimited range of sonic potential, or do their push-button interfaces and acoustical models lead to cookie-cutter productions? Through this interrogation of sound and technology, Aden Evens provides an acute consideration of how music becomes sensible, advancing original variations on the themes of creativity and habit, analog and digital technologies, and improvisation and repetition. Sound Ideas reinvents the philosophy of music in a way that encompasses traditional aspects of musicology, avant-garde explorations of music’s relation to noise and silence, and the consequences of digitization. “A first step toward a far-reaching but distant goal. Recommended.” —Choice Aden Evens is a musician and assistant professor of technical communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 240 pages | 16 graphs | 7 x 10 | 2005 Theory Out of Bounds Series, volume 27 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments 1. Sound and Noise 2. Sound and Time 3. Sound and Digits 4. Making Music Notes Works Cited Index