http://playinprogress.net/text specializing is for bugs Sun, 18 May 2008 15:31:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Wandering through a library I've never been to before I got struck by the bad shape it is in - too many books that should've been replaced decades ago, too many that should've been treated by a good bookbinder to keep them from falling apart, but were left alone. ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2008/the-beauty-of-decaying-books/ A radio studio equipped with magnetic tape became the birthplace of Music Concrète, which made all the sounds there are its material. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry created the pieces of music stitched together, cutted & glued from railway station noise „dockside clanging, street shouts, creaking doors, sighs, cries and ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2007/sound-as-graph/ The following is the description of a lecture I'm going to give at the 23. Chaos Communication Congress - Who Can You Trust?, which takes place in Berlin from December 27th to December 30th 2006. It extends some things I've allready mentioned in this posting: Distributing Soundwaves - Radio. Abstract The introduction ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/funkerspuk/ Parallel to the touchable music media, radio is developed. Its theoretical foundation had been laid by Maxwell in 1873 (without having a clue of what would follow) with his work on the behaviour of electric and magnetic fields, predicting electric and magnetic waves travelling through empty space whose existence was ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/distributing-soundwaves-radio/ Walter Haas/Ulrich Klever, Die Stimme seines Herrn - Eine Geschichte der Schallplatte, 1959 Frankfurt am Main (the title translates to 'His Master's Voice - A History of The Record') (I have used the first part extensively in Music Caught and Saved and it has been my source for these pictures.) This book, already ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/his-masters-voice/ With the entry of the gramophone the first level of the 'uprooting' of sound, now not just being freed from social circumstances and independent from one's own capabilities, but also from the original source, was complete. Music became something that could not be pre/described only by the use of notation, ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/sound-free-to-travel-the-world/ Note: This is the first part of a translation of two articles I've written for the german magazine/anthology Testcard, which will hopefully appear this spring; one about the history of recording and music media, the other about the development of notions of intellectual property in relationship to the development ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/the-score-and-the-arithmetic-of-music/ The first mechanical instruments/music automata (of course almost every instrument depends on some kind of mechanics, but the instruments I will talk about now were more than any before them perceived and described as 'mechanic') have not left as much a mark on music as notation: music boxes and hurdy-gurdies, ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/music-caught-and-saved/ <intro> I had hitchhiked from Berlin taking the host's words to heart (No excuse if you aren't in the country). Some said it's 700km, and were surprised I did it in one day (about 9h). I thought I was rather slow, and dutch people suck when it comes to hitchhiking. ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/friday-224-at-sonicacts-xi-amsterdam/ With the advent of mechanical reproduction of "culture", i.e. the invention of the printing press, the sense of value of cultural production began to shift. Before printing a book's worth lay much more in the book's physical apperance than we are used to now. The workers being payed in the ... http://playinprogress.net/text/2006/scripture-intellectual-property-and-popular-music/