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Author: George Michelsen Foy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439101043
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal—or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man’s quest to find the grail of total quiet.--- “ I don’t know at what point noise became intolerable for me,” George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city’s noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered. Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most—the subway, the local café, different rooms of his apartment—as well as the places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer’s “silent vault,” the snowy expanses of the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones, floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a Minnesota laboratory’s anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls “the quietest place on earth,” and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable. Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy, religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence? Did human beings ever experience silence in their early history? What is the relationship between noise and space? What are the implications of silence and our need for it—physically, mentally, emotionally, politically? Does absolute silence actually exist? If so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does it mean to us? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today’s digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places. In this respect, Foy’s quest for silence represents more than a simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings help to answer the question “How can we live saner, healthier lives today?” Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, Zero Decibels will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape of our lives.
Author: George Michelsen Foy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439101043
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal—or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man’s quest to find the grail of total quiet.--- “ I don’t know at what point noise became intolerable for me,” George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city’s noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered. Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most—the subway, the local café, different rooms of his apartment—as well as the places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer’s “silent vault,” the snowy expanses of the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones, floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a Minnesota laboratory’s anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls “the quietest place on earth,” and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable. Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy, religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence? Did human beings ever experience silence in their early history? What is the relationship between noise and space? What are the implications of silence and our need for it—physically, mentally, emotionally, politically? Does absolute silence actually exist? If so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does it mean to us? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today’s digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places. In this respect, Foy’s quest for silence represents more than a simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings help to answer the question “How can we live saner, healthier lives today?” Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, Zero Decibels will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape of our lives.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Deafness
Languages : en
Pages : 1170
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Book Description
Author: Masha Salazkina
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520400755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
"This book considers the unexpected and mostly unexamined popularity of the Mexican film Yesenia (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1971) in the Soviet Union. Set during the Second Franco-Mexican war, this unassuming movie melodrama was based on a successful television series, itself an adaptation of a popular women's romance graphic novel, a genre that was extremely common in mid-century Mexico. Screened in the Soviet Union in 1975, Yesenia became the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet film exhibition, unsurpassed by any movie, foreign or domestic. Based on ticket sales alone, it was seen by an astounding 91.4 million viewes in only the first year of its release. Yesenia's popularity in the socialist bloc, largely unbeknown to its Mexican producers, continued for decades after its initial release as the film migrated from cinemas to television screens and video. Boosted by its success with Soviet audiences, the film enjoyed a similarly spectacular exhibition history in China in the late 1970s, when the country was opening itself up to more international media, paving the way for other Mexican and Latin American productions broadcasted on Chinese television in decades to follow. Approaching this period restrospectively, cognizant of more contemporary developments in the global media, I conceive of this episode in film history through a framework of television culture whose increasing impact, I argue, shaped both the film's Mexican production and its subsequent reception within the Socialist bloc. I also argue that Yesenia's popularity carved out a crucial node within the global circuit of cultural and industrial networks, further enabling Latin American media's transcontinental reach"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Kevin C. Karnes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815404
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Sounds Beyond charts the origins of Arvo Pärt’s most famous music, which was created in dialogue with underground creative circles in the USSR. In Sounds Beyond, Kevin C. Karnes studies the interconnected alternative music and art scenes in the USSR during the second half of the 1970s, revealing the audacious origins of some of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s most famous music. Karnes shows how Pärt’s work was created within a vital yet forgotten culture of collective experimentation, the Soviet underground. Mining archives and oral history from across the former USSR, Sounds Beyond carefully situates modes of creative experimentation within their late socialist contexts. In documenting Pärt’s work, Karnes reveals the rich creative culture that thrived covertly in the USSR and the network of figures that made underground performances possible: students, audio engineers, sympathetic administrators, star performers, and aspiring DJs. Sounds Beyond advances a new understanding of Pärt’s music as an expression of the aesthetic and religious commitments shared, nurtured, and celebrated by many in Soviet underground circles. At the same time, this story attests to the lasting power of Pärt’s music. Dislodging the mythology of the solitary creative genius, Karnes shows that Pärt’s work would be impossible without community.
Author: Harry Dodge
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143134361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020 An expansive, radiant, and genre-defying investigation into bonding—and how we are shaped by forces we cannot fully know Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging. Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life.
Author: Martin Iddon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108492525
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 439
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Book Description
An authoritative guide to the multi-faceted compositional approach that underpinned twentieth-century art music from Schoenberg to Babbitt and beyond.
Author: Karen Fricker
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526115859
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 483
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Book Description
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984-1994) and middle (1995-2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect on shaping his aesthetic and his professional trajectory. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. Productions discussed include The Dragon’s Trilogy, Needles and Opium, and The Far Side of the Moon. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the early 21st century.
Author: Richard Taruskin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199813698
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 6390
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Book Description
The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the c
Author: Richard Houghton
Publisher: This Day In Music Books
ISBN: 1787590542
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially successful and influential rock bands of all time. They have sold more than 250 million records worldwide, including 75 million certified units in the United States, and 37.9 million albums sold in the US since 1993. This book is based on fans, friends and colleagues memories of the band from their earliest days in Cambridge through the on stage pyrotechnics of Dark Side and through to the massive stage events like The Wall. Includes new insights into the band with Syd Barrett.
Author: Keith Soares
Publisher: Bufflegoat Books
ISBN: 0989948366
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 461
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Book Description
They kept us locked in walled cities, away from the unlucky people who got infected. I suppose that made us the lucky ones, but for me it was a pretty tough pill to swallow. Before everything went down - before a combination of rabies and leprosy turned people into something an awful lot like zombies - I was a Maryland doctor, nearing retirement, wealthy and respected, even if I was a pompous ass. In the walled city, all of that disappeared and I had nothing. Not until Rosa showed up one day. She had dreams, making me realize that I had lost mine. If not for her, I would never have escaped. Never seen the world outside the walls. Never known hope again. But with hope came fear, and in our world, that came with death. Funny how the disease took away life, community, even civilization itself, but gave me one thing I never knew I wanted: family. Still, our life was a cruel life, and it taught me one thing clearly. We might not all get killed by this world, this disease, but there's no way we're all getting out alive. ----- Includes: The Oasis of Filth - Part 1 The Hopeless Pastures - The Oasis of Filth - Part 2 From Blood Reborn - The Oasis of Filth - Part 3 ----- Winner of the Red City Review science fiction and fantasy book of the year award! "The book sets up a believable and in many ways terrifying world, one which takes the zombie genre in a direction that can actually be called unique..." "While a book about outcasts banding together may seem as overdone a trope as zombie fiction itself, once again I have to assure anyone reading this that the author, Keith Soares, is in all ways a step above those expectations in his ideas and his execution... I don't recommend reading this book; I recommend reading every book this author publishes, as I have no doubt he will continue raising the bar." "Soares paints a frightening, realistic picture of life in a post-apocalyptic world... It’s refreshing to read a book in this vein that allows the reader to explore a protagonist’s anguish without relying on a flat, twenty-something hero." "Quite different from the majority of novels in the zombie apocalypse genre, but in those differences were some truly great decisions by the author in creating a post apocalyptic environment, and mind set, that is unlike any other I have ever read, and I have read literally over a hundred books by now dealing with post apocalyptic worlds." "A realistic zombie virus -- great book!" "A zombie trilogy that had me hooked. I found it to be unique among books in the zombie outbreak genre and very plausible. Fast-paced and exciting. I couldn't put it down!"
