The Acoustical Unconscious

The Acoustical Unconscious PDF Author: Robert Ryder
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Is there an acoustical equivalent to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious? In the 1930s, Benjamin was interested in how visual media expand our optical perception: the invention of the camera allowed us to see images and details that we could not consciously perceive before. This study argues that Benjamin was also concerned with how acoustical media allow us to “hear otherwise,” that is, to listen to sound structures previously lost to the naked ear. Crucially, they help sensitize us to the discursive sonority of words, which Benjamin was already alluding to in his autobiographical work. In five chapters that range in scope from Tieck’s Blonde Eckbert, which Benjamin once called his locus classicus of his theory of forgetting, to Alexander Kluge’s films and short texts, where he develops what he calls “sound perspectives,” this monograph discusses how the acoustical unconscious enriches our understanding of different media, from the written word to radio and film. As the first book-length study of Benjamin’s linguistic, cultural-historical, and media-theoretical reflections on sound, this book will be particularly relevant to students and scholars of both German studies and sound studies.

The Acoustical Unconscious

The Acoustical Unconscious PDF Author: Robert Ryder
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Is there an acoustical equivalent to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious? In the 1930s, Benjamin was interested in how visual media expand our optical perception: the invention of the camera allowed us to see images and details that we could not consciously perceive before. This study argues that Benjamin was also concerned with how acoustical media allow us to “hear otherwise,” that is, to listen to sound structures previously lost to the naked ear. Crucially, they help sensitize us to the discursive sonority of words, which Benjamin was already alluding to in his autobiographical work. In five chapters that range in scope from Tieck’s Blonde Eckbert, which Benjamin once called his locus classicus of his theory of forgetting, to Alexander Kluge’s films and short texts, where he develops what he calls “sound perspectives,” this monograph discusses how the acoustical unconscious enriches our understanding of different media, from the written word to radio and film. As the first book-length study of Benjamin’s linguistic, cultural-historical, and media-theoretical reflections on sound, this book will be particularly relevant to students and scholars of both German studies and sound studies.

Hearing Otherwise

Hearing Otherwise PDF Author: Robert G. Ryder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781109518214
Category : Motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This dissertation introduces new ways of thinking about German radio and sound film in relation both to theories of modernity and to trends in psychology in the early twentieth century. The idea of an acoustical unconscious derives from Walter Benjamin's concept of the "optical unconscious." Benjamin showed that both photography and film begin to stretch our optical perception, so that it includes visions that previously could not have been consciously perceived. The dissertation argues that this theory can also illuminate the analysis of acoustical media. The first chapter examines Benjamin's optical unconscious alongside his various references to sound, concluding that the acoustical unconscious involves a complex relationship to phonetic and linguistic phenomena that distinguishes it from its optical counterpart. Subsequent chapters examine the implications of the acoustical unconscious in three different media: the written word, radio, and film. Starting with Ludwig Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert," which provides a link between romantic theories of the voice and listening to twentieth-century concerns of the same, Chapter Two examines how the acoustical unconscious is both structurally similar to and yet distinct from Proust's memoire involontaire. Chapter Three builds on claims in previous chapters, arguing that, if the acoustical unconscious involves a word's detachment from its meaning through its multiple sound parts, then it also dissociates and displaces the voice as it is commonly understood--namely, as unified and expressive--by allowing sounds of the human voice to emerge, which are amplified in radio. Chapter Three thus explores the relationship between voice and language in both the radio theory of Rudolf Arnheim and three radio plays by Gunter Eich: Traume, Sabeth, and Das Jahr Lazertes. Finally, Chapter Four reads the theoretical work, various stories and two films by Alexander Kluge, who directly addresses Benjamin's theory of the optical unconscious while also developing and describing "sound perspectives" that push sound material to the verge of disintegration. In examining how Kluge appropriates and reorganizes previous music and sound material in order to give them new meaning beyond their otherwise fixed historical contexts, it is also possible to interpret Kluge as politicizing the acoustical unconscious.

Hearing Otherwise

Hearing Otherwise PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description


Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century

Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century PDF Author: Florence Feiereisen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199759383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book introduces German Sound Studies using a transdisciplinary approach. It invites readers to auralize space by describing characteristically German soundscapes in the long twentieth century, including the noisy city of the early 1900s, the sounds of East and West Germany, and hip-hop soundscapes of the millennium.

Goethe Yearbook 25

Goethe Yearbook 25 PDF Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140034
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on acoustics around 1800.

Music, Authorship, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe

Music, Authorship, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe PDF Author: Michael Baumgartner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315298317
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Music, Authorship, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s investigates the function of music in European cinema after the Second World War up to the fall of the Berlin wall, a period when composers and directors embraced experimentation. Through analyses of music and sound in a wide range of iconic films from across Europe, the essays in this book provide a nuanced reconsideration of three core themes: auteur theory, art house film, and national cinema. Chapters written by an international array of contributors focus on case studies of music in the cinema of Carlos Saura, Jean-Pierre Melville, the Polish School, and Romanian directors, as well as collaborations between directors and composers, including Michelangelo Antonioni and Giovanni Fusco, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, Leo Arnshtam and Dmitry Shostakovich, and Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman. The contributors shift the emphasis from a director-centered view to the working relationship between director and composer, and from the visual component to the sonic aspects of these films, without ignoring the close correlation between soundtrack and visual elements. Enriching our understanding of the complex, intertwined nature of authorship in film, the role of film music, and sound, nation-state and art cinema, and European cinematic history, this volume offers a valuable addition to research across music and film studies.

Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science

Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science PDF Author: Robert M. Brain
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 140202987X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
This fascinating text is an exploration of the relationship between science and philosophy in the early nineteenth century. This subject remains one of the most misunderstood topics in modern European intellectual history. By taking the brilliant career of Danish physicist-philosopher Hans Christian Ørsted as their organizing theme, leading international philosophers and historians of science reveal illuminating new perspectives on the intellectual map of Europe in the age of revolution and romanticism.

A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness

A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness PDF Author: Bernard J. Baars
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521427432
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena with comparable unconscious ones, such as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended or habituated. By adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of workplace in the nervous system, Baars helps clarify the problem.

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory PDF Author: Imre Szeman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118472314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
This Companion addresses the contemporary transformation of critical and cultural theory, with special emphasis on the way debates in the field have changed in recent decades. Features original essays from an international team of cultural theorists which offer fresh and compelling perspectives and sketch out exciting new areas of theoretical inquiry Thoughtfully organized into two sections – lineages and problematics – that facilitate its use both by students new to the field and advanced scholars and researchers Explains key schools and movements clearly and succinctly, situating them in relation to broader developments in culture, society, and politics Tackles issues that have shaped and energized the field since the Second World War, with discussion of familiar and under-theorized topics related to living and laboring, being and knowing, and agency and belonging

Kaleidophonic Modernity

Kaleidophonic Modernity PDF Author: Brett Brehm
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531501508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies. Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes. In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.