Modular Synthesis

ISBN-13: 9781032113470 / Twarda / 2024 / 552 str.

Opis

Modular Synthesis brings together scholars, artists, composers, and musical instrument designers in an exploration of modular synthesis, an unusually multifaceted musical instrument that opens up many avenues for exploration and insight, particularly with respect to technological use, practice, and resistance.

Spis treści

1. The Buchla Music Easel: From Cyberculture to Market Culture  2. Modular Synthesizers as Conceptual Models  3. A Time-warped Assemblage as a Musical Instrument: Flexibility and Constauration of Modular Synthesis in Willem Twee Studio  4. Interview  5. Gordon Mumma’s Sound-Modifier Console  6. Artist Statement: Switchboard Modulars - Vacant Levels and Intercept Tones  7. Eurorack to VCV Rack: Modular Synthesis as Compositional Performance  8. Strange Play: Parametric Design and Modular Learning  9. Grid Culture  10. Modular Ecologies  11. Ourorack: Altered States of Consciousness and Auto-Experimentation with Electronic Sound  12. Logics and Rhetorics of Modularity in Electronic Sound  13. Draft/patch/weave: Interfacing the Modular Synthesizer with the Floor Loom  14. Composing Autonomy in Thresholds and Fragile States  15. Virtual Materiality: Simulated Mediation in the Eurorack Synthesizer Format  16. Interview: Designing Instruments as Designing Problems  17. Interviews with Four Toronto-based Modular Designers  18. Interview  19. Interview  20. Interview  21. Modular Synthesis in the Era of Control Societies  22. Randomness, Chaos, and Communication  23. Interview  24. From ‘What If’ to ‘What Diff?’ And Back Again  25. Interview: The Mycelia of Does-Nothing Objects

O autorze

Ezra J. Teboul is a researcher and artist, currently student librarian at Concordia University. They obtained a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2020. In 2022 they were a scholar in residence at the Columbia University Computer Music Center. Their work focuses on the material histories of electricity, work, and music.

Andreas Kitzmann is Associate Professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research interests include modular synthesis, technology and culture, digital media and community and memory studies. His self authored books include: The Hypertext Handbook: the Straight Story. Peter Lang, 2005 and Saved From Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams, Peter Lang, 2004. He has co-edited two books, and his work has also been included in various edited collections and journals such as A History of English Autobiography, (2016); From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom, (2012); the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2017); First Monday (2015) and Organized Sound (2023).

Einar Engström is a software engineer, modular synthesist, and computer musician. Creatively, he has been known to code in Lua, SuperCollider, Tidal Cycles, and the Teletype esolang, whilst professionally he primarily inhabits the BEAM ecosystem. Both practices are natural extensions to Einar’s previous PhD research in the history and philosophy of computing music programming, which focused on the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center at Bell Laboratories–the first behemoth of innovation in both telecommunications and computing. He also holds an MA in Visual Culture from Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan); is a former editor-in-chief of the bilingual international contemporary art magazine LEAP (Beijing, China) and technician and researcher at RE/Lab (Toronto Metropolitan University); and has hands in various electronic music record labels.