Low End Theory

Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience

Dr. Paul C. Jasen (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

296 Seiten

2016
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-0993-9 (ISBN)

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Low End Theory probes the much-mythologized field of bass and low-frequency sound. It begins in music but quickly moves far beyond, following vibratory phenomena across time, disciplines and disparate cultural spheres (including hauntings, laboratories, organ workshops, burial mounds, sound art, studios, dancefloors, infrasonic anomalies, and a global mystery called The Hum). Low End Theory asks what it is about bass that has fascinated us for so long and made it such a busy site of bio-technological experimentation, driving developments in science, technology, the arts, and religious culture.

The guiding question is not so much what we make of bass, but what it makes of us: how does it undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it draw bodily thought into new equations with itself and its surroundings? Low End Theory is the first book to survey this sonorous terrain and devise a conceptual language proper to it. With its focus on sound’s structuring agency and the multi-sensory aspects of sonic experience, it stands to make a transformative contribution to the study of music and sound, while pushing scholarship on affect, materiality, and the senses into fertile new territory. Through energetic and creative prose, Low End Theory works to put thought in touch with the vibratory encounter as no scholarly book has done before.

For more information, visit: http://www.lowendtheorybook.com/

Paul C. Jasen is a Lecturer in Music and Communication Studies at Carleton University, Canada.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Elements of a Myth-Science

1. The Sonic Body: An Ethico-Acoustic Toolkit
Sonorous Relations
Tales and Strategies
Myth-Science in the Vibratory Milieu

2. Spectral Catalysis: Disquieting Encounters
Spectres of the Manmade Unknown
Infrasound
Unhomed
Boo! (toward an operative reality)
The Hum
‘And it was only by analogy that it could be called a sound at all...’
Blinkered Science
We still do not know what a sonic body can do...

3. Numinous Strategies
Learning to Play the Sonic Body
The Nervous Piano
Numinous Instruments
Religious Audiogenesis
Numinous Sound Design
Playing the Resonances
Tellurian Organs
The Organ-Church Assemblage
The Arcanum: An Ambulant Myth-Science
The Nervous Organ
Baroque Affect Engineering
The Gothic Assemblage: Applied Synaesthetics

4. Tone Scientists I: Vibratory Arts
Cymatic Arts
Documentary Practices
A Speculative Turn
Perceptual Abstraction
Transversal Strategies
Incipient Dance
Sonic Architectures
Dance With the Speaker
‘A people of oscillators’

5. Tone Scientists II: Bass Cults
The Lab
The Science
Bass Science
Dubplates and Mastering
Engineering the Vibratorium
Affects and Affectations
Entering the Rhythmachine
Three Physio-Logics
Jungle (1994)
Dubstep (2005)
Footwork (2009)

Conclusion: Where next?

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	24.3.2016
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	562 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musiktheorie / Musiklehre
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-5013-0993-5 / 1501309935
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-0993-9 / 9781501309939
Zustand	Neuware