An Epistemology of Noise

Author: Cecile Malaspina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350011797
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
What do we understand 'noise' to be? The term 'noise' no longer suggests only aesthetic judgement, as in acoustic or visual noise, and is now relevant to domains as varied as communication theory, physics and biology. This trans-disciplinary usage leads to confusion and complication, and reveals that the question of noise is a properly philosophical problem. Presenting an analysis of the rising interest in the notion of noise, this book investigates if there can be a coherent understanding of what it is, that can be effectively shared among the natural and human sciences, technology and the arts. Drawing the philosophical consequences of noise for the theory of knowledge, Malaspina undertakes a philosophical revaluation of Shannon and Weaver's theory of 'information entropy'; this forms the basis upon which to challenge the common idea that noise can be reduced to notions of error, disorder or disorganization. The wider consequences of this analysis relate the technological and scientific aspect of noise, with its cultural and psycho-social aspects. At the heart of Malaspina's argument is the contestation of the ground upon which we judge and distinguish noise from information and finally the exploration of its emancipatory potential.

An Epistemology of Noise

Author: Cecile Malaspina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350011800
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Sounds

Author: Casey O'Callaghan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191527041
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science has traditionally focused on a visual model. In a radical departure from established practice, Casey O'Callaghan provides a systematic treatment of sound and sound experience, and shows how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships between multiple sense modalities can enrich our understanding of perception and the mind. Sounds proposes a novel theory of sounds and auditory perception. Against the widely accepted philosophical view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, O'Callaghan argues that, on any perceptually plausible account, sounds are events. But this does not imply that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near the objects and happenings that bring them about. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time, and situates sounds in a world populated by items and events that have significance for us. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities. O'Callaghan's account of sounds and their perception discloses far greater variety among the kinds of things we perceive than traditional views acknowledge. But more importantly, investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. Sounds articulates a powerful account of echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories, and also reveals a number of surprising cross-modal perceptual illusions. O'Callaghan argues that such illusions demonstrate that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that the visuocentric model for theorizing about perception - according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry - ought to be abandoned.

Beyond Unwanted Sound

Author: Marie Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501313320
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Noise is so often a 'stench in the ear' – an unpleasant disturbance or an unwelcome distraction. But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Beyond Unwanted Sound is about noise and how we talk about it. Weaving together affect theory with cybernetics, media histories, acoustic ecology, geo-politics, sonic art practices and a range of noises, Marie Thompson critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise music, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Beyond Unwanted Sound instead aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

Noise Music

Author: David Cycleback
Publisher: Hamerweit Books
ISBN: 9780692567678
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 822

Book Description
"Will computers ever think like humans?" "Not if they're well designed." Mixing academic essay, anti-art philosophy, unsettling memoir and wry wit, Noise Music is a profoundly complex and open-ended collage covering a plethora of topics including psychology of information processing, consciousness, science, time, perception, art theory and criticism, morals, mental illness, the human condition, artificial intelligence, cognitive biases, language and communication. However, at its core the book is about the limits of human knowledge and understanding due to how minds and senses work. Going hand in hand with the philosophy, the aleatory narrative and miscellaneous scope expects readers to critique and expand beyond their conventional aesthetic modes of thinking and, in the end, makes the book itself "unsolvable."

Mechanical Sound

Author: Karin Bijsterveld
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262026392
Category : Machinery
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
Tracing efforts to control unwanted sound--the noise of industry, city traffic, gramophones and radios, and aircraft--from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

An Epistemology of Noise

Author: Cécile Malaspina
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350011816
Category : Entropy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
"What do we understand 'noise' to be? The term 'noise' no longer suggests only aesthetic judgement, as in acoustic or visual noise, and is now relevant to domains as varied as communication theory, physics and biology. This trans-disciplinary usage leads to confusion and complication, and reveals that the question of noise is a properly philosophical problem. Presenting an analysis of the rising interest in the notion of noise, this book investigates if there can be a coherent understanding of what it is, that can be effectively shared among the natural and human sciences, technology and the arts. Drawing the philosophical consequences of noise for the theory of knowledge, Malaspina undertakes a philosophical revaluation of Shannon and Weaver's theory of 'information entropy'; this forms the basis upon which to challenge the common idea that noise can be reduced to notions of error, disorder or disorganization. The wider consequences of this analysis relate the technological and scientific aspect of noise, with its cultural and psycho-social aspects. At the heart of Malaspina's argument is the contestation of the ground upon which we judge and distinguish noise from information and finally the exploration of its emancipatory potential."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art

Author: Sanne Krogh Groth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501338803
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 581

Book Description
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

Kafka and Noise

Author: Kata Gellen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780810138940
Category : Noise in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Kafka and Noise applies concepts from film theory and sound studies to explore noises in Kafka's writings--from Gregor Samsa's squeaking and Josefine the mouse singer's whistling to the terror of spoken Yiddish and the thrill of literary recitation.--Provided by publisher.

Modernist Soundscapes

Author: Angela Frattarola
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.