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Invisible Man's awesome thread in General Gear inspired this. (viewtopic.php?f=149&t=48588)

Pardon if there is a similar thread already. I did some cursory searching and found nothing.

I'm starting my PhD next week in media studies, likely focusing on the history of technology, particularly in audio repro tech. You can get a better idea at my blog: http://www.asoundeconomy.com/

Who else is in school and doing similar work? Discipline doesn't matter...but who else is working with/writing about sound? What are you doing? Where are you? Where will you be presenting next? I'm obviously not the only one.

Audio engineer here, does that count? I make musicians sound their best.

p.s. just downloaded your thesis, gonna work my way through it, looks interesting.

I think you count

I'd have nothing to write about if it wasn't for engineers.

And thanks for the download. It's a bit long-winded as those things tend to be. The good bits are in the 'Discussion' and 'Results' sections (a format that really made no sense at all for the work I was doing...but when you try and jam humanities work in a social science framework, that tends to happen).

So...perhaps there aren't a whole ton of us...

I'm pretty sure there a couple more folks...maybe Goroth? Eivind August? UC? You know, the Scandies. I thought I caught that they were working on some literary stuff.

I was just hired back in May to chair the English department at a weird little non-profit college here in Michigan (which is where I am from originally). My training is in English, though I make it a point to work on other stuff, too. I mostly write about economics/Marxism, labor history, utopianism, SF, and the politics of power. But sound/noise/music help inform a lot of that.

PhD student in Cybercrime, but that's a bit off. and my SO (who lurks) is a PhD student in Criminal Psychology.

Invisible Man wrote:So...perhaps there aren't a whole ton of us...

I'm pretty sure there a couple more folks...maybe Goroth? Eivind August? UC? You know, the Scandies. I thought I caught that they were working on some literary stuff.

I was just hired back in May to chair the English department at a weird little non-profit college here in Michigan (which is where I am from originally). My training is in English, though I make it a point to work on other stuff, too. I mostly write about economics/Marxism, labor history, utopianism, SF, and the politics of power. But sound/noise/music help inform a lot of that.

This is probably an obvious suggestion, but have you read Attali's Noise? I'd love to hear your thoughts on it if so. I really wanted to get into Hillell Scwartz's Making Noise this summer but I tried to take a couple months off of academic lit and reading an 800pp tome about noise was just not an exception I was willing to make.

Inconuucl wrote:PhD student in Cybercrime, but that's a bit off. and my SO (who lurks) is a PhD student in Criminal Psychology.

I watched a show on crime once. They use a giant touchscreen and an eq to get rid of all this noise in except the perfect noise of a stream and found the bad guy. It was definitely 100% realistic and accurate.

Working in my masters thesis in philosophy, which (hopefully) will try to describe how noise can be beauty. Thankful for all suggestions on litterature, as long as they focus more on aesthetics and description than on history. A bit of noise history is cool.

DRodriguez wrote:

Inconuucl wrote:PhD student in Cybercrime, but that's a bit off. and my SO (who lurks) is a PhD student in Criminal Psychology.

I watched a show on crime once. They use a giant touchscreen and an eq to get rid of all this noise in except the perfect noise of a stream and found the bad guy. It was definitely 100% realistic and accurate.

I use a plugin for this in the studio. It analyzes white noise then creates a sympathetic tone to cancel it out.

Working on my masters thesis in Music Theory (underlying chordal connections based in hemitonicism with Webern's music). Once this is wrapped I'll hopefully start a PhD in theory as well so I can teach the young'uns how to properly analyze the shit they play.

Eivind, your thesis sounds awesome! I'd love to read your conclusions when you finish!

colossus wrote:This is probably an obvious suggestion, but have you read Attali's Noise? I'd love to hear your thoughts on it if so. I really wanted to get into Hillell Scwartz's Making Noise this summer but I tried to take a couple months off of academic lit and reading an 800pp tome about noise was just not an exception I was willing to make.

It's on my shelf, and I get (and like) his thesis. I just haven't had a chance to really dig into that kind of thing. Still trying to rework some stuff for a book, and anything that qualifies as "reading for pleasure" doesn't seem to be happening these days. At least beyond wasting time on ILF.

It looks like some pretty prescient stuff ("Post-Repeating," I think? Talking about sampling/looping sound manipulation?), and the rest of it seems fairly clear in retrospect. That's the trick, isn't it? Some of our best theorists are hardly worth reading anymore, as anyone currently in that field has a kind of implicit understanding of the work that's come before, or at least understands the references to the prime movers and shakers because they've read enough of the contemporary (read: derivative) scholarship.

Eivind August wrote:Working in my masters thesis in philosophy, which (hopefully) will try to describe how noise can be beauty. Thankful for all suggestions on litterature, as long as they focus more on aesthetics and description than on history. A bit of noise history is cool.

I forgot to mention this in the other thread, but I think you were talking about F. T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto."

[url]http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
[/url]

Just taught it recently, alongside a play about robots and excerpts from Amazing Stories. It's some seriously scary shit, but really interesting for its application to a place like ILF. Of course, it led immediately to Italian fascism, but...we're never more than two steps away from it, anyway.

My studies sound boring. Does that count?

waltdogg wrote:

DRodriguez wrote:

Inconuucl wrote:PhD student in Cybercrime, but that's a bit off. and my SO (who lurks) is a PhD student in Criminal Psychology.

I watched a show on crime once. They use a giant touchscreen and an eq to get rid of all this noise in except the perfect noise of a stream and found the bad guy. It was definitely 100% realistic and accurate.

I use a plugin for this in the studio. It analyzes white noise then creates a sympathetic tone to cancel it out.

It's not totally far-fetched in theory, editing audio to make garbled or soft conversations more audible is standard practice. Audio forensics generally relies on white noise removal, compression and removing everything below 200hz and above 5000Hz, which is where most talking resides. Audiovisual enhancements is rarely imperative to drive a case, however, as most crimes are fairly obvious, usually it's use to support a testimony if needed.

Okay, there's more to the eq aspect, but that's mostly things that are obvious, such as sweeping frequencies with a low bandwidth bandpass filter to isolate frequencies, and then widening the band to get the full range of the conversation.

osbornkt wrote:Working on my masters thesis in Music Theory (underlying chordal connections based in hemitonicism with Webern's music). Once this is wrapped I'll hopefully start a PhD in theory as well so I can teach the young'uns how to properly analyze the shit they play.

Eivind, your thesis sounds awesome! I'd love to read your conclusions when you finish!

So does yours! Lets team up and make a science lab. It will basically be us walking around in lab coats, making noise while nodding to each other, and eating candy.

Invisible Man wrote:I forgot to mention this in the other thread, but I think you were talking about F. T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto."

[url]http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
[/url]

Just taught it recently, alongside a play about robots and excerpts from Amazing Stories. It's some seriously scary shit, but really interesting for its application to a place like ILF. Of course, it led immediately to Italian fascism, but...we're never more than two steps away from it, anyway.

Yeah, that's the one. Thanks for digging that up for me.

Anything can lead to everything. Well, not really, but (almost) any ideology can be appropriated to create a tyrannical rule.

Also, my temporary mentor seemed really stoked on my thesis, so it looks like I'm doing this. Done nothing but read, go to seminars and writing reviews lately, but it's worth it.