In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works pred…
How the S-C 4020—a mainframe peripheral intended to produce scientific visualizations—shaped a series of early computer art projects that emerged from Bell Labs. In 1959, the electronics manufacturer Stromberg-Carlson produced the S-C 4020, a device that allowed mainframe computers to present and preserve images. In the mainframe era, the output of text and image was quite literally periph…
Scholars from science, art, and humanities explore the meaning of our new image worlds and offer new strategies for visual analysis. We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's i…
An overview of emerging topics, theories, methods, and practices in sonic interactive design, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience. Sound is an integral part of every user experience but a neglected medium in design disciplines. Design of an artifact's sonic qualities is often limited to the shaping of functional, representational, and signaling roles of sound. The in…
"The first rigorous and systematic theory of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) electronic culture"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Music and Connectionism provides a fresh approach to both fields, using the techniques of connectionism and parallel distributed processing to look at a wide range of topics in music research, from pitch perception to chord fingering to composition. As one of our highest expressions of thought and creativity, music has always been a difficult realm to capture, model, and understand. The connec…
The first book to provide comprehensive introductory coverage of the multiple topics encompassed under psychoacoustics. How hearing works and how the brain processes sounds entering the ear to provide the listener with useful information are of great interest to psychologists, cognitive scientists, and musicians. However, while a number of books have concentrated on individual aspects of thi…
This volume presents the most up-to-date collection of neural network models of music and creativity gathered together in one place. Chapters by leaders in the field cover new connectionist models of pitch perception, tonality, musical streaming, sequential and hierarchical melodic structure, composition, harmonization, rhythmic analysis, sound generation, and creative evolution. The collection…
Tracing the logic of media history, from the baroque to the neo-baroque, from magic lanterns and automata to film and computer games. The artists of the seventeenth-century baroque period used spectacle to delight and astonish; contemporary entertainment media, according to Angela Ndalianis, are imbued with a neo-baroque aesthetic that is similarly spectacular. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and …
A music researcher's quest to discover other musical species. Even those of us who can't play a musical instrument or lack a sense of rhythm can perceive and enjoy music. Research shows that all humans possess the trait of musicality. We are a musical species—but are we the only musical species? Is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic ability? In The Evolving Animal Orche…