Vacuum Cleaner Relaxation & Other YouTube Natives

Been thinking about “native” YouTube genres, or genres which, in their way, are “native” to the platform, having necessarily emerged on YouTube — new forms and conventions, in other words, essentially made possible by YouTube’s existence and special features (especially, but not limited to, unprecedented access to an endless archive, thanks to massive uptake and […]

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Feeling the Unheard

The following text is the comment I delivered as the discussant for Steven Feld’s presentation this past Friday at Sensing the Unseen, a year-long seminar at MIT seeking “to join more familiar attention to material culture with an innovative focus on immaterial culture” in order to explore, in a variety of ways, the realm of […]

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nature mashing (riddim meth0d repost)

In anticipation of tomorrow’s opening session of MIT’s Sensing the Unseen series, which, in October, will bring to campus Steven Feld — a scholar of music and sound who has deeply influenced both my field (ethnomusicology) and my own work — I am re-posting yet another riddimmeth0d mashup. This particular mash was even more of […]

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The Sound of Skinny Jeans

Tomorrow I’ll be joining the fine folks from the Music and Sound Studies Colloquium Series at the University of Minnesota to talk about the synaesthetic publics addressing each other via skinny jeans, electronic dance beats, and wonky shuffle steps. I’m pasting the title and abstract below. As you can see, I’m flogging some familiar, but […]

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Copenhagen Call for Commotion

via Filastine (reblogged, more artfully than i&i, by /Rupture) — URGENT CALL FOR SOUND COMPOSITIONS On a topic even more urgent: Climate Chaos Deadline: December 13, 2009 Public Performance: December 16, in the streets of Copenhagen during the Climate Summit, broadcast from the Sound Swarm, a of battery of bicycle-mounted megaphones within the Bike Bloc […]

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Sounds Physical

wheel it back, selector I’m going to take a page from MBQ’s playbook and reblog a rather interesting post on sound cannons (aka LRADs, Long Range Acoustic Devices™) by fellow ethnomusicoloblogger, Ben Tausig, who is writing a very engaging blog about the “politics of sound.” I find Ben’s thoughts particularly revealing against the backdrop of […]

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Feel the Vibes

via Eric Gunther — On Friday and Saturday this week, I will be presenting artworks for the body at WAVES AND SIGNS, a conference on low-frequency vibration, at CAVS, organized by Wendy Jacob. That’s right, a conference about vibration! On Friday, there will be a wildly diverse series of 10-minute talks on vibration. There will […]

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