Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-07T10:39:09.663Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Relays: Audiotape, Material Affordances, and Cultural Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2017

BRIAN KANE
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article considers the relationship between audiotape's material affordances and the audibility of cultural practices. Not all changes in the materiality of sound media are audible to listeners, and not all changes in the audibility of cultural practices require changes in their material support. Thus focus on the affordances of sound technologies – those possibilities of sound technologies that may or may not be engaged by its users, and the wide range of practices that such technologies support – can help to connect materiality and audibility. I address the affordances of audiotape by examining a number of small case studies where established sonic practices encounter a transition from phonography to audiotape: musique concrète and the tape loop, serialist composition, and Les Paul's use of overdubbing. Finally, I consider the nature of the audiotape archive and its mode of access in order to pose some general questions about the meaning and use of audiotape's affordances.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 14 , Special Issue 1: Tape , February 2017 , pp. 65 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beckett, Samuel. Krapp's Last Tape and Embers. London: Faber & Faber, 1958.Google Scholar
Edison, Thomas. ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’. The North American Review 126/262 (1878), 527–36.Google Scholar
Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Ernst, Wolfgang. ‘Listening to Sonic Expressions with Media-Archaeology Ears’. Paper presented at the conference Sound Art Matters, Aarhus University, 1–4 June 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2m9ouzlYHc (accessed 6 January 2017).Google Scholar
Gayou, Évelyne. Le Grm, Groupe De Recherches Musicales: Cinquante Ans D'histoire. Paris: Fayard, 2007.Google Scholar
Hodeir, André. Since Debussy. New York: Grove Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
‘Les Paul and Mary Ford’. Omnibus. (CBS Television). https://vimeo.com/82828405 (accessed 6 January 2017).Google Scholar
Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music, rev. and expanded edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Murray, Christopher. ‘A History of “Timbres-Durées”: Understanding Olivier Messiaen's Role in Pierre Schaeffer's Studio’. Revue de Musicologie 96/1 (2010), 117–29.Google Scholar
Schaeffer, Pierre. L'oeuvre Musicale. Paris: Institut national de l'audiovisuel, 2011.Google Scholar
Shaughnessy, Mary Alice. Les Paul: An American Original. New York: William Morrow, 1993.Google Scholar
Snyder, Ross H. ‘Sel-Sync and the “Octopus”: How Came to Be the First Recorder to Minimize Successive Copying in Overdubs’. ARSC Journal 34/2 (2003), 209–13.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Teruggi, Daniel. ‘Technology and Musique Concrète: The Technical Developments of the Groupe De Recherches Musicales and Their Implication in Musical Composition’. Organised Sound 12/3 (2007), 213–31.Google Scholar
Toop, David. ‘Stockhausen and the Sine-Wave: The Story of an Ambiguous Relationship’. Musical Quarterly 65/3 (1979), 379–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ussachevsky, Vladimir. ‘Music in the Tape Medium’. The Juilliard Review VI/2 (1959), 8–9, 18–20.Google Scholar
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Auguste. L’ève Future, new edn. Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1921 [1886].Google Scholar