Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. Sonic Time Machines aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, "sonicity," a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.
- Content
- Preface
- Foreword: Wolfgang Ernst’s Media-archaeological soundings / Liam Cole Young
- Part I – Definitions of Sonicity and the Sonic Time Machine
- 1. Introduction: On ‘sonicity’
- 2. Beeing as ‘Stimmung’
- 3. Sonic re-presencing
- 4. The sonic computer
- Part II – Cultural Soundings and Their Engineering
- 5. Resonance of siren songs: Experimenting cultural sonicity
- 6. Textual sonicity: Technologizing oral poetry
- Part III – Techno-Sonicity and Its Beeing-In-Time
- 7. History or resonance?
- 8. From sound signal to alphanumeric symbol
- 9. Rescued from the archive: Archaeonautics of sound
- 10. Sonic analytics
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index