★Duke University Press
At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositio…
Keywords In Sound
*2024 stock* In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies, and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keywo…
Sound Objects
*2024 stock* Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’…
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. Attentive to the way streaming has reordered the production, circulation, and consumption of music, Drott examines key features of t…
The Voice in the Headphones
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .
Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphone…
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Book)
*2023 stock* The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpect…
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Book)
In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, mu…
Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Book)
*2023 stock* Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most in…
Soundscapes of Liberation African American Music in Postwar France (Book)
*2023 stock* In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media…
Soundworks Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Book)
*2023 stock* In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practic…
Now that the audience is assembled
*2023 stock* Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that th…
Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Book)
*2023 stock* Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for soc…
Sound An Acoulogical Treatise (Book)
*2023 stock* First published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical, interpretive, and practical questions that inform our encounters with sound. Chion co…
Records Ruin the Landscape (John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording) (Book)
*2023 stock* John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and …
Tony Allen An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat
*2023 stock* Tony Allen is the autobiography of legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, the rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat. Conversational, inviting, and packed with telling anecdotes, Allen's memoir is based on hundreds of hours of interview…
Japanoise Music at the Edge of Circulation (Book)
*2023 stock* Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its c…
Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Book)
Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an …
The Record Contemporary Art and Vinyl (Book)
*2023 stock* The Record is the full-color catalog accompanying the groundbreaking exhibition The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from September 2, 2010 through February 6, 2011. The first exhibition …
Hold On to Your Dreams Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992(Book)
*2023 stock* Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few …