On summer nights on downtown Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, Grand Performances presents free public concerts for the people of the city. A hip hop orchestra, a mariachi musician, an Afropop singer, and a Chinese modern dance company are just a few examples of the eclectic range of artists employed to reflect the diversity of LA itself. At these concerts, shared experiences of listening and dancing to the music become sites for the recognition of some of the general aspirations for the performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life. In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes—from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences—through which civic space is created at downtown performances. Along with archival materials on urban planning and policy, Peterson draws extensively on her own participation with Grand Performances, ranging from working in an information booth answering questions about the artists and the venue, to observing concerts and concert-goers as an audience member, to performing onstage herself as a cellist with the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra. The book offers an exploration of intersecting concerns of urban residents and scholars today that include social relations and diversity, public space and civic life, privatization and suburbanization and economic and cultural globalization. At a moment when cities around the world are undertaking similar efforts to revitalize their centers, Sound, Space, and the City conveys the underlying tensions of such projects and their relevance for understanding urban futures.

This book argues that sound – as it is created, transmitted, and perceived – plays a key role in the constitution of space and community in contemporary Japan. The book examines how sonic practices reflect politics, aesthetics, and ethics, with transformative effects on human relations. From right-wing sound trucks to left-wing protests, from early 20th century jazz cafes to contemporary avant-garde art forms, from the sounds of U.S. military presence to exuberant performances organized in opposition, the book, rich in ethnographic detail, contributes to sensory anthropology and the anthropology of contemporary Japan.

Music, Space and Place examines the urban and rural spaces in which music is experienced, produced and consumed. The editors of this collection have brought together new and exciting perspectives by international researchers and scholars working in the field of popular music studies. Underpinning all of the contributions is the recognition that musical processes take place within a particular space and place, where these processes are shaped both by specific musical practices and by the pressures and dynamics of political and economic circumstances. Important discourses are explored concerning national culture and identity, as well as how identity is constructed through the exchanges that occur between displaced peoples of the world's many diasporas. Music helps to articulate a shared sense of community among these dispersed people, carving out spaces of freedom which are integral to personal and group consciousness. A specific focal point is the rap and hip hop music that has contributed towards a particular sense of identity as indigenous resistance vernaculars for otherwise socially marginalized minorities in Cuba, France, Italy, New Zealand and South Africa. New research is also presented on the authorial presence in production within the domain of the commercially driven Anglo-American music industry. The issue of authorship and creativity is tackled alongside matters relating to the production of musical texts themselves, and demonstrates the gender politics in pop. Underlying Music, Space and Place, is the question of how the disciplines informing popular music studies - sociology, musicology, cultural studies, media studies and feminism - have developed within a changing intellectual climate. The book therefore covers a wide range of subject matter in relation to space and place, including community and identity, gender, race, 'vernaculars', power, performance and production.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music. Through considerations of changes in technology and the mediascape that have shaped the experience of popular music (vinyl, iPods, social media), the role of social difference and how it shapes sociomusical encounters (queer spaces, gendered and racialised spaces), as well as the construction and representations of place (musical tourism, city branding, urban mythologies), this is an up-to-the-moment overview of central discussions about place and music. The contributors explore a range of contexts, moving from the studio to the stage, the city to the suburb, the bedroom to festival, from nightclub to museum, with each entry highlighting the diverse and complex ways in which music and place are mutually constitutive.

The Conference on Computer, Informatics, Cybernetics and Applications 2011 aims to facilitate an exchange of information on best practices for the latest research advances in the area of computer, informatics, cybernetics and applications, which mainly includes computer science and engineering, informatics, cybernetics, control systems, communication and network systems, technologies and applications, others and emerging new topics.

Architects are used to designing visually. In order to expand their basic design tools, this book explores the interactions between sound, space, hearing, and architecture. To this end, the author uses contemporary and historic buildings and projects, but also fictional, philosophical, and theoretical approaches – the idea is not only to define sound as a source, but also as an instrument of architectural space. By introducing a metatheory of "critical hearing", designers are able to acoustically test their projects and contribute to their design with auditive input, already at the design stage.

Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 presents new perspectives on the role music played in the physical, cultural, and civic spaces of Italian cities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Across thirteen chapters, contributors explore the complex connections between sound and space within these urban contexts, demonstrating how music and sound were intimately connected to changing social and political practices. The volume offers a critical redefinition of the core concept of soundscape, considering musical practices through the lenses of territory, space, representation, and identity, in five parts: Soundscape, Phonosphere, and Urban History Urban Soundscapes across Time Urban Soundscapes and Acoustic Communities Urban Soundscapes in Literary Sources Reconstructing Urban Soundscapes in the Digital Era Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 reframes our understanding of Italian music history beyond models of patronage, investigating how sounds and musics have contributed to the construction of human identities and communities.

In this collection, the essays examine the critical role that judgments about noise and sound played in framing the meaning of civility in British discourse and literature during the long eighteenth century. The volume restores the sonic dimension to conversations about civil conduct by exploring how censured behaviours and recommended practices resonated beyond the written word. As the contributors show, understanding changing perceptions and valuations of noise and sound allows us to chart how civility was understood in the context of significant political, social and cultural change, including the development of urban life, the extension of empire and the consolidation of legal procedure. Divided into three parts, Sound, Space and Civility in the British World demonstrates how both noise and sound could be recognized by eighteenth-century Britons as expressions of civility. The essays also explore the audible implications of uncivil conduct to complicate our understanding of the sonic range of politeness. The uses of sound and noise to interrogate British colonial anxieties about the distinction between civility and incivility are also investigated. Taken together, the essays identify the emergence of civility as a development that radically altered sonic attitudes and experiences, producing new notions of what counted as desirable or undesirable sound.

In 1964, rebel radio stations took to the seas in converted ships to offer listening choice to a young, resistant audience, against a backdrop of restrictive broadcasting policies. This book draws on this exceptional moment in social history, and the decades that followed, teasing out the relations between sound, society and space that were central to ‘pirate’ broadcasting activities. With a turn towards mediated life in geography, studies of radio have been largely absent. However, radio remains the most pervasive mass communications medium. This book breaks new ground, discussing in depth the relationship between radio, space and society; considering how space matters in the production, consumption and regulation of audio transmission, through the geophysical spaces of sea, land and air. It is relevant for readers interested in geographies of media, sensory spatial experience, everyday geopolitics and the turn towards elemental and more-than-human geographies.