This dissertation provides a historical account of a until now neglected field of moving image production. It identifies and focuses on optical effects as a practice of montage within moving images as opposed to the montage of like images in time. Drawing on a wide range of new archival material, my dissertation presents previously unknown reasons…[Read more]

Call for papers for the II Historical Soundscapes Meeting – Évora 2019, that will take place at the University of Évora, October 16th-18th, 2019. The meeting is organized by the FCT research project PASEV – Patrimonialization of Évora’s Soundscape (1540-1910) (ref ALT20-03-0145-FEDER-028584 • LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-028584). Further information and…[Read more]

Finite Element Analyses (FEA) was used to predict the resonant modes of the Tsar Kolokol, a 200-ton fractured bell that sits outside the Kremlin in Moscow. Frequency and displacement data informed a physical model implemented in the Faust programming language (Functional Audio Stream). The authors hosted a concert for Tsar bell and carillon with…[Read more]

Archives are full of ghosts—the ghosts of music long-forgotten, technologies now superseded, practices that have faded away with time. This talk examines music used to accompany and signify the supernatural the silent film, as well as what can be learned by excavating the ghosts of musicians’ lives and careers now held in archives both at the Uni…[Read more]

Archives are full of ghosts—the ghosts of music long-forgotten, technologies now superseded, practices that have faded away with time. This talk examines music used to accompany and signify the supernatural the silent film, as well as what can be learned by excavating the ghosts of musicians’ lives and careers now held in archives both at the Uni…[Read more]

In this chapter I discuss how contests about religious language have revolved around a contrast between, on the one hand, a preference for literalism, with its emphasis on reference and denotation; and on the other hand, a valuation of the poetic functions of language and its material properties. Turning to the issue of electronically mediated…[Read more]

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorce…[Read more]

Should philosophy help address the problems of non-philosophers or should it be something isolated both from
other disciplines and from the lay public? This question became more than academic for philosophers working in
UK universities with the introduction of societal impact assessment in the national research evaluation exercise,
the REF.…[Read more]

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]

While found documents have long been marshalled as evidence in documentary, several recent films have interrogated the found document’s evidentiary status and raised questions about the ethics of appropriation. This essay examines two films — Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) and Jane Gillooly’s Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013) – in rela…[Read more]

This paper explores the ways in which Natalie Bookchin’s video loop installation entitled Mass Ornament (2009) both replicates and diverges from the notion of the mass ornament articulated by Siegfried Kracauer in the 1930s. By appropriating YouTube videos of many anonymous amateurs dancing alone in their homes and synchronizing them so that the d…[Read more]

Found footage filmmaking often generates novel juxtapositions and produces new meanings unintended by the footage’s original makers – meanings that are, in other words, “inappropriate.” One response to many such films is laughter. Through an examination of several experimental found footage videos made in the past decade, this chapter explore…[Read more]

Explores Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” as if it were experienced by many viewers of a particular type — SCM’s: suburban, collegiate young men — as a feeling out of how they might contrive themselves so that their future development would not place them as identifiable as losers by he-men pulp figures they’d learned early represent…[Read more]

British composer Laura Rossi is perhaps best known for her work providing new scores for
silent films, including The Battle of the Somme (1915), The Battle of the Ancre (1917), and a
selection of very early cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare (1899-1911) that appeared as
Silent Shakespeare in 1998. Rossi is also the composer of scores for many…[Read more]

A survey of different approaches to the concept of a subjective (or post-subjective) camera.

A central element of the core folk horror texts (The Wicker Man (1973), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968)) is the idea of rural communities as retaining pre-Christian practices and beliefs. When uncovered by a modern outsider who is returning to the countryside, these revelations disrupt their world view. Folk horror texts d…[Read more]

This bibliography presents selected sources (mostly in English) at the intersection of music and architecture. Many of the sources approach the relationship between the practices through multiple case studies. Several books focused on particular artists in both disciplines have been included not because those artists are central to the study of…[Read more]

Argues that the humanities do not need a replication drive like that being pushed for in the sciences.

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1314) portrays Hell as an alienated realm, in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. Franz Liszt’s two-movement Dante Symphony (1857), based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, gives musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. These evocations of suffering are enhanced by Lisz…[Read more]