Summer is like New Year’s for academics: a time of reflection and goal-setting, both in work and in personal life.
Category: food for thought
New Years Resolutions for 2017
I have 2 big resolutions for 2017.
Listening
This is a bit of a watershed moment for me and I need to record it, so I can go back when I slip into my jokey aloof self, and remind myself that this is how it felt when I really finally understood.
I Want It That Way
Oliver Wang: “Phil Collins, like Sly Stone and disco producers before him, saw the drum machine as an instrument for aiding a larger musical vision.”
“Any accurate analysis of rock music must therefore ultimately account for its timbre and studio production at least as much as on the traditionally analyzed parameters of tonality, harmony, and meter; in other words, how the song sounds is as important—if not more so—than what is sounding.”
Kevin Holm-Hudson, “The Future Is Now … and Then: Sonic Historiography in Post-1960s Rock”
Trying out a new post format today—posting a quote from a recent reading and reflecting on it a teensy weensy bit.
Holm-Hudson’s idea of sonic historiography, tracing the history of rock music through the sound of that music, is integral to my approach and my (still under construction) thesis statement for my dissertation. Part of what I want to do is define the “’80s sound” through its technology, analyze the timbres of those technologies, and finally raise issues of aesthetics and reception and how they relate to those timbres/technologies.