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                                 // handwritten experimental notebook one

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// click the link to be directed to a compilation based on recordings mentioned         in readings and discoveries from several hours of listening rabbit holes.

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How does Ethnographic Music Travel? (Unfinished)

Stemming from a continued interest in listening to jazz and funk having played saxophone since age 10, (unfortunately which the perils of architecture school has quashed) I have seemingly always been aware of the exotic sounds present in Herbie Hancock’s album “Head Hunters” (1973). Sounds which to this day I turn to as tonic for that final hour push, early in the morning before review day. My musical interests of late have been peaked by ex Irish radio DJ, Donal Dineen on his podcast “Make Me An Island”, a product of covid lockdown this Spring. These compilations and conversations on world music traditions are a healthy reminder and insight into the variety of music and sounds from around the globe available at a touch through contemporary media like Spotify and Youtube. Initiated by discoveries through playlists, endless new artist profiles, and podcast on Spotify and Youtube Channels such as the Alan Lomax Archives or Real World Records there is a beginning to a long life of new discoveries and favourites to look forward to. As a proxy to these discoveries the world of ethnomusicologists like Colin Turnbull and Steven Feld inevitably only lay around the corner in my journey through musics. Their work comes at a pivotal and cutting edge moment where as soon as there was the technologies capable of providing the portability they required, they were out making recordings and contributing to the forward marching momentum of globalisation and broadening of borders and boundaries across societies.           There are intriguing questions to be asked of today and the industry of these ethnographic recordings melting into the seemingly bottomless pot of content that is music streaming services. How can data that was so tirelessly and carefully extracted at great expenses of energy with essentially unknown implications for those they were recording and what the exposure might entail for them be so effortlessly accessed with hardly any thought by a 22 year old going for a cycle on the West coast of Ireland 60 years in the future? So far from the reality of the recording event but somehow still enamoured with a small sense sure to have been present when recorded.

Steven Feld describes a moment he had on a field trip in a interview in 2004 -

“Somebody had died. They said, "Get your tape recorder." I didn't understand the language. I didn't know anything! So here I am, wham! with big Nagra [tape recorder] and headphones and microphone sitting among all these people who were weeping. I just sort of closed my eyes and listened and realised that I could easily spend a year trying to figure out the first sounds I was hearing. So much was going on with the sound and social patterning, in the relationship between emotion and sonic form and structure and organisation.”

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The Sound Recorder, Between the Musician and the World; Considering Ethnographic Sound Study.

This title above plays off the title, “The Handle, Between the Vessel and the World”, used in Cabinet Magazine Issue 60 for Georg Simmel’s essay ““The Handle: An Aesthetic Study”. Does the sound recorder as an object in an ethnographic context provoke thoughts on the subject of art, reproduction, anthropology, aesthetics, and society in a similar fashion to the paradigms formed by Simmel in his observations of handle and vessel?

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This diagram attempts to visual the objects, individuals, processes, results, relationships, and contexts involved in the ethnographic recording of music, poetry, song, or sounds. A  recording process such as those carried out by ethnomusicologists are a complex weave of interrelating elements such as technological use, human relationships, environment, and social functions. It is key for the success of a recording to be aware of all the possible elements not limited to the those that are active at the time of the recording.           The following is a string of pragmatically themed questions directed at each element present in the diagram above. These initial questions of individual elements will be use to create a base of provocation to which there will be an attempt to draw conclusions from, trace interrelations, and ask further questions. Although the following is admittedly not a frightfully engaging set of questions to read, it proved a valuable method of writing to help wrap my thoughts around the forces at play in an encounter such as this.

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Sound Produced

Why is this sound being produced, is it in response to an event or something of the environment? Does it contain meaning, what is it intended for? What does this sound mean to the person who makes it or is it supposed to mean for those who hear it? Is the sound made part of a greater whole, is it just an element, is it the whole which can be broken down into smaller parts? How social is the sound, does it make relationships with other peoples voices or other environments voices? How is the sound made? Can the sound be replicated easily, is there much skill to producing this sound? Did it take much practice to master this sound, therefore is this sound deep rooted in a broader context in that there is obligation to recognising and making this sound? Is it one sound or many sounds, does it rely on other sources of sound in order to be truly represented? Who owns this sound? Who invented the sound? How rare or common is this sound? Is it made by one person or many people? Do instruments or tools make this sound?

Sound Recorder (Device)

What technology was used to record this sound? Was it visible to the performer? Was the performer instructed on how to use it correctly? Should the performer be instructed how to use it? Did the device work reliably? What audio format did the device record in? Did the device afford the opportunity to pass on a copy of the recording to the performer? If part of a series of recordings, was it the same device used to record all the sounds? Were multiple devices used to record many voices simultaneously? What limits to quality or radius could the device operate at?

Performer

Who is the person being recorded? From what background do they belong and why is it their expertise or skill that is being asked to be recorded? Are they familiar with the recording process? What is their cultural background or status? Are they aware they are being recorded? Do they know why they are being recorded or what the recording will be used for? Will this recording have personal affects on them after the process is complete? Are they being coerced to perform? Does the consciousness of the performer to being recorded affect how they present themselves for the recording?

Sound Observer (Ethnographer)

What responsibility does the ethnographer have for the recording? What is their competency with the recording equipment? How much effort have they gone through to get to this recording point? Are they acting individually or as part of a team? How will their previous experience with similar or dissimilar performers affect their approach in this instance? What is their cultural background? Do they know why they are recording and what the recording will be used for? Will this recording have personal affects on them after the process is complete? Are they being coerced to record? What particular skill or experience does this ethnographer provide for the situation? How much of an observer or a participant are they? Are they listening, just recording, or both? How engaged are they in other aspects of anthropology and does this engagement reflect into their work? Does the presence of the observer in close proximity to the performer change the aura surrounding this sound?

Sound Travel

What spatial environment was the sound recorded? Was there obstacles to the sound? Was there aid to help improve or amplify the the sound from source to recorder? Was there climate forces acting at the time of recording? Did the sound travel in sequence? Was the order of this sequence as expected? What affect does recording in situ have for the palpability of the sound?

Process between Observer, Recorder and Recording

Using all their skill, have they faithfully captured the performance or achieved their intended goals? What responsibility did the ethnographer have over the physical device? How familiar was the ethnographer with the device, did they maximise the devices potential? Has the ethnographer had much control over the input restrictions on this sound?

Observer, Performer Relationship

Are ethnographer and performer familiar with each other? Are they friendly/hostile towards each other? How aware are they of each other? Is there understanding from both sides about each others purpose in the recording? Is this a repeat occasion, or a first meeting? Is there much engagement of any form between the two? Have either sought each other out under specific instruction or desire? What becomes of the relationship after the recording? Is the performer remunerated by the ethnographer?

Recording / Reproduction

Was it recorded to the best of its ability, was there care involved in its recording? Has the sound notably changed or deviated from what the performer produced in real-time? How much of the environmental conditions have made their way into the recordings? Are there layers present in the recorded sound? What level of noise is present (noise being considered as something undesirable or subtractive towards the quality of the recording)? Are the sounds recognisable or completely new? Is this sound a known language, be it language of style, music, emotion, expression, linguistics..etc? Is the sound audibly degraded or of lesser quality?

Environment

What is the immediate context and environment of the recording? What are all the effects this has on the whole process? What was the impetus or forces that brought this recording together? How will the condition affect the output of the recording and what it will be used for? Does this environment change throughout time and how will it be perceived in the future? Has this operation happened in this environment before? What does it mean for this place going forward? What impact will this recording have on other environments and the interests to be explored there? Does this recording improve recognition for this place? Does it add value to the environment that would otherwise have been missed?

Reproduction Trajectory

Does the sound become part of a published collection for distribution? Does the sound make its way into other cultures? Do people use this sound as a resource to create something new? Does this sound become a source of inspiration? Can the sound be studied carefully and have observations made about it? Can the sound inform patterns or reinforce other ideas? Can the sound be fully understood or does it need to be? How long will this sound remain around, has it been eternalised in a sense? Will the sound be forgotten or lost? Is nobody interested in this sound? Can the sound make money for people? Can the sound become an educational tool?

Reproduction Orbit

Who does this sound belong to now? Does the relationship between the recording and the ethnographer change over time even if nothing is done? How inaccessible or separated from the recording is the performer at this point? Does the ethnographer know what they are to do with it? Is this sound part of a collection of sounds also orbiting on a similar course or from the same source ideas? Within this span of time under the control of the ethnographer how much editing is to be used? Is there an effort to reduced the amount of editing?

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//essay

The recorder is the bridge of a somewhat unattainable, deeply disguised and inaccessible art and the practical medium by which it can reproduce itself in another world of arts. The recording device is nothing without these two worlds, it cannot be celebrated without either the art to input in to it or the world to listen to it.            And what aesthetic role does the recorder play in our minds, is it the symbol of a curious and prodding ethnographer, those of the 1960s and 70s trekking sweatily through thick growth wearing the heavy metal product of a foreign industrialised world steeped in a era of expanding electrical science and technological developments. What would a field studying ethnomusicologist be without their instrument of mass recording, merely a boring old anthropologist of sorts? It is curious to think of those in the field today, with reliable high quality compact equipment and no need to carefully store hours and hours of tape in adverse conditions battling clunky yet sensitive tools.           There is a collision of several worlds when the device is revealed. Is the recording device an extension of the human ear. Is it an improved sensory organ with independent memory? And how can we claim it for ourselves so that we can describe the experience between performer, device, and observer as a pure and human one? Georg Simmel notes that the bowl is as a tool is an extension of the human hand in the case where our hands are performing the same function as the bowl. By proxy of its extension to our body, the bowl now asserts itself in alignment with our souls. “…just as the hand is a tool of the soul, so too the tool is a hand of the soul.”           Upon our request the bowl can hold water and it can maintain this request for much longer than we could through our own clasped hands. The same can maybe be applied to the recording device, we request of it to listen as when we listen and but it remembers the sounds for much longer than we could possibly. The only discrepancy is to think of the quality of memory, human memory is unavoidably blended with precedent and context in comparison to the almost purely empirical memory of the device.

This empirical memory is not without its flaws.

The operation of sound recording in an ethnographic context is laced with interrelating phenomena. At the core of the operation being the recording device itself, around which orbits the role of performer, observer, the reproduction, and the environment in which it is set. It is probably best to consider this intricate exchange between device and affecting parties in a chronological sense, thinking closely on the interaction between the introduced and existing conditions.           Fundamentally, at its base the recording device is a conversion chamber for vibrations. Its initial function is to listen and take a certain ownership of a specific portion of vibrations available to it in its immediate space. In this moment the sound lacks extrinsic value, the vessel of sound serves only itself. This is the only moment where the original sound which has been created to be heard in the conventional sense, cannot be heard. These inputs are then condensed and converted, into an analog or digital output. Only now do we employ more instruments in an extension of our bodies and return these signals back into vibrations and prime them for future regurgitation and repetition of use.           All recordings have an immediate environment in which they situate themselves and it is the detectable traces of environment often heard in ethnographic studies that can hold as much value as the main voice in focus. The audible cues hint at the nature of social contexts or even the geography of a location. Is the space indoor or outdoor, are the surrounding surfaces hard or soft, can other elements or voices be heard making sounds and for what reasons? It is only the particulars of sound recordings that can accomplish this layered simultaneity and sequence of alternating, overlapping, or interlocking dialogues. Whilst writing and linguistics constrain our expressions to sequential unravelling, sound has an ability to describe environments with broad strokes of multiplicity and depth. “…speaking voices, birds whooping, the ambience, the overlapping of axes, trees falling, whistling, yodelling and singing.”(Feld 2004)            It is an ability that requires control on the part of the observer and the manipulation of their recorder. The selected slice of space in which they observe is crucial, while we the listener cannot precisely deduce the chosen direction of observation from the recording we must consider the possibilities and consequences of the observer having an impact on this. How the observer decides to orientate their instrument is an extension of their intent. Do they face away from one action and focus on another or combine the sounds of many sources in unison?            How does time in space become important for the narrative of an environment and can time have a function for the recording? The recording can act as a segment of sonic history. If a place is to change through time, recordings can preserve insight into the kinds of multiplicities and layers that writing and photographs fail to provide. The recording is assimilating all of that moment in time suspending it and sustaining it for any point in the future. There is a capturing of a sequence in time with input but not necessarily having to respect that sequence or time for the output. The device enables a temporal control, reflected time can now be manipulated, sped up, reversed, cut. Contexts from seconds before or after can be ignored, we can choose to inform ourselves fully, or only just a small amount. This delicate and predetermined choreography of staging and positioning is critical for the nature of synthesis revealed in the final recording.           A recording is certainly not the same as the authentic sound it comes from, we know this. How is it different, how is it better, or what can be learned from the process. Is there an obligation to preserving the integrity of an original recording? When this work of art becomes a copy of the real thing it has crossed over into a new realm of reproduction. A reproduction no matter how faithful or true to the source of the sound or music will always be considered “smaller”. Reproduction reduces an art, and the technological process miniaturises it, but not necessarily to the detriment of its accessibility. A smaller representation of art can improve our ability to understand it, in particular cases where pure art or music is so richly possessed by ideas and emotions that we would struggle to easily comprehend it in its raw state. We can obtain a power over the reproduced “smaller” work, we can handle it, we can enjoy it. (Benjamin, Carl Einstein)           The reproduction of sound is a powerful tool, it possess an almost infinite potential for iterations and altered repetitions but this same dynamism for change also masks a false stability within itself, it is an illusion to its own mortality. How do sounds or music last forever in a truly reproductive cycle, surely with each rendition or playback it changes. The environment we play back in never rests, and the sounds themselves either degrade or become altered. And sure this now returns to the question of a new art, just as the original recording was the creation of something new, each play or repetition of that same recording becomes not only a new art but part of a new world too.           To reproduce a work of art for Walter Benjamin is a means to renew it and make useful again in the present, but not without its losses too. The same technology that can miniaturise reproductions for our benefit also detach the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. In the realm of ethnography it is tradition that is at the core of the message attempting to be portrayed through these recordings. Is there a defeat of function when this reproduction makes its way out into the world beyond its original intentions to be listened to as a matter of record? Or can elements of one tradition still shine through in reproductions as it brushes up alongside other traditions in conversation and essentially create a new version of tradition. When Benjamin wrote this conclusion of reproduction and tradition in relation to art and technology, there was no precedent for what technology could achieve and how technology would become embroiled in a tradition of its own.            By replacing the work many times over, it supplants uniqueness with massive quantity. This stripping away of uniqueness then brings into question Benjamin’s argument for Aura. To abuse the aura of art is to shatter the aura. Held in such a high regard that aura is “the nimbus of authority that enveloped artworks in a nexus of uniqueness, unattainability, and the putative permanence.” According to Benjamin, several modes can undermine the aura of say a recording. An aura as a weave of space and time, creating an apparition of distance however near it might be. Any performance, above all, those deep in an unaccessible remote location are singular events. Strictly ordered in a temporal space, they are knitted tightly alongside tradition, as tradition almost solely relies on its place in time. By making this singular event reproducible the auratic mode of spatial temporal perception becomes undermined. One blow for aura. Technology, in its cold touch and foreign existence exploits and subjugates the nature living in the moment of the recording. It disrupts the balanced interplay between humans and nature for its own benefit and therefore strikes another blow to the aura of the performed sound which was so securely knotted in nature. And finally a recording hastens aura, it asserts urgency and an accelerated direction through time in a forward direction. And who likes to be hurried along? Certainly not Aura.

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Soundscape in a Deskscape

There is no discernible difference between being asleep and being awake, within the first 20 steps of the day I am dressed, showered, fed and back adjacent to my bed sat at my desk. The work day begins. The condensed sense of space we occupy seems to reflect in time. Mornings are short, and the dark tinted skies quickly evaporate into bright winter daylight. Afternoons plunge away with the brewing of coffee. Every evening’s fleeting blackness is interrupted by the luminous car headlights scanning across our 6 windows. The night races in and you wonder, am I still awake or am I back asleep?. These sixteen hour days pass by choreographed by our three-roomed routine. All the uniqueness of a day diminishes with each iteration.           Frighteningly the most striking daily element of diminishing value, is that of our sight. The visual intrigue of each day shallows. There are fewer novelties and nuances to be assimilated by our eyes while the same images and the same people fill our days. The closeness of computer screens and the hours poured thickly over pencil lead and paper do not suffice for stimulation or exercise. The eyes have become lazy to life, we have no need to react instinctively or quickly and we have forgotten what it means to have a reflex. A truly slovenly existent of sightly perception exists here.             R. Murray Schafer remarks that since the development of perspective painting and the printing press of Renaissance times, our ears have given way to our eyes. (Schafer) Information no longer solely passes down through oral traditions of song and story. Instead, we live in an era of imagery, over-whelming amounts of imagery, and we are numb to it. But here, now, in our three roomed flat, things are different, the dwindling reliance on our eyes have set the waves in motion for a sonic renaissance! While our eyes begin to lose a certain focus the ears have tuned our consciousness into the immediate sounds of our surroundings. A day now begins to define its length along the quietly played symphony of banal circadian notes prickling in and out of the background of our work-from-home lives. Never has noise so vividly resembled sound. What was once an unmemorable product of careless listening in noise pollution is now the soundtrack to our day-to-day.

“Music is sounds, sounds around us whether we’re in or out of concert halls: cf. Thoreau” - John Cage (1969)

// to hear it:

The Morning Alarm, repeating shrill tones, insisting on a response…snooze.

the click and scrape of a door lock, footsteps, knock one, knock two.

groan.

the same footsteps shuffle on the cool tiles outside my door, more click-scrape

the shower bursts into muffled life, thin doors bang and taps squawk under morning pressure.

the alarm again, this time it stops abruptly.

Click, scrape, shuffle, click-scrape, my turn

gush, click, thump, tick, gurgle…”eggs?”

“eggs”

plastic crinkles, springs load

water trickles, cutlery ting and resonate, is that ‘A’ sharp?SnatcH! springs thrust back

an airy whoosh, we plant ourselves

satisfied murmurs, plates flutter and feet shuffle back to position.

the little Trojan fans begin to push hot air, a keyboard clicksandclacks in changing directions and the mouse snips snips polyrhythmically, concentrated gazes fall silent…

…

…

gush, click, thump, tick, gurgle, wait……pushhhd, pour, exhale

back to position…

…

faint chugging grows louder, a diesel engine lazily makes ground, a clumsy halt, ticking over, quick feet scuffle from door to door, click scrape..clack

the lazy chugging fades

…

click scrape, footsteps, click-scrape, thwack

more faint conversation comes and goes, some snippet of words float through the open window and fade away again

thud, clang-kkt!, is that ‘A’ sharp again? the heavy gate swings closed behind them

…

click-scrape thwack, shuffle, creak, slide

…now all kinds of engines faintly revving over uneven bumps, this remains consistent

…

…

slide, creak, thwack!…

quiet again

…

more diesel engines putter in and out, surely it must be nearly five?

…

ting..ting..ting, galvanised bells sound as footsteps descend from a height outside

more thud, clang-kkt!

…

clicksandclacks

…

clicksandclacks

…

sudden soft movements slide over carpet, fabrics fizz with static over limbs and heads careful thumps force heels swiftly into worn clunking boots

clack-scrapeA Brisk wall of cool air whooshes in on a whisper, scrape thwack and a tick tick tick as the freewheel trundles away over kerbs.

…

…

the soft voices come and go for some time, smaller engines cut off and come to rest peacefully outside my window.

..

..

I pay less attention to the noises I make  

..

..

..

..

The Morning Alar……..

As the attractive visual landscape we once admired fades from view and all of a sudden becomes filled with text boxes, endless scrolling, loading bars and pixelated reflections of our groggy selves, another scape begins to rear its head. The Soundscape reincarnates itself, and an intrigue ensues. Notably it is not the product of our bodily selves we hear the most but it is the contribution of other people and things to the composition of this soundscape that asserts a prominence. As it is said, the “ear draws inwards”. The physical nature of sound challenges us when we try to make sense of the sounds we produce with our bodies. Our flesh becomes essentially a medium that falsifies and transfigures the sounds we push outward past these inward facing ears. For instance, we all cringe when we hear our own voices played back and deny that it represents us fairly. The ear that draws inward is exposed to the new, and when we really listen its the newness of sounds that excites us, which makes sense. Newness is to be coveted by our ears, for our ears are always on, our ears are forever absorbing and taking in.           We more often than not, have a personal choice over the images and objects we put before ourselves to set our eyes upon. And a similar choice when we decide to plug in and listen to our favourite playlist of 1970s disco hits. Unusually with our ears, unlike most of our other senses, we are in most cases involuntary listeners to the World’s machine of sounds that begin and end around us at a constant beginning and ending rate. Listening is involuntary, we cannot close our ears, like we can our lids at will. What is it we are actually hearing and listening, are there significant sounds that we hear in what we might perceive as noise, are there the sounds of individuals, of dominant louder and sharper sounds, or are there sounds just more numerous than the last or the next one? Can we identify “sounds within the cacophony” as one might have in post industrialised New York City of the early 20th century!

Much of Emily Thompson’s writing in “The Soundscape of Modernity” I find useful in distilling down what it is that I am hearing or even how to describe the situation through which the noises have come about. Is there a concentration of people near me, how urban is the environment, what organic sources are acting, what mechanical or autonomous noises are being produced or what kind of rhythm does the noise have? I am curious too as Thompson identifies the inspiration of modern world noises on Jazz avant-gardism which was subsequently criticised as “an impulse for wildness” in its transfiguration of mechanisation and industrialisation as it stimulated barbarianism. A rebellious streak. And in return does my personal experience of exposure and listening to works by the likes of John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Philip Glass or even Mike Oldfield have an affect on how I listen back to noise, on how I could find novelty or music in their sounds? I makes me question us all and how in tune today are we to the keynotes of the soundscapes we situate ourselves in. How much insight into our geography, community, or even social structuring do the sounds about us describe? How, when we close off one sense and inspire ourselves about another, we can transform the soundscape once overlooked as mundane,  give it audibility and clarity and open our ears and minds to noises that again have never so vividly resembled sound!

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This audio file is an attempt to simply capture what Lisa Robertson describes as a prosody in a study of noise. Like Robertson and even like ethnographers Steven Feld and Colin Turnbull this is a “constraint-based description of the present”, whichever present that is I am not too sure. Also fundamentally using time as a constraint, in the case of these recordings two minutes for each. Two minutes, because any longer is too long to maintain an attentiveness towards noise and particularly towards noise that will inevitably hold less meaning to those who have not experience it specifically.            There are ten, two minute recordings, from a variety of times and days, all of which are layered on top of each other simultaneously and then looped two and a half times to create a track of 5 minutes. I suggest it to be listened to independently for two minutes and stopped, then listened to for the five minutes while doing another task. The difference between noises and sounds might start to distinguish themselves with this approach to listening. Also of note, different sounds within the recordings have been dedicated to either left or right audio channels based on the source of noises in relation to my desk where I spend the majority of the day. As Robertson ventured into Paris in early afternoon she sought a lack of clarity in the “full economy of day” so that the “sound would not become an image”. For me, even in the somewhat intense layering and multiplicity of numerous sounds I can still decode a clarity and piece together an image in my mind. It is of interest to me to learn what others hear and visualise in this. Further experimentation is required here.

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Bibliography

Topic I

Geertz, Clifford. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton University Press, 2000.

Feld, Steven. Schizophonic Memesis Pygmy POP. A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis.  Yearbook for Traditional Music, 1996, Vol.8 pp. 1-35. Cambridge University Press 1996

Feld, Steven and Donald Brenneis. Doing Anthropology in Sound, American Ethnologist 2004 Vol.31 . American Anthropological Association, 2004.

Shaw, Lytle. Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. Stanford University Press, 2018. (Just the introduction!)

Szwed, John. Alan Lomax: The Man who Recorded the World. New York Penguin, 2010. (Small extracts, too biographical I found)

Lomax recordings. research.culturalequity.org/audio-guide.jsp

Lomax recordings and video. youtube.com/user/AlanLomaxArchive

Aka Pygmies. Central Africa: Musical Anthology of the Aka Pygmies. Radio France

Aka Pygmies. Musics and Polyphonic Songs from the Great Forest. VDE-GALLO, 1994

Congo: Pygmy Polyphonies from North Congo. AIMP & VDE-GALLO, 2011.

Hancock, Herbie. Head Hunters. Sony Music Entertainment Inc. 1973.

Topic II

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory (1970). The Athlone Press, 1997 Translation.

Gronert, Siegfried. Simmel’s Handle: A Historical and Theoretical Design Study, Design and Culture - The Journal of the Design Studies Forum Vol. 4 Issue 1, 2012

Haxthausen, W. Charles. Reproduction/Repitition: Walter Benjamin/Carl   Einstein,October, Winter, 2004, Vol.107 pp 47-74, The MIT Press

McBride C. Patrizia. The Chatter of the Visible: Storytelling in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Benjamin on Film and Montage. University of Michigan Press

Simmel, Georg. The Handle: An Aesthetic Study, The Hudson Review, 1958 Vol.11 No.3 pp. 371-385, The Hudson Review, Inc.

Topic III

Robertson, Lisa. Disquiet, 2012

Schafer, R.Murray. The Tuning of the World, Arcana Edition 1998

Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. The MIT Press 2002