Friday, August 3, 2012

What We Listen to When We Listen

As the trappings of our cultural lives seem to melt into air, we have come to attach a romantic virtue to things?holding and cherishing them, buying and possessing them, tracing their histories and meanings. But, as academic and artist Jonathan Sterne argues in MP3: The Meaning of a Format, the dreams associated with MP3s, iPods, and the digital revolution in music distribution are actually ?old dreams.? Rigorous and quietly philosophical, MP3 situates this world-conquering format in a broader context than the familiar stories of college kids downloading wild and the death of the recording industry. Instead, Sterne offers the MP3 as the realization of a century-old vision of perfect and efficient audio formats. As he forcefully argues, the MP3 carries within it ?practical and philosophical understandings of what it means to communicate, what it means to listen or speak, how the mind?s ear works, and what it means to make music.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=e36212470d0ad3fa990056c98e8fb9d0

rock and roll hall of fame 2012 brandon rios oklahoma news nascar news doppler radar colorado rockies moonshine

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.