Media Tech Tonic: Seminars for designers, artists, and media makers held at MassArt

The next speaker in our Fall of 2009 series will be Joseph Auner. The lecture will take place at MassArt on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 and is free and open to the public. Please RSVP for this event (details on how to do that below) if you are not a DMI student.

Abstract

Focusing on the use of sampled voices in the genre known as instrumental hip hop, this presentation considers the broader implications of the ubiquity of recorded voices throughout our musical soundscape and in our everyday lives. In reference to music by Prefuse 73, DJ Shadow, Blockhead, and the Books, and some of the software used to create, I will consider sampled voices from the perspective of writings on ubiquitous computing and ideas of the posthuman. In some examples, as I will discuss, the vocal samples are staged to produce a sense of strangeness and disorientation long associated with the recorded voice, notable even in the critical vocabulary developed to describe it: uncanny, simulacral, schizophonic, acousmatic. Yet still stranger are the many examples of music in which the remarkable act of speaking through borrowed voices is presented as absolutely unremarkable. If the experience of recorded voices as uncanny, as ‘dead’ or disembodied, depends on the belief that they once had been connected with bodies of flesh and blood, the demystified, disenchanted voices that increasingly surround us—and that perhaps are already emerging from us–are treated as if they had never been alive.

Event Details
Free and and open to the public.
RSVP: Please let us know if you’re planning to attend this event.
Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Tower Building, Room 312 (3rd floor, through Computer Arts Center, at end of the hall)
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Time: 6:30 to 8:30 P.M.
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Parking Information: at the end of this post

Speaker Biography

Joseph Auner is Chair and Professor of Music at Tufts University. He is a musicologist whose research interests include the Second Viennese School, music and technology, turn-of-the century Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and 19th and 20th-Century Music. Auner is the author of A Schoenberg Reader (Yale), Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, with Jennifer Shaw, Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, with Judith Lochhead (Routledge). He was formerly an editor-in-chief for The Journal of the American Musicological Society. He has received fellowships and grants from Humboldt, Getty Center for the History of Arts and Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities. He earned a B.A. from Colorado College and M.A./Ph.D in the History and Theory of Music from University of Chicago.

Parking and Driving Directions
Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left at the stop sign and right on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

The gate should be open for this event. If it’s not, ring the emergency button on the guard house and security will answer. Tell them you’re here for Media Tech Tonic, they should have it on their list of events for this evening.