Esta dissertação pretende mapear e discutir o pensamento sonoro cinematográfico dos pesquisadores brasileiros contemporâneos através de uma revisão sistemática que aborda a evolução quantitativa, as tendências temáticas e o perfil da pesquisa brasileira contemporânea sobre o som no cinema. Os estudos selecionados para tal investigação e análise foram os livros, as teses, as dissertações e os artigos acadêmicos nacionais que contemplam o universo sonoro cinematográfico, publicados no Brasil no período entre os anos 2001 e 2011, e que articulam essencialmente questões que não são específicas da trilha musical / This master thesis aims to map and discuss the film sound thinking of contemporary brazilian researches through a systematic rewiew that approach the quantitative developments, the thematic tendencies and the profile of Brasilian contemporary film sound studies. The studies selected for this research and analysis were national books, doctoral theses, master´s theses and academic articles the address the universe of film sound published in Brasil between 2001 and 2011, and essentially articulate issues that are not specific of the film score

Esta dissertação pretende mapear e discutir o pensamento sonoro cinematográfico dos pesquisadores brasileiros contemporâneos através de uma revisão sistemática que aborda a evolução quantitativa, as tendências temáticas e o perfil da pesquisa brasileira contemporânea sobre o som no cinema. Os estudos selecionados para tal investigação e análise foram os livros, as teses, as dissertações e os artigos acadêmicos nacionais que contemplam o universo sonoro cinematográfico, publicados no Brasil no período entre os anos 2001 e 2011, e que articulam essencialmente questões que não são específicas da trilha musical / This master thesis aims to map and discuss the film sound thinking of contemporary brazilian researches through a systematic rewiew that approach the quantitative developments, the thematic tendencies and the profile of Brasilian contemporary film sound studies. The studies selected for this research and analysis were national books, doctoral theses, master´s theses and academic articles the address the universe of film sound published in Brasil between 2001 and 2011, and essentially articulate issues that are not specific of the film score

Twentieth-century popular music is fundamentally associated with electronics in its creation and recording, consumption, modes of dissemination, and playback. Traditional musical analysis, placing primacy on notated music, generally focuses on harmony, melody, and form, with issues of timbre and postproduction effects remaining largely unstudied. Interdisciplinary methodological practices address these limitations and can help broaden the analytical scope of popular idioms. Grounded in Jacques Attali's critical theories about the political economy of music, this dissertation investigates how the subversive noise of electronic sound challenges a controlling order and predicts broad cultural realignment. This study demonstrates how electronic noise, as an extra-musical element, creates modern soundscapes that require a new mapping of musical form and social intent. I further argue that the use of electronics in popular music signifies a technologically-obsessed postwar American culture moving rapidly towards an online digital revolution. I examine how electronic music technology introduces new sounds concurrent with generational shifts, projects imagined utopian and dystopian futures, and engages the tension between automated modern life and emotionally validating musical communities in real and virtual spaces. Chapter One synthesizes this interdisciplinary American studies project with the growing scholarship of sound studies in order to construct theoretical models for popular music analysis drawn from the fields of musicology, history, and science and technology studies. Chapter Two traces the emergence of the electronic synthesizer as a new sound that facilitated the transition of a technological postwar American culture into the politicized counterculture of the 1960s. The following three chapters provide case studies of individual popular artists' use of electronic music technology to express societal and political discontent: 1) Jimi Hendrix's application of distortion and stereo effects to narrate an Afrofuturist consciousness in the 1960s; 2) Trent Reznor's aggressive industrial rejection of Conservatism in the 1980s; and 3) Deadmau5's mediation of online life through computer-based production and performance in the 2000s. Lastly, this study extends existing discussions within sound studies to consider the cultural implications of music technology, noise politics, electronic timbre, multitrack audio, digital analytical techniques and online communities built through social media.

This manuscript tells the stories of the Latin/o and general music industries in the United States from 1898 to 2000. It argues that performers transformed the local identities of aural industries based in place and melody into global industries of visual identities designed for space and celebrity. Both the Latin/o and general music industries shifted back and forth along a local-sound-to-global-sight spectrum more than once, from sounds of music rooted in specific places to sights of musicians uprooted across universal spaces between 1898 and 2000. This claim is supported by a textual analysis of archival materials, such as trade press articles, audio recordings, still photographs and motion pictures. While the general music industry's identity changed, the Latin/o industry's identity stayed the same, and vice-versa. Specifically, when the general industry identified with transnational performers and images between 1926 and 1963, the Latin/o industry retained its identification with the sounds of music rooted in specific places. From 1964 to 1979, as the Latin/o industry moved from one end of the spectrum to the other, only to return to its initial position, it was the general industry that maintained its identification with the midpoint of the spectrum. During the 1980s, the general industry zigzagged from the midpoint to the global-visual end and back again, while the Latin/o industry remained at the local-sonic end of the spectrum. In the 1990s, the Latin/o industry's local and sonic identity continued, and the general industry moved from the midpoint to the global-visual end of the spectrum with the Latin boom. The general industry's identity changed during each interval except 1964-1979, the only period in which the Latin/o industry's identity fluctuated. From Aural Places to Visual Spaces: the Latin/o and General Music Industries should be of interest to anyone invested in the relations between creativity and commerce, substance and style, or geography and genre.

“Sonic Gentitud” brings American Indian and Chicana/o literatures into sound studies as testimonials to decolonial and transformative listening practices. I argue that the narrative forms and paratexts in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), and Nina Marie Martínez’s ¡Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Card (2004) remap the cognitive space of sonic (re)production by offering textual and graphic representations of sound and listening. Understanding this articulation of the literary to the sonic as a form of audile realism, I highlight the listening citizen as a prominent figure in literary renderings of enduring Laguna, Spokane, Chicana/o, and Greater Mexican community-formation and growth. A self-consciously aesthetic narrative depiction that links embodied practices of listening to the historical, material, and political contours and discourses of a specific locale, audile realism represents subversive and differential listening practices that transform social networks of sonic (re)production such that they serve the interests of the tribal nation or Greater Mexican community. Listening citizens are thus critical actors in the maintenance of gentitud, a form of community- and network-building that recognizes affiliation as always-already performed across differences of race, class, gender, and/or sexuality. / text

The common perception that sound design is a subset of postproduction sound, and that most film sound professionals are more technicians than artists, is an assumption that leads to erroneous conclusions about the nature of film sound as a component of filmmaking. Specific sound designers have been elevated to celebrity status while other film sound professionals remain unknown. Additionally, the computerization of postproduction sound contributes to the misconception that these professionals are workstation operators who merely construct film soundtracks from sound libraries and/or elements designed by the main sound designer. In the 1990s, the initial transition from analogue to digital postproduction sound practices began in motion pictures. The three major American film sound communities—Hollywood, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York—had developed unique approaches to sound design largely due to cultural, labor, and economic differences between the three cities. The three communities worked from different historical contexts, within different union regulations, and were subject to different economic structures. These differences predisposed the three geographical sound communities to different workflows and attitudes toward sound design. By examining three case studies of award-winning soundtracks from the three regions—Barton Fink (1991), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and The English Patient (1996)—it becomes clear that the three communities, when confronted with the initial technological changes of the 1990s, experienced similar challenges with the inelegant transition from analogue to digital. However, their cultural and structural labor differences governed different results. Rather than define the 1990s as an era of technological determinism—which would be a superficial reading of the era—it is an era best understood as one in which sound professionals became more viable as artists, collaborated in sound design authorship, and influenced this digital transition to better accommodate their needs and desires in their work.

This dissertation seeks to identify the purposive force that determines the form and function of commercial stereophony in capitalist society, and the ways in which this force affects the productive and consumptive activities of stereophonic practitioners and listening audiences. Employing dialectical materialism, I examine three social processes that either historically established or continue to influence the mediative potential of stereophonic sound: the invention and industrial standardization of the stereophonic apparatus, the professionalization of stereophonic practitioners, and the social construction of stereophonic listeners as a mass consuming audience. These interrelated studies reveal perceived economic necessity as the dominant causal force that governs all stereophonic processes and practices under the capitalist economic system. Informed by my chapter findings, which complicate Karl Marx’s materialist base and superstructure schema – a coarse conceptual abstraction of capitalist production, I construct a more refined and flexible schematic diagram that offers a distinctive bird’s eye view of the universal interplay between capitalists, producers and consumers. This novel conceptual schematic depicts productive forces and productive relations as coterminous expressions of the dual-purpose of capitalism: to produce surplus-value for accumulation by capitalists, and to do so in perpetuity.

Recent advancements in voice-interactive technology such as Apple's Siri application, IBM's Watson, and Google's Now are not just the products of innovative computer scientists; they have been directly influenced by fictional technology. Computer scientists and programmers have openly drawn inspiration from Science Fiction texts such as Gene Roddenberry's television show Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to create more effective voice-interactive programs. Such comparisons between present-day technology and past Science Fiction (hereafter, Sci-Fi) texts are even more apt than computer scientists seem to have intended; not only are Watson, Siri, and Now real-world versions of fictional computers, but each of them also hides the ways in which the computer is implicitly embodied and gendered by its voice. Real and fictional computers alike are generally voiced by a human: the Star Trek computer by Majel Barrett; Hal-9000 by Douglas Rain; and Watson by Jeff Woodman. Mysteriously, both Apple and Google have worked hard to hide the vocal origins of Siri and Now respectively. But the question remains: why do these programs even have gendered voices? In particular, why is Siri--the digital equivalent of a secretary--female? And why hide their voices' corporeal origins? Aside from technological inspiration, how have the underlying ideological gender assumptions in Sci-Fi texts like 2001 and Star Trek influenced the creation of such programs? What does the fact of the shift from Sci-Fi representations to scientific innovation reveal about the perpetuation of ideological assumptions about gender roles? How do other representations of computer voices confirm or problematize the gendering of computer voices? In this dissertation, I seek to answer these questions by examining the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic trace of the computer voice from Star Trek in 1966 to Siri in 2013. The voice-interactive computer, I argue, may be understood as a paradoxically acousmatic character: a disembodied voice that is simultaneously embodied through non-humanoid computer-objects. Through psychoanalytic interpretations, historical contextualizations, and transtextual considerations, I show how representations of acousmatic computers are positioned within narrative texts as gendered subjects, playing out particular gender roles that are situated within each text's historical context. I attend to the textual problem of location in Sci-Fi by dividing the analyses into two categories: extra-terrestrial and terrestrial. This division is important in understanding the roles of voice-interactive computers, as spaceships provide a uniquely different environment than terrestrial structures such as houses, office buildings, or prisons. Further, spaceships always already imply a womb-like habitat, a mothership that controls and maintains all aspects of the life forms within it; terrestrial computers, on the other hand, tend to connote varying gendered subjectivities and anxieties within historical contexts of technological innovation and cultural change. In this first part, I focus on extra-terrestrial voice-interactive computers in Star Trek (Paramount, 1966-1969), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974), Quark (NBC, 1977-1978), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994), and Moon (Duncan Jones, 2010). In the second part, I examine terrestrial computers; these computers may be further divided into two, gendered subsections of masculine and feminine functions. The texts featuring masculine-voiced computers tend to act as the son to their programmer/creator fathers or, conversely, as all-knowing fathers, thereby reinforcing patriarchal rule. These films, Colossus: The Forbin Project (Joseph Sargent, 1970), THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975), and Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977), narrativize cultural and business struggles in the 1970s surrounding militarization and corporatization. I then examine the films of the early 1980s, TRON (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and Electric Dreams (Steven Barron, 1984), that express a rapidly-changing cultural conception of computers, set in narratives of homosocial struggle. And finally, I discuss computers in the 1990s and 2000s that serve in domestic roles, particularly those texts that feature domestic spaces run by female-voiced computers or, literally, house-wives. These texts, Fortress (Stuart Gordon, 1992), Smart House (LeVar Burton, 1999), and Eureka (SyFy, 2006-2012), position computers as replacements for human women who are absent from the home. Additionally, I examine two texts that feature male servants--Demon Seed (an anomaly among representations of domestic servitude) and Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008). I then return to Siri by examining representations of her programming, voice, and body in popular culture. By thus exploring the representations of gendered acousmatic computers within the context of computer history and changing gender norms, I self-reflexively examine how artificial intelligence may be presented in a gendered context, and how this may reflect changing notions of gender in digital culture.

Contested interactions between social acoustic spaces and the appropriate methods of listening within them are pervasive in everyday life. This dissertation answers two questions within this expanding field of inquiry. How are sounds phenomenologically interpreted into perceptual categories? Why are these private categories reflected in shared acoustic space, configuring the possible conditions for future sounds? For the first, I propose a phenomenology of audition within which sounds are categorized into three modes: affective, symbolic, and excessive. This classification technique enables the perceptive listener to objectify, parse, interpret, and respond to the sounding world. Second, I argue that these categories are projected and reflected in the socio-political concept of "acoustic orders". Organizations of sound in social space emerge from the tensions between interpretive agents and pre-existing acoustic configurations; in return, the habits and techniques of auditors are fundamentally influenced by these acoustic orders. Henri Lefebvre's spatial theory will be utilized to develop this descriptive framework. The reciprocity outlined between listener and context suggests dual theoretical revisions. In the first part, phenomenology is shown to benefit from the inclusion of its socially generated influences. Alternately, I argue that acoustic orders exist in part because of spatial actions intended to resolve excessive perceptions into a unified experience. / Ph. D.

Through its portfolio of practical case studies and its engagement with critical thinking from a range of disciplines, the PhD investigates the following key question: what are the technical, aesthetic and conceptual impacts of using binaural technology to create a soundscape? ‘Using binaural technology’ implies users and users are essentially at the heart of this impact because users mediate the technical and aesthetic aspects of binaural technology and also inherently shape the theoretical ideology of this technology. By analysing users’ interactions with binaural technology from a social constructivist perspective, this thesis gains rich insights into the impact of using binaural technology when creating soundscapes. Chapter One explores sound artists’ and field recordists’ work that use binaural technology for the shared purpose of documenting urban soundwalks. The first case study “Audio Postcards” is also informed by questions drawn from acoustic ecology, socio-political theories on the practices of everyday life and the challenges that arise in finding, recording and preserving ‘soundmarks’. Chapter Two outlines practitioners’ applications of binaural technology to create an intimate connection to an art piece such as theatre director David Rosenberg’s productions. Peter Salvatore Petralia’s concept of headspace is applied to the chapter’s case study: “From Austria To America” to further understand binaural technology’s psychoacoustic effects. Chapter Three studies the impact of social groups who use binaural technology to record classical music performances. Traditional stereo and binaural classical music recording conventions are shaped in a new direction in two case studies: “Point of Audition” and “From Page to Stage”. Questions of ‘fidelity’ also arise from this creative practice. The outcomes of this reflective binaural practice unearth deep layers of understanding. This thesis discovers the impact of binaural technology moves beyond the effect it has on a listener to realise this recording practice also impacts a recordist’s decisions in the field and a sound artist’s creative choices when crafting soundscapes. The beneficial impact of binaural technology including its inconspicuous nature, the ability to imprint an artist’s subjective signature on recordings and its lifelike immersive qualities in playback are revealed through practice and reflection. Representing the real, the role of artist and point of audition are also themes explored throughout each chapter. Ultimately, insights gained are woven together as a means of constructing an original theoretical framework for an under-theorised subject: understanding how social user groups shape the impact of using binaural technology when creating soundscapes.