Sound States

By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to 'turn up the volume' on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life. The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist 'sonosphers' to Henri Chopin's electroacoustical audio-poames, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements--statements held only partially in check by meaning. The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

International Democracy Documents is the first comprehensive compilation on democracy at the international level. It covers the most important international documents relating to democracy, while at the same time providing a focused approach.

SONAR (sound navigation and ranging) systems have many similarities to RADAR and electro-optical systems. Again, detection is based on the propagation of waves between the target and detector. There are active sonar systems, where the wave propagates from the transmitter to the target and back to the receiver, analogous to pulse-echo radar. There are also passive sonar systems, where the target is the source of the energy which propagates to the receiver, analogous to passive infrared detection. Therefore, a great deal of what has been discussed about these systems will also apply to sonar. Sonar, however, differs fundamentally from radar and electro-optics because the energy is transferred by acoustics waves propagating in water. So we first begin by discussing the characteristics of acoustic waves.

In Inner Sound, author Jonathan Weinel traverses the influence of altered states of consciousness on audio-visual media, explaining how our subjective realities may change during states of dream, psychedelic experience, meditation, and trance.