Sounds In Translation

Sounds in Translation: Intersections of music, technology and society joins a growing number of publications taking up R. Murray Schafer's challenge to examine and to re-focus attention on the sound dimensions of our human environment. This book takes up his challenge to contemporary audiologists, musicologists and sound artists working within areas of music, cultural studies, media studies and social science to explore the idea of the 'soundscape' and to investigate the acoustic environment that we inhabit. It seeks to raise questions regarding the translative process of sound: 1) what happens to sound during the process of transfer and transformation; and 2) what transpires in the process of sound production/expression/performance. Sounds in Translation was conceived to take advantage of new technology and a development in book publishing, the electronic book. Much of what is written in the book is best illustrated by the sound itself, and in that sense, permits sound to 'speak for itself'.

The soundscape--a term coined by the author--is our sonic environment, the ever-present array of noises with which we all live. Beginning with the primordial sounds of nature, we have experienced an ever-increasing complexity of our sonic surroundings. As civilization develops, new noises rise up around us: from the creaking wheel, the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer, and the distant chugging of steam trains to the “sound imperialism” of airports, city streets, and factories. The author contends that we now suffer from an overabundance of acoustic information and a proportionate diminishing of our ability to hear the nuances and subtleties of sound. Our task, he maintains, is to listen, analyze, and make distinctions. As a society we have become more aware of the toxic wastes that can enter our bodies through the air we breathe and the water we drink. In fact, the pollution of our sonic environment is no less real. Schafer emphasizes the importance of discerning the sounds that enrich and feed us and using them to create healthier environments. To this end, he explains how to classify sounds, appreciating their beauty or ugliness, and provides exercises and “soundwalks” to help us become more discriminating and sensitive to the sounds around us. This book is a pioneering exploration of our acoustic environment, past and present, and an attempt to imagine what it might become in the future.

The application of advanced digital-processing techniques has great potential for systems that transmit voice or utilize information coded in the form of speech. The report employs a digital process that offers a new approach for general use in speech synthesis, and is an application of homomorphic methods to the problem of correcting the distorted speech of talkers in pressurized helium-oxygen atmospheres. The vocal-tract impulse response of such speech was extracted by the homomorphic deconvolution technique, and its frequency components were moved downward in frequency according to correction formulas given in a study by Gerstman (1966). Both linear and nonlinear frequency corrections were used. Speech samples taken at 800-foot pressure depth in a 96 percent helium, 4 percent oxygen atmosphere were processed in this way, using a digital simulation of Oppenheim's (1969) analysis-synthesis system. Results indicate considerable promise for the technique as a tool for further study of helium speech, and perhaps as a future on-line translation method. (Author).

After the many interdisciplinary perspectives on nonverbal communication offered by the author in his previous seven John Benjamins books, which have generated a wide range of scholarly applications, the present monograph is dominated by a very broad concept of translation. This treatment of translation includes theater and cinema (enriching our intellectual-sensorial experience of both 'reading act' and 'viewing act') and offers among other topics: sensorial-intellectual-emotional pre- and post-reading interactions with books; mute or audible 'oralization' of texts; the translator's linguistic and nonverbal-cultural fluency and implicit textual paralanguage and kinesics; translating functions of pictorial illustrations; the blind's text and film perception; the foreign reader's cultural background and circumstances; theater and cinema spectators' total sensory-intellectual experience of plays and films beyond staging or projection; the multiple interrelationships between cinema and theater performers, spectators and their environments, of special interest to all those involved in the theater; and the translator's challenging textual perception of sounds and movements. Over 800 literary quotations, and two virtually exhaustive English inventories of sound- and movement-denoting words with many examples, offer serious students of translation, language or literature a rich reference and drill source.

In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Delia Chiaro explores the pragmatics of word play, using frameworks normally adopted in descriptive linguistics. Using examples from personally recorded conversations, she examines the structure of jokes, quips, riddles and asides. Chiaro explores degrees of conformity to and deviation from established conventions; the `tellability' of jokes, and the interpretative role of the listener; the creative use of puns, word play and discourse. The emphasis in her analysis is on sociocultural contexts for the production and reception of jokes, and she examines the extent to which jokes are both universal in their appeal, and specific to a particular culture.

In 2014, New York-based artist Lois Conner gifted one of pioneering Chinese artist Zhang Peili’s last paintings to The Australian National University’s newly opened Australian Centre on China in the World. Never exhibited and thought lost, the reemergence of Flying Machine (1994) prompts an exploration of the relation between painting and video in the oeuvre of Zhang Peili. Given Zhang’s significance as a leading conceptual painter in the 1980s, then as a media art pioneer and educator in the 1990s and 2000s, Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video is also a nuanced study of broader developments in Chinese contemporary art’s history. Featuring contributions by historian Geremie R. Barmé, photographer Lois Conner, art historians John Clark, Katie Grube, and Olivier Krischer, and curator Kim Machan, these essays together challenge the narrative of Zhang as ‘the father of Chinese video art’, highlighting instead the conceptual consistency, rigour, and formal experimentation in his work, which transcends a specific medium. By equal measure, the book embraces longstanding connections as integral to its meaning, connections between artists, curators and researchers, collaborators, colleagues and friends through China and Australia.