Studying Sound

An introduction to the concepts and principles of sound design practice, with more than 175 exercises that teach readers to put theory into practice. This book offers an introduction to the principles and concepts of sound design practice, from technical aspects of sound effects to the creative use of sound in storytelling. Most books on sound design focus on sound for the moving image. Studying Sound is unique in its exploration of sound on its own as a medium and rhetorical device. It includes more than 175 exercises that enable readers to put theory into practice as they progress through the chapters. The book begins with an examination of the distinction between hearing and listening (with exercises to train the ears) and then offers an overview of sound as an acoustic phenomenon. It introduces recording sound, covering basic recording accessories as well as theories about recording and perception; explores such spatial effects as reverberation and echo; and surveys other common digital sound effects, including tremolo, vibrato, and distortion. It introduces the theory and practice of mixing; explains surround and spatial sound; and considers sound and meaning, discussing ideas from semiotics and psychology. Finally, drawing on material presented in the preceding chapters, the book explores in detail using sound to support story, with examples from radio plays, audio dramas, and podcasts. Studying Sound is suitable for classroom use or independent study.

An introduction to the concepts and principles of sound design practice, with more than 175 exercises that teach readers to put theory into practice. This book offers an introduction to the principles and concepts of sound design practice, from technical aspects of sound effects to the creative use of sound in storytelling. Most books on sound design focus on sound for the moving image. Studying Sound is unique in its exploration of sound on its own as a medium and rhetorical device. It includes more than 175 exercises that enable readers to put theory into practice as they progress through the chapters.

Guide by faculty member of the Juilliard School of Music explains what students can and cannot expect from singing lessons, plus musical notation and theory, ear training, languages, and related subjects.

The word is central to both naive and expert theories of language. Yet the definition of 'word' remains problematic. The 42 chapters of this Handbook offer a variety of perspectives on this most basic and elusive of linguistic units.

Imagine if a student spent as much time managing information as celebrities doted on dieting? While eating too much food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, excessive information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and questioning. Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness probes the social, political and academic difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. But this book does not diagnose a crisis. Instead, Digital Dieting provides strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal. In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher education? If students complain that the reading is ’too hard’, then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage this challenge is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in the long term. Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.

In this accessible introduction to early and silent cinema, which is currently enjoying a renaissance, both academically and in the popular imagination thanks to The Artist, Keith Withall provides both a comprehensive chronology of the period until the birth of sound and also a series of detailed case studies on the key films from the period – some well known (including Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, Eisenstein's Strike and Chaplin's The Kid), some perhaps less well familiar (including Murnau's The Last Laugh and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates). As well as covering in detail the major film-making figures and nations of the period, the author also provides insights into the industry in less well documented areas. Throughout, the films and film-makers are placed in the context of rapid worldwide industrial change. (Please note this book is a revised and expanded version of Early and Silent Cinema: A Teacher's Guide, published by Auteur in 2007.)

This volume is a self-contained companion piece to Studying Vibrational Communication, published in 2014 within the same series. The field has expanded considerably since then, and has even acquired a name of its own: biotremology. In this context, the book reports on new concepts in this fascinating discipline, and features chapters on state-of-the art methods for studying behavior tied to substrate-borne vibrations, as well as an entire section on applied biotremology. Also included are a historical contribution by pioneers in the field and several chapters reviewing the advances that have been made regarding specific animal taxa. Other new topics covered are vibrational communication in vertebrates, multimodal communication, and biotremology in the classroom, as well as in art and music. Given its scope, the book will appeal to all those interested in communication and vibrational behavior, but also to those seeking to learn about an ancient mode of communication.