music/sound/noise

Marcus Boon explores the healing of traditional music.

From event to non-event. Frank Seeburger deconstructs 9/11.

Tim Keane on rock'n'roll awakenings and the lyrical existentialism of U2 (St Patrick's Day Special, 2005)

Larry McCaffery reframes his 1989 essay on the "postmodern turn" in rock'n'roll music.

Against the notion that music is the most abstract of art forms, Olivia Block thinks of music as a language with its own vocabulary of sounds, patterns, rhythms, notes. On the day of a performance in Kyoto, Japan, these reflections alter Block's sense of her own language, English, deconstructed by Japanese advertisements, tee-shirts, "American" candy-bar wrappers, and text-cell phones.

graphics: Artists Rights Society; Performance for MIDI keyboard, pianola configurations, and click-track:G. Schirmer Rental; studio portrait of Hedy Lamarr: Roy George and Associates.

In her Sonic Spectrum survey, Elise Kermani invited readers to locate sounds on the spectrum from noise to sound to music. Here, Skip LaPlante responds with an autobiography in music, sound, and noise.

Allison Hunter writes on Douglas Kahn, a modern musicologist who takes in the noise of modern battle, recordings from the tops of trains and the interiors of coalmines, and the musicality of undigitized everyday noise.

noise poem: Raymond Federman. audio recording and production: Eric Dean Rasmussen and Shaun Sandor

The msn thread originated in the Fall of 2001 as an ebr special co-edited by Cary Wolfe, Mark Amerika, and Joseph Tabbi.