Sonic-Literary Feedback in Cyberpunk Composition

Bibliography

Scholarship

Abbate, Carolyn. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505–36.

Anderson, Reynaldo. “AFROFUTURISM 2.0 & THE BLACK SPECULATIVE ARTS MOVMENT: Notes on a Manifesto.” Obsidian 42, no. 1 (2016): 230–38.

Borgo, David. “Openness From Closure: The Puzzle of Interagency in Improvised Music and a Neocybernetic Solution.” In Negotiated Moments. New York: Duke University Press (2020): 113–130.

Born, Georgina. “Making Time: Temporality, History, and the Cultural Object.” New Literary History 46, no. 3 (2015): 361–386.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zone Books, 2015.

Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016.

Du Bois, W.E.B., Adrienne Brown, and Britt Rusert. “The Princess Steel.” Publication of the Modern Language Association 130, no. 3 (2015): 819–29.

Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Zone Books, 2015.

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998.

Felt, Lindsey Dolich. “Cyberpunk’s Other Hackers: The Girls Who Were Plugged In,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–38.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books: 1994.

Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics For Inappropiate/d Others.” In Cybersexualities: A Reader of Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999: 314–66.

Iverson, Jennifer. “Mechanized Bodies: Technology and Supplements in Björk’s Electronica.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Ed. (Oxford, 2016): 155–175.

Medlicott, Sheryl. “Conceiving an Ecofeminist Utopia: Genre, Gender, and Ecology in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 29, no. 3 (2022): 821–34.

Moore, Andrea. “Neoliberalism and the Musical Entrepreneur.” Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 1. (2016): 33–53.

Noon, Jeff. “The Ghost On the B-Side: A Technique for Remixing Narrative.” Accessed December 12, 2022. http://jeffnoon.weebly.com/the-ghost-on-the-b-side.html.

Ra, Sun, Joshua Smith, James Newman, John Coney, Ray Johnson, Christopher Brooks, Barbara Deloney, et al., Space Is the Place, 40th anniversary edition (San Francisco: Harte Recordings, 2014).

Ritchey, Marianna. Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Taylor, Timothy. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Weber, Max. General Economic History. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New York: Collier Books, 1961 [1923].

______. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Introduction by Anthony Giddens. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Weheliye, Alexander. “Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 21–47.

Media

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon. London: Electric Book Company, 2000.

Copperwire. Earthbound. Porto Franco Records PFR041. 2012, CD.

Imarisha, Walidah, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Sheree Renee Thomas. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. New York: Avon, 1975.

______. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace trade pbk. ed. New York: Ace Books, 2000.

Lytton, Edward Bulwer, and David Seed. The Coming Race. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.

Madtwiinz. “BLOKHEZS webisodes.” https://vimeo.com/131929156?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=22826988. Accessed April 2023.

Noon, Jeff. Needle in the Groove. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Public Enemy. Fear of a Black Planet. Def Jam Recordings 45413. 1990, LP.

Ra, Sun, Joshua Smith, James Newman, John Coney, Ray Johnson, Christopher Brooks, Barbara Deloney, et al., Space Is the Place, 40th anniversary edition (San Francisco: Harte Recordings, 2014).

Tiptree, James, and Ellen. Kushner. The Girl Who Was Plugged In. 1st TOR ed. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1989.

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Here we are constantly banging to try and come through the other side.

Below is an example of my own work, as half of the experimental duo grein (Jay Rauch and Aaron Michael Smith), that explores the techniques discussed in my talk. The process went something like this:

  1. Each take a field recording at the same time in different places.

  2. Exchange recordings and transcribe one another’s recordings in language—don’t coordinate your writing style, just describe what you hear.

  3. Mashup the transcriptions using Jeff Noon’s Cobra Lingus filtering system. This provides the text.

  4. Mix the recordings in the style of the Cobra Lingus system. In other words, treat them as an archive and subtract material to help form emerge.

  5. Iteratively improvise over the piece you’ve made with the field recordings. Now you have your whole sound piece.

  6. Mix together video from the locales of the field recordings with the sound piece (emulate same subtractive process used for text and sound), and animate text over all of this.