While Western medicine has conventionally separated music, science, and religion into distinct entities, traditional cultures throughout the world have always viewed music as a bridge that connects the physical with the spiritual. Now, as people in even the most technologically advanced nations across the globe struggle with obtaining affordable and reliable healthcare coverage, more and more people are turning to these ancient cultural practices of ICAM healing (integrative, complementary...

While Western medicine has conventionally separated music, science, and religion into distinct entities, traditional cultures throughout the world have always viewed music as a bridge that connects the physical with the spiritual. Now, as people in even the most technologically advanced nations across the globe struggle with obtaining affordable and reliable healthcare coverage, more and more people are turning to these ancient cultural practices of ICAM healing (integrative, complementary...

The Sound of Pictures is an illuminating journey through the soundtracks of more than 400 films. How do filmmakers play with sound? And how does that affect the way we watch their movies? Whether pop or classical, sweeping or sparse, music plays a crucial role in our cinematic experience. Other sounds can be even more evocative: the sounds of nature, of cities and of voices.In The Sound of Pictures, Andrew Ford listens to the movies. He speaks to acclaimed directo...

What is it about the music you love that makes you want to hear it again? Why do we crave a "hook" that returns, again and again, within the same piece? And how does a song end up getting stuck in your head? Whether it's a motif repeated throughout a composition, a sample looped under an electronic dance beat, a passage replayed incessantly by a musician in a practice room-or an "earworm" burrowing through your mind like a broken record-repetition is nearly as integral to music as the note...

Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their des...

Why don't Guitar Hero players just pick up real guitars? What happens when millions of people play the role of a young black gang member in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? How are YouTube-based music lessons changing the nature of amateur musicianship? This book is about play, performance, and participatory culture in the digital age. Miller shows how video games and social media are bridging virtual and visceral experience, creating dispersed communities who forge meaning...

Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected religions, cultures, languages and nations throughout world history. The chapters in this History take readers to foundational historical moments – in Europe, Oceania, China, India, the Muslim world, North and South America – in search of the connections provided by a truly world music. Historically, world music emerged from ritual and religion, labor and life-cycle...

To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it--and to have listened through it. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, author J. Martin Daughtry re...

Music is one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of Latin American countries. But, while many people in the United States and Europe are familiar with musical genres such as salsa, merengue, and reggaetón, the musical manifestations that young people listen to in most Latin American countries are much more varied than these commercially successful ones that have entered the American and European markets. Not only that, the young people themselves often have little in common wi...

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship betwee...

Chopin's twenty-four Préludes remain as mysterious today as when they were newly published. What prompted Franz Liszt and others to consider Chopin's Préludes to be compositions in their own right rather than introductions to other works? What did set Chopin's Préludes so drastically apart from their forerunners? What exactly was 'the morbid, the feverish, the repellent' that Schumann heard in Opus 28, in that 'wild motley' of 'strange sketches' and 'ruins'? Why did Liszt and another, anon...

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that in order to make sense of music we need descriptive language; that to open up the new in music we need to revisit the old; that to arrive at a figuration of music itself we need to posit its starting point in noise; that in order to...