Listen on your favorite podcast platform! In the fall of 2001, an obscure experimental musician decided to revisit some analog tape loops he had made back in the early eighties. Inspired by the work of Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp, William Basinski had created his own distinctive practice
Do fish have ears? What is the nature of underwater hearing and how does it differ from hearing in the air? If humans are the evolutionary descendants of ocean creatures, do we retain any fishy traces in the way we hear the world? And what about all the noise we
Why does a sixty-year-old media theory resurface in the media every few years, while journalists ignore the great communication scholarship that has emerged in the meantime? More importantly, what effects does antiquated thinking have on the public understanding of our current digital discontent? In this episode, Cameron Naylor interviews our
Creativity doesn’t come out of thin air–it evolves in relation to the communities around us and the tools available to us. Some of the most common forms of everyday creative works–memes, podcasts, vertical videos–barely existed a couple of decades ago. And obviously, we can’t ignore
Today we go on a listening tour with audio legend Julie Shapiro, who has helped define what radio and podcasts could be over the past 25-plus years. Shapiro co-founded the Third Coast International Audio Festival, one of the most prestigious and influential awards in audio. She was a longtime executive
The year is off to a very disturbing start thanks to ICE’s violent paramilitary incursion in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Minnesota citizens have responded with mass protests and direct action, much of it sonic in nature—with the sound of whistles alerting neighbors and making life harder on ICE. This episode,
Phantom Power is a monthly newsletter on sound and listening. It features essays and interviews on the culture, politics, physics, and philosophy of sound, as well as reviews of new music, film sound, sound art, and books on sound.
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Gabriel Saloman Mindel is a lot more than one half of the United States best known noise bands. He's also an interdisciplinary artist and a scholar whose research studies the interplay between sound and power, as he theorizes how noise can push the limits of the body in
Today host Mack Hagood is joined by three remarkable scholars whose work sits at the intersection of African music, technology, and culture. Dr. Louise Meintjes is Marcello Lotti Professor at Duke University. She's a distinguished ethnomusicologist whose groundbreaking research on South African music has transformed how we understand
How did we humans become so dependent on white noise machines, noise-canceling headphones, lo-fi girl and other technologies that help us privatize and individualize our soundscape? An important character in that cultural history is Irv Teibel, whose environments series helped change how we listen. These records were the first to
Graham Reznick is a multifaceted sound designer, screenwriter, director, and musician, best known for his work on indie horror films like Ti West's X and the critically acclaimed video game Until Dawn]. In this episode, Reznick discusses Rabbit Trap, a film based on Welsh folklore blending analog synthesis
With movie star looks and a raucous piano style, Maurice Rocco made a splash in the 1940’s, influencing future rock and rollers Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. By the 60s, however, he was a has-been in the U.S., playing lounges in Bangkok, Thailand until his grisly murder
This month, we have a guest pod in the feed: It’s the debut episode of Critical Listening, music technology criticism from journalist Liz Pelly and composer-educator Max Alper, “two lifers of the Northeast underground and independent scholars of streaming era dystopia.” Liz and Max’s guest is Greg Saunier,