Lunar Mountains and Divine Spheres: 1,000 Years of Illustrating Outer Space, by Allison Meier

Copernicus was convinced the planets revolved around the sun; Tycho Brahe had his own theory, that every planet except the Earth revolved around our star, then the sun orbited with all the planets around the Earth. Both offered heavily illustrated charts to accompany their visions of the universe, just two examples in a long history of human depictions of the world beyond our planet. In a new book called Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, published this month by Abrams, Michael Benson examines over a thousand years of mapping the great beyond.

 A photographer and filmmaker, Benson has published his own images of the night sky and the planets of our solar system. He’s also thoroughly researched the strange, beautiful, and prescient ways in which artists, scientists, and other enthusiasts have documented the seen and unseen in space over the centuries. Drawing on libraries and collections from around the world, Cosmigraphics chronicles how our understanding of the stars has changed with technology like telescopes and satellites, and even now continues to expand. Benson wrote in the New York Times: “The book’s overarching subject is our emergence as conscious beings within an unimaginably vast and cryptic universe, one that doesn’t necessarily guard its secrets willfully, but doesn’t hand out codebooks either.”

One major change over the years is a lessening of the emphasis on the divine now that the workings of astronomy are more evident. A 1573 illustration by Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda feels strikingly contemporary with its fusion of abstract shapes and the Holy Trinity, shown as a human figure shooting lightning from his hands; the explosion of illumination and the words “Let There Be Light” in Latin evoke the dawn of our universe. Earlier works, like Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars from 964, give the first glimpses of galaxies neighboring our Milky Way, including Andromeda and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Étienne Trouvelot’s late-19th-century pastels based on his view from the Harvard College Observatory vividly illustrated phenomena like sunspots; his depictions went unrivaled for a century after.

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Brendan Chilcutt: The Museum Of Endangered Sounds

"I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it's a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it's likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100. And as new products come to market, we stand to lose much more than VCRs.

Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I'm gone?

These questions and more led me to the undertaking that is The Museum Of Endangered Sounds."

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No Ghost Appears: Luciano Chessa’s Reconstructions of the Futurist Intonarumori, by Benjamin Lord

I. A Photograph Comes to Life

In every history of sound-art lurks a photograph of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and his assistant in Russolo’s painting studio with the intonarumori. Literally noise-intoners, these were musical instruments with delicious names: gorgoliatore (the gurgler), ululatore (the howler), stroppicciatore (the rubber), and so on. Played with levers and cranks, and housed in simple plywood boxes, the intonarumori channeled their gurgles and howls through large, speaker-like cones. Much in the photograph is obscure: the bulky boxes hide the internal mechanisms from view, and both the photographer and the precise date of exposure are unknown.

In spite of or perhaps partly because of its obscurity, the image has become famous, entrancing generations of artists and experimental musicians. Part of its allure is formal: the patterned spread of hexagonal tile on the floor creates a strong, almost diagrammatic perspective in the foreground, which then terminates in a jumble of boxes against the back wall. The effect is deeply classical, not unlike some paintings by the 15th century master of perspective Paolo Uccello. In the photograph, the two men appear dwarfed by the giant instruments. Together, they seem composed but slightly ill at ease, late-19th century men adrift in a 20th century world of inflationary geometries. The whole scene is suffused with the decline of the Belle Epoque.

Luciano Chessa, a musician and musicologist, has studied this photograph intensively for several years. He is probably the world expert on this picture and on its close cousin, an alternate exposure of the same scene with a slightly different arrangement. Ever since he began looking at the photos while writing his dissertation on Russolo (published in 2004), he hasn’t been able to leave them alone, mining them for their every minute detail as a documentary record of the instruments. When RoseLee Goldberg, impresario of the Performa festival in New York, invited him to recreate the instruments for concert performance in 2009, he began an extended project of reconstruction. At once scholarly and creative, Chessa’s project recreates a technique of the historic avant-garde, bringing it into the present in a necessarily altered form. Given its massive scope, it also raises historically complex aesthetic, political, and musicological concerns that have so far escaped serious critical review. This essay attempts to situate and evaluate Chessa’s remobilization of the intonarumori within each of these realms.

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Trends in the Anthropology of the Supernatural, by Jack Hunter

Definitions, Origins, Functions and Experiences: Trends in the Anthropology of the Supernatural from Tylor to Turner

The branch of anthropology that most frequently encounters the supernatural is the anthropology of religion. Religion has been a key concern for anthropologists since the very dawn of the discipline in the mid-Nineteenth Century. In light of the apparent diversity of forms that religion takes throughout the world—from the monotheism characteristic of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to the polytheism of Hinduism and Buddhism and all the many variations and varieties in between—one of the first tasks facing the early anthropologists was to try to develop a standard definition of religion. At first glance this might seem like an easy task, but a generally accepted definition has, even today, yet to be devised. The problem lies in the complexity of the various phenomena usually classified as religious in nature, and in understanding how all of these disparate parts relate to one another. For example, religion may be defined in terms of the beliefs of a certain people or in terms of their practices—that is, their rituals, rites and performances. Religion might also be interpreted politically and economically, or described using the language of psychology and philosophy. This complexity, combined with huge cultural variation, makes the development of an all–encompassing definition and theory of religion a particularly difficult task (Boyer 2001, 2–3).

Defining Religion:

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, realized that any definition of religion would have to be inclusive of the broad spectrum of religious ideas present throughout the human world. Tylor was shocked to read in the reports of pioneering explorers and missionaries that many newly discovered societies were described as possessing no religion at all, despite their apparent preoccupation with spirits, demons, and ancestors. This, he thought, arose from too narrow a definition of what religion entails. He argued that if our definition of religion is built around belief in a supreme deity, judgment after death, or the adoration of idols (which are hallmarks of both classical and contemporary European religions), the beliefs of a great many non-European people would immediately be excluded from the category of religion. To Tylor this simply did not make sense. The problem with this sort of definition was that it was based upon a particular development of religion, namely a Judeo-Christian development, and not upon religion itself. In order to counter this apparent bias, Tylor defined religion, in its simplest terms, as the belief in spiritual beings, a common trait of which he found ample evidence in the vast majority of ethnographic documents he read. Tylor’s definition of religion, therefore, highlighted the significance of belief, as well as the supernatural objects of these beliefs (Tylor 1930). Another definition of religion was offered by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a contemporary of Tylor’s, who argued that belief in spiritual beings, although common to many religions, could not be considered a minimum definition of religion because there are religious traditions that do not hold such beings as centrally important. To illustrate this point Durkheim gives the example of Buddhism, which does not consider gods and spirits to be central to its beliefs (though it does not exclude them), but rather emphasizes the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths (dukkha, “suffering”; samudaya, “craving”; nirodha, “the end of suffering”; and the Eightfold Path to end suffering) as its main creed. Durkheim suggested, therefore, that religion could best be defined as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things (rather than supernatural beings specifically) and as beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community. To Durkheim, religion was to do with the sacred, which he defined as things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions. For Durkheim, then, the sacred did not have to include supernatural concepts; his definition of religion could, for example, equally be applied to other social phenomena, as long as they were treated with a special kind of respect and separated from normal everyday life by certain prohibitions. Above all of this, Durkheim thought of religion as a social and communal phenomenon (Durkheim 2008); we will discuss the influence of Durkheim’s sociological view of religion shortly.

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Book Download: An Individual Note, by Daphne Oram

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Graham Wrench: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer, by Steve Marshall

In the early '60s, pioneering British composer Daphne Oram set out to create a synthesizer unlike any other. The engineer who turned her ideas into reality was Graham Wrench.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in April 2008, I wrote about its history for Sound On Sound (you can read the article on‑line at /sos/apr08/articles/radiophonic.htm). I've always felt that Daphne Oram's importance has been underestimated, both as a co‑founder of the Workshop and as an electronic composer, so I tried to redress this by including as much as I could about her graphically controlled Oramic synthesiser. This was not easy, as Daphne died in 2003 and I was unable to find anyone who'd even seen the Oramic System, let alone knew how it worked. I did my best, but shortly after the magazine went on sale, an email was forwarded to me by Sound On Sound. 

"I enjoyed the article very much,” said the writer. "With reference to the bizarre design concept of the original Oramics machine, you might be interested in some background as to why and how it took shape! I was the engineer who originally turned Daphne's concept into a reality, with an extremely tight budget and a lot of inverted, lateral thinking.” It was signed: "Yours respectfully, Graham Wrench.”

I had to meet this man! So off I went to rural Suffolk, where Graham lives in a little house crammed with engineering wonders. There are musical instruments, home‑made telescopes, model railways, vintage photographic gear… There's even a steam railway museum just down the road! Despite these temptations, I managed to spend a whole afternoon listening to Graham's account of how Oramics really worked, and how he came to design and build the prototype.

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The ANS Synthesizer: Composing on a Photoelectronic Instrument, by Stanislav Kreichi

THE ANS SYNTHESIZER

For the past 30 years, I have been working with the ANS synthesizer. This photoelectronic instrument takes its name from the initials of Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, whose creative work and ideas about synthesizing the different arts inspired the young inventor Eugeny Murzin [2,3].

In 1938 Murzin invented a design for composers based on synthesizing complex musical sounds from a limited number of pure tones; this proposed system was to perform music without musicians or musical instruments. The technological basis of his invention was the method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography, which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal - synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image, the technical realization of the ANS as a musical instrument did not occur until 20 years later. Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby and he had many problems realizing on a practical level. It was not until 1958 that Murzin was able to establish a laboratory and gather a group of engineers and musicians in order to design the ANS. I joined his laboratory in 1961 as asound engineer and composer.

One of the main features of the ANS is its photo-optic generator, which Murzin designed in the form of a rotating glass disk with 144 optic phonograms of pure tones, or sound tracks. The narrow tracks that proceed from the wide track at the edge to the center of the disk correspond to the 144 pure tones. The track nearest to the center has the lowest frequency; the track nearest to the edge has the highest. A unit of five similar disks with different rotating speeds produces 720 pure tones, covering the whole range of audible frequencies. To select the needed tones, a coding field (the "score") was designed in the form of a glass plate covered with an opaque, nondrying black mastic. The score moves past a reading device made up of a narrow aperture with a number of photoelectric cells and amplifiers.

Scraping off a part of the mastic at a specific point on the plate makes it possible for the light from the corresponding optic phonogram to penetrate into the reading device and be transformed into a sound. The narrow aperture reads the length of the scraped-off part of the mastic during its run and transforms it into a sound duration. The nondrying mastic allows for immediate correction of the resulting sounds: portions of the plate that generate superfluous sounds can be smeared over, and missing sounds can be added. The speed of the score can also be smoothly regulated, all the way to a full stop. All this makes it possible for the composer to work direcdy and materially with the production of sound.

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The Sound of Soviet Science Fiction, by Robert Barry

Eduard Artemiev first met Andrei Tarkovsky at a house party thrown by the painter, Mikhail Romadin, in the spring of 1970. The conversation somehow turned to the subject of electronic music and, to Artemiev's surprise, the director soon invited himself to the electronic music studio in Moscow where the composer worked, keen to see the working methods behind the ANS synthesizer that was housed there.

Artemiev had been one of the first composers to work with the ANS, after its inventor, Yevgeny Murzin, posted a note up at the Moscow Conservatoire where Artemiev was a student, looking for composers interested in electronic music. This machine, the first Russian synthesizer, operated using a unique system of drawn sound synthesis. The composer would paint on a sheet of glass which was scanned by the synthesizer, becoming a kind of graphic score, allowing the composer to work like a painter, tinting and shading, forming textures and tone colours directly. Due to the similarities such a method conjured up with the colouristic music of Murzin's idol, the Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the device was named after his initials.

Tarkovsky was evidently impressed with what he saw at Artemiev's studio for he soon asked him to compose all the music for a new science fiction film he was working on with Romadin, Solaris, having recently fallen out with regular musical collaborator, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. Tarkovsky gave Artemiev a completely free hand on Solaris, insisting on just one stipulation: that the film must include JS Bach's Choral Prelude in F-minor, ‘Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesus Christ’.

Though the soundtrack to Solaris uses both orchestral and electronic textures (from the ANS), Artemiev has said in interviews that in terms of its treatment, the orchestra "functioned like one giant synthesizer." From the composer's notes written before he started work on the film, we can see that he delineated five general areas: landscapes; personal sound perceptions; various transformations and distortions of the Bach theme; recollections of the Earth; and the sounds of the living ocean, Solaris, itself. Of this final category, Artemiev remarked, "It is, obviously, composed of the sounds of terrestrial life as if processed by the Ocean. . . The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kind of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identity out of the mass of strange and yet incomprehensible noises."

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Book: The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land

John Murray Spear was one of nineteenth-century America's most interesting characters. A leading social agitator against slavery and capital punishment, Spear also became the nation's most flamboyant spiritualist, inventor of “spirit machines,” and advocate of free love. In his captivating biography, John Buescher brings to life Spear's superlatively odd story. While no photograph or engraving of Spear exists, and his letters and personal papers are scarce, Buescher recreates in this book a sympathetic, even heroic, figure who spent the most energetic decades of his career absent, in a sense, from his own life, displaced by other spirits.

Born in 1804, John Murray Spear started his career as a Universalist minister. Later he was a close colleague of William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker in the abolitionist movement, an operator on the underground railroad in Boston, an influential leader in the effort to end the death penalty and to reform prison conditions, and a public advocate of the causes of pacifism, women's rights, labor reform, and socialism. Buescher chronicles Spear's work as an activist among the New England reformers and Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, and Dorothea Dix.

In midlife Spear turned to the new revelation of spiritualism and came under the thrall of what he believed were spirit messages. Spear's spirits dictated that he and a small group of associates embark on plans for a perpetual motion machine, an electric ship propelled by psychic batteries, a vehicle that would levitate in the air, and a sewing machine that would work with no hands. As Buescher documents, Spear's spirit-guided efforts to harness technology to human liberation—sexual and otherwise—were far stranger than anyone outside his closest associates imagined, and were aimed at the eventual manufacturing of human beings and the improvement of the race. Buescher also examines the way in which Spear's story was minimized by his embarrassed fellow radicals. In the last years of his life, retired by the spirits and regarded by fellow Gilded Age progressives as a visitor from another age, if not another planet, Spear helped organize support for anarchist, socialist, peace, and labor causes. Spear's life, an odd mixture of comic absurdity and serious foreshadowing of the future, provides us with a unique perspective on nineteenth-century American religious and social life.

Spiritualism and Electromagnetism

The classical theory of electromagnetism, which formed the basis of wireless communication technology, was developed in the latter half of the 19th century, coinciding quite closely with the rise of spiritualism, i.e., the belief in the possibility of communicating with departed souls. Interestingly, there seems to have been some connection between these two fields of thought. Although aspects of what later came to be called spiritualism can be found throughout the 19th century (and indeed throughout history), the modern spiritualist movement is usually considered to have begun in 1848, when the young Fox sisters of upstate New York began to hold séances, during which they mediated messages from deceased persons. The idea spread rapidly, and by 1854 there were thousands of “mediums” throughout the United States and Europe – especially England – all claiming the ability to communicate with the dead. How seriously these claims were taken by the average person is debatable, but it’s remarkable that many well-educated and intelligent people became genuinely convinced by the basic tenet of spiritualism, which is that individual human souls survive death and continue in some mode of existence capable of interacting with the living. One notion was that the souls of the departed are imprinted in an “ethereal medium” that surrounds and permeates all ordinary matter.

The success of Isaac Newton’s inverse-square law of gravitation formulated in 1687 led to a concept of physical forces as some kind of direct “action at a distance”, and this conception was carried over to the study of magnetic and electric forces by scientists such as Ampere and Coulomb. However, beginning in the early 1850’s, James Clerk Maxwell began to conceive of electric and magnetic effects in a completely different way. Building on the earlier suggestions of Faraday, Maxwell conceived of an all-embracing ether as the mechanism and embodiment for the forces of electromagnetism. Moreover, he showed that this ethereal medium was capable of conveying energy in the form of electromagnetic waves propagating at the speed of light. Indeed he surmised that light itself is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell’s final synthesis was published in 1873, and in the 1880s the reality of electromagnetic waves was shown by Hertz, who succeeded in producing and detecting them directly by means of oscillating electrical circuits.

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