Technology

Acousmatic voice/ Acousmêtre

A term popularized by the work of Michel Chion. In his 1982 book The Voice in Cinema, Chion details the presence of an acousmatic […]

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Amusia

a neurological disorder that affects the ability to process music. Amusia can affect the perception of music (e.g., recognize a familiar melody) or the […]

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Consonant

Consonants are classified as fricatives (generated by moving air turbulently through some part of the vocal apparatus), unvoiced plosives (bursts of air resulting from opening a […]

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Eavesdrop

Structurally, multimedia texts involve eavesdropping, as their viewer is also an active and engaged listener, hearing speech and sometimes thoughts represented as private inasmuch […]

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Formant

To an electronic musician, a formant is a peak in an audio signals’s spectral envelope. Formants are specified by giving their peak frequency, peak […]

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Fundamental Frequency

If a recorded audio signal is nearly periodic (as is much voiced speech), it is said to have a fundamental frequency, sometimes denoted “f0” […]

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Harmonics

A periodic audio signal can be represented as a sum of harmonically tuned sinusoids called harmonics.  Their frequencies are multiples of the signal’s fundamental frequency, and […]

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Language / writing / text

There is a pervasive tendency in the academy to assume (and theorize) equivalence between language, writing, and text. Despite the strenuous attempts of many […]

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Liveness

A concept that blurs the divisions between the live and mediated. In dialogue with Peggy Phelan’s argument that the “ontology of performance” lies in […]

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Loudness

Loudness is a perceptual quality of sound that correlates somewhat with the sound’s amplitude or power, but also depends on its short-time spectrum.  The loudness of […]

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