Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
The long wait is over, and my master’s thesis for the MIT Comparative Media Studies department is now online. It’s a relief to have it done (in this incarnation at least—I’ll be crushing it down to article length this summer), and kind of nice to remember that I started blogging the summer before I started at MIT, trying to get my brain back into shape for grad school.
The thesis ended up in a different place than I could have imagined at the start (of course), and as a result I have a few qualms about it. First is the language: I very much value academic writing that is not in “academese.” As a result of time pressures, the appeal of well-worn habits, and really, time pressures, this thesis is mostly in a pidgin academese. I know that is a barrier for a lot of people, and my plan is to essentially post the whole thesis on this blog in installments, rephrasing things in a way that makes more sense for the everyday world we live in.
Second is the methodology: I started with the idea that I could somehow capture all about the player piano, from its pre-history to Hedy Lamarr’s missile guidance patent, to the punched-paper rolls of the RCA Mark I synthesizer. Of course I had to narrow, and what I ended up with treats essentially four categories of player-piano-related objects. I’ve learned a lot about the work of doing media history—methodological obligations, common traps, fallacies, and so on—but given the scope of the project, I wish I could start all over and be a rigorously theoretical historian, more thoroughly practicing what I preach. For a thesis that values context above all, I wish I could have included more of it!
In any case, I am happy with how it all turned out—an exploration of an unusual form of music reproduction in three parts: material representations, labor reconfigurations, and scientific productions. I’ve copied the abstract below the jump, or you can read the PDF yourself here.
Stay tuned for the hyperlinked, colloquial, bloggy version, coming soon to a sound/music/technology blog near you.
