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.
This post is part of my attempt to port my master’s thesis into blog form. Over the next [arbitrary and probably long amount of time], I’ll be posting longer-form pieces that track the various themes of the thesis, from the dominance of the speaker/microphone paradigm to the use of scientific rhetoric by 1920s player piano laboratories. I’m hoping they’ll be intelligible on their own, but as they go up, you can see them all together in chronological order here. You could also skip ahead and download the real deal PDF. This first installment is more or less directly copied from my introduction—a description of an unusual Glenn Gould concert.
“I was totally wowed,” a woman in the audience told CBC News. “The only thing missing was a hologram of Gould actually playing.” [1]
In 2006, on what would have been Glenn Gould’s 74th birthday, in the studio named after him at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, Zenph Studios produced a concert featuring his performance of the work that launched his career when he recorded it for Columbia Masterworks 50 years previous: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Variations, published in 1741, had been considered esoteric harpsichord music until Gould’s interpretation on the piano revived them for a modern audience—an aria and 30 short contrapuntal variations on its bass theme. Zenph’s concert was unusual in many respects, but two facts suggested that it should not have happened at all: Gould famously abandoned live performance at the age of 31, and he died at 51.
