The Resonance of Music Across Cultures

What predestines music to be able to transgress geo-cultural boundaries? I argue that music’s sensuous, bodily-affective immediacy requires a mode of cross-cultural translation via what I call auditory resonance—the spontaneous attunement of listeners with the sonic presence of music through media-technological transmission despite vestiges of cultural colonialism and other sociopolitical barriers. I trace such resonance effects from German Romanticism through our global present, focusing especially on the conversations between two Japanese cultural figures, the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami. These texts show that the category of auditory resonance is more suitable for addressing European music’s global significance than its traditional claims to transcultural universality. Keywords: Music, resonance, immediacy, presence, media technologies, cultural translation, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Walter Benjamin, Seiji Ozawa, Haruki Murakami

Bronze Age weight systems as a measure of market integration in Western Eurasia

Weighing technology was invented around 3000 BCE between Mesopotamia and Egypt and became widely adopted in Western Eurasia within ∼2,000 y. For the first time in history, merchants could rely on an objective frame of reference to quantify economic value. The subsequent emergence of different weight systems goes hand in hand with the formation of a continental market. However, we still do not know how the technological transmission happened and why different weight systems emerged along the way. Here, we show that the diffusion of weighing technology can be explained as the result of merchants’ interaction and the emergence of primary weight systems as the outcome of the random propagation of error constrained by market self-regulation. We found that the statistical errors of early units between Mesopotamia and Europe overlap significantly. Our experiment with replica weights gives error figures that are consistent with the archaeological sample. We used these figures to develop a model simulating the formation of primary weight systems based on the random propagation of error over time from a single original unit. The simulation is consistent with the observed distribution of weight units. We demonstrate that the creation of the earliest weight systems is not consistent with a substantial intervention of political authorities. Our results urge a revaluation of the role of individual commercial initiatives in the formation of the first integrated market in Western Eurasia.

The Coming of the Drawloom: A Chapter in the Technological Transmission between Iran and India

In the history of technology, the loom has come to occupy an important place. While the horizontal handloom has a comparatively simple mechanism, this is not true of the vertical drawloom, which through centuries has developed complex forms. The question of the latter’s presence in India in early times has aroused some controversy. The case is made in this article that it arrived in the thirteenth century from Iran but failed to supplant the handloom in most areas of textile production, except for carpet weaving, mainly in Kashmir.

The Logic of Noise Reduction

Chapter 2 explores the conceptual implications of the myth of perfect fidelity by further analyzing the two case studies introduced in chapter 1. While analog noise reduction and the addition of “dither”-noise in the digital domain at first seem diametrically opposed (reducing and adding noise, respectively), closer analysis shows that they both serve to conceal the physical influence of the medium on the reproduced sound. Following a conceptual logic of noise reduction, they strive to achieve the most accurate copy of the “original” sound. Information theory has shown, however, that this influence of media technological transmission channels on the output signal is inevitable, because the physical limitations of the medium cannot be fully overcome. The chapter therefore suggests replacing the myth of perfect fidelity with the competing concept of a noise resonance of sound media, to account for the fact that noise, distortion, and randomness unavoidably shape all reproduced sound.

The introduction of the glaze in al-Andalus: Technological waves and Oriental influences

This research develops a much-needed approach to the study of glazed ware production in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain and Portugal) during the early Middle Ages. The introduction of glaze to the Iberian Peninsula was a long and complex process involving three waves of technology transfer arriving from the eastern Islamic regions between the ninth and eleventh centuries. In this paper, the main glaze workshops of each technological wave have been characterised in order to understand how the medieval technological transmission took place and how political and economic factors influenced this gradual dissemination.

Costruire ingegnosamente riutilizzando materiali poveri. L’impiego di conchiglie a fini edilizi ad Aquileia tra età repubblicana e tarda antichità.

In this paper, we take into exam six different contexts in Roman Aquileia in which considerable amounts of shells, originally collected for different purposes (dietary consumption or purple dye production), were re-used as raw material in building activities, either inserted in mortars or used as floor foundation. Shells as building material have useful properties, which are here analyzed. Themes such as technological transmission among cultures are discussed through the examination of other attestations of these practices in the ancient Mediterranean.

Listening behaviour and musical preference in the age of ‘transmitted music’

The significance of the mass media in everyday musical life can scarcely be exaggerated. Music is nowadays, to a large degree, heard in technologically communicated form, i.e. as ‘transmitted music’ (Übertragungsmusik), not live (see especially Silbermann 1954, Eberhard 1962, Jungk 1971, Goslich 1971, Bornoff 1972, Blaukopf, Goslich and Scheib 1973, Schmidt 1975, Rösing 1978a, Brinkmann 1980, Hosokawa 1981). It can be assumed that young people and adults in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) consume, on average, a good three hours' worth of music a day, on radio, cassette recorder, television or records. The fact that music, by means of the technological transmission-chain, is available at all times and can be replayed at will, independent of the here-and-now of live performance, has far-reaching consequences for the listening behaviour, listening expectations, musical preferences and musical understanding of every individual. Two of these aspects, listening behaviour and musical preferences, will be examined in detail in what follows.