"On Becoming-Music: Between Boredom and Ecstasy is a critical approach to the possibility of music as an art form in the age of media. It opens our ears and our minds to the dialectics of repetition and variation, ecstasy and entertainment in music."
- Michael Schmidt
"In our world of conventional music pieties to which almost everyone pays lip service, Peter Price and Tyler Burba have opened up a new world of sound aesthetics-with terrific results. This book is an exhilarating plunge into a playful world of sound at its most ethereal: it's an exploration that is an engaging and forthright manifesto into why mix culture means so much more in the 21st century than anything in the rear view mirror."
- Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
-----Sound as Art in the Age of Global Entertainment examines the changing role of music as art and entertainment in a world of global commodity circulation. From Adorno to the iPod and Jean-Luc Nancy on techno, this text is a "mashup" of music, philosophy, and political economy.
-----The Ecstasy of Difference: The Phenomenology of Repetition and Variation in Music debunks the relation of the ecstatic experience through music to repetition. It investigates the role of form, genre, and the music market on the possibilities of ecstatic listening and how music has been used throughout history to subdue through pseudo-exaltation. Clearing our ears of these ideological aesthetics, we are left with an opening for a truly ecstatic becoming-music.
About the authors:
Peter Price is a composer, digital artist, and media theorist. He co-directs "thefidget space" in Philadelphia, a research laboratory for new forms of art, performance, and media. Peter received an M.A. from the European Graduate School and is a candidate for a PhD in Media Philosophy.
Tyler Burba is a musician/poet performing in the groups Snowboots, a psychedelic folk band, and Visit, an existential country band. Tyler completed his M.A. in Communication at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he is currently pursuing a PhD. He lives and teaches in New York City.
