Providence
Myles Jackson | Broadcasting Fidelity: Early German Radio and the Rise of Electronic Music | An STS Colloquium
Join Myles Jackson and the STS Program for his talk, titled: Broadcasting Fidelity: Early German Radio and the Rise of Electronic Music In the early days of radio, acoustical distortions made it hard for even the most discerning musical ears to differentiate instruments and voices. The physicists and engineers of interwar Germany, with the assistance of leading composers and musicians, tackled this daunting technical challenge.
Research led to the invention in 1930 of the trautonium, an early electronic instrument capable of imitating the timbres of numerous acoustical instruments and generating novel sounds for many musical genres. This talk traces the broader political and artistic trajectories of this instrument, tracing how it was embraced by the Nazis and subsequently used to subvert Nazi aesthetics after the war and describing how the trautonium went on to play a role in a famous Hollywood thriller.
Kabob and Curry lunch provided for attendees of the talk!
