A vivid and essential memoir of deafness, disability and identity by Australian writer Fiona Murphy

""Reading this volume transported me back to Harvard and MIT lecture halls of the 1960s, where weekly Roman Jakobson would spellbind his audience (this reviewer included), developing his vision of language through impassioned exposition, deft and devastating allusions to critical literature, anecdotes with the force of parables, metaphors of mythic imagery, and above all else overriding verbal artistry: truly in his own phrase, 'In the poetry of grammar'. The Sound Shape of Language, his collaboration with Linda R. Waugh, a scholar who has devoted considerable attention to an exposition and el.

Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region’s ecological complexities. Focusing on the area south of Port Townsend and between the Cascade and Olympic mountains, Williams uncovers human and natural histories in, on, and around the Sound. In conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish, and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet, and today’s ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound’s ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction, and the effects of climate change. Witty, graceful, and deeply informed, Homewaters weaves history and science into a fascinating and hopeful narrative, one that will introduce newcomers to the astonishing life that inhabits the Sound and offers longtime residents new insight into and appreciation of the waters they call home. A Michael J. Repass Book

We think we know language. We think it is ours. The body speaks it. Words are pieces and parts of humans. However, like people, language morphs. Andrew Ruzkowski investigates the complications of language in his long poem A Shape & Sound. The poet explores what words can do to us, in us, and for us. His love of writing, the world, and the beloved take us to a connected space. This long poem begs the reader to explore our collective and individual happenings.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception–action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

For the past 20 years, Victoria Meyers, a Founding Partner of hanrahanMeyers architects, has crafted an architectural and urban design practice that includes sound as an intimate aspect of the designed environment. Meyers analyses the shape of sound; architecture and sound; form; materiality; windows; the urban soundscape, its politics, aesthetics and social character; reflection; virtuality; sound art; and silence. This sequel to Designing with Light offers new theoretical insights into sound and the spatial experience accompanied by several key case studies. These include Meyers' work with Stephen Vitiello, whose piece A Bell For Every Minute animated the New York High Line project, and her collaborations with composer and sound artist Michael Schumacher. Digital Water i-Pavilion, located opposite Ground Zero in Manhattan, has proved particularly innovative: Schumacher's score, developed especially for the building, has been etched into a glass facade which can be 'played' by the public via an app; onlookers direct their mobile phones at the glass to read and hear the music. Sound is not simply music however, and Meyers reflects upon this in her quest for an understanding of architecture as an auditory environment, through examples of buildings and materials which inspire and possess characteristic sonic properties.

Shape is a concept widely used in talk about music. Musicians in classical, popular, jazz and world musics use it to help them rehearse, teach and think about what they do. Yet why is a word that seems to require something to see or to touch so useful to describe something that sounds? Music and Shape examines numerous aspects of this surprisingly close relationship, with contributions from scholars and musicians, artists, dancers, filmmakers, and synaesthetes. The main chapters are provided by leading scholars from music psychology, music analysis, music therapy, dance, classical, jazz and popular music who examine how shape makes sense in music from their varied points of view. Here we see shape providing a key notion for the teaching and practice of performance nuance or prosody; as a way of making relationships between sound and body movement; as a link between improvisational as well as compositional design and listener response, and between notation, sound and cognition; and as a unimodal quality linked to vitality affects. Reflections from practitioners, between the chapters, offer complementary insights, embracing musical form, performance and composition styles, body movement, rhythm, harmony, timbre, narrative, emotions and feelings, and beginnings and endings. Music and Shape opens up new perspectives on musical performance, music psychology and music analysis, making explicit and open to investigation a vital factor in musical thinking and experience previously viewed merely as a metaphor.

The Shape of sounds is a series of sound and visual art developed by synesthetic artistThe work explores how the invisible world of sound can manifest itself in visually through an overlapping of the senses.

Introduces shapes, including squares, triangles, circles, and rectangles, and presents images of musical instruments that incorporate these shapes.