English

This article considers a 'curious' player piano found in Earl Hamner's 'A Piano in the House ' (1962) and how it comes to upend the lives of all those within earshot. Aired during the third season of The Twilight Zone (US 1959 -64), the episode uses a player piano to explore mid-century anxieties about gender, class and culture made obvious through the intercession of this antiquated instrument. By examining this narrative and its technological and cultural context, this article will show how representations of musical technology can function as a site where complex concerns about human agency in an age of technological reproduction can be sorted and (re) examined through the extrapolative structures of sf.

In this paper, I briefly explore the construction, design, and execution of the Le Corbusier/Xenakis' Philips Pavilion’s installation as an optimistic, wondrously extrapolative gesture that brought into sharp relief the musical, political, and cultural possibilities for—and anxieties about—the changes that would come to define the production and consumption of music in the twentieth-century.

This article explores the soundscape of Stephen King’s directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive – both its original AC/DC songs as well as other more cinematic, ‘synthetic’ sonic elements in the film – and how it functions as a reinforcement of the film’s central machines vs. humans plot, while also connecting to larger contextual questions about the changing sound of popular (and film) music in the 1980s.

This article explores the 1960s children’s recordings of Canadian electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack and his collaborator, the American dancer and educator Esther Nelson. Their musical partnership existed at the intersection of music, performance, and technology at a time when all three were changing rapidly. The unpredictable and playful recordings that resulted relied upon DIY electronic equipment to create an unusual range of styles and sounds, from low-fi electronic collage to traditional folk music against a mechanical backbeat; they also, crucially, relied on the input of children. By examining the resulting musical experiments within the cultural and technological context of electronic music from the early 1960s to today, we hope to emphasize that, far from being diminished versions of electronic music, children’s electronic music articulates some of the genre’s most intriguing and lasting concerns. Indeed, the innovations in musical technology and technique deployed in the...

This article considers a 'curious' player piano found in Earl Hamner's 'A Piano in the House' (1962) and how it comes to upend the lives of all those within earshot. Aired during the third season of The Twilight Zone (US 1959-64), the episode uses a player piano to explore mid-century anxieties about gender, class and culture made obvious through the intercession of this antiquated instrument. By examining this narrative and its technological and cultural context, this article will show how representations of musical technology can function as a site where complex concerns about human agency in an age of technological reproduction can be sorted and (re) examined through the extrapolative structures of sf.

The newest electronic music instrument--sounds like a human performance! --From a 1962 Clavivox advertisement We'll always be together ... Together in electric dreams --Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder FRED WILCOX'S 1956 FILM FORBIDDEN PLANET IS REGARDED AS A CLASSIC OF science fiction cinema for its narrative and intertextual complexity, lush special effects, and unconventional retelling of The Tempest; however, it is also known for featuring the first all-electronic film score. Termed "the most important" science fiction soundtrack (Taylor 93), as well as a "cult masterpiece" (Lack 313) and "one of the most imaginative electronic music creations of all time.[the one that] wrote the book on what outer space sounded like" (McGowan 110), Forbidden Planet's beautifully odd soundscape was the work of experimental New York composers Bebe and Louis Barron. A married couple whose compositional methods were as unconventional as the music they produced, the Barrons constructed for this film a score unlike any other at that time (and arguably since). Every note of the soundtrack had its origin in modular sound circuits hand-built by the composers to function as semi-autonomous "creatures" whose short, bright lives (the Barrons referred to them as "primitive life-forms" ["Interview" 195]) were spent singing out emotional leitmotifs in the service of the film's soundscape. Bebe Barron was later to describe the sound generating circuits as "electronic nervous systems" that, through the music they create, "convey strong emotional meanings to listeners" and ultimately remind them of what their "dreams sound like" (qtd. in Taylor 94). Electronic Nervous Systems I begin this article with the notion of the Barrons' score as a product of "electronic nervous systems" because in this image one finds a convenient entry point into the immense technological, compositional, and cultural achievement that is the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. These quasi-animate circuits that were to help "write the book" on the spooky sounds of science fictional spaces are indicative of the fact that, more than just a filmic/musical "first" from which other sf soundscapes were to follow, the Barrons' score is itself a powerful cultural object of the mid-century. Forbidden Planet's acoustic environment constitutes a compelling work of speculative fiction that, as this essay hopes to prove, helped make clear the vital role electronic song and sound played in the development of the cinematic genre. I will argue that the full impact of the auditory landscape in Forbidden Planet exists not just in its ability to bolster the illusion of "strangeness" in the visual landscape or even in its sounding out of characters' emotional cues or monstrous loomings (though it does this quite well). The score's evocative power also emanates from the fact that the electronic tonalities making up this soundscape relate their own complementary narrative grounded in a historically shifting process of electronic musical composition and performance. In tandem with this techno-historical analysis of the Barrons' score and its place in the development of the electronic instrument in sf cinema, I will examine the ways in which this history dovetails with the continued emergence of one of the genre's more persistent tropes: specifically the role new/alien technologies play in cinematic narratives of being and becoming human (and, sometimes, more than human). Through the compositional and technological nature of their score--as the dream-sounding product of "electronic nervous systems"--the Barrons also bring into sharp relief the influential role electronic music making plays in our cultural representations of the technologized human and how science fiction film of the mid-century, especially a film like Forbidden Planet, can be the perfect medium in which to conduct just such an experiment. For if, as science fiction film critic J. …

In the context of this analysis, enthymeme is analyzed in the speeches of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama with the intention of demonstrating how each president constructs enthymemes based upon assumptions that he has about the American people in order to create arguments tailored for specific target audiences. Additionally, each president"s speech is analyzed to demonstrate how the various syllogisms lead to one overarching conclusion within the speech, despite the target audience. Enthymemes are drawn from speeches regarding Bush"s plan to reform Social Security and Obama"s plan to reform health care. All of these factors lead to the final conclusion that despite the fact that each president is arguing for a different legislative change to unique audiences who have different concerns about the proposed legislation. Ultimately, both presidents construct enthymemes according to audience demographics and their assumptions regarding the American people as a whole. In the field of presidential rhetoric, this analysis provides a unique perspective regarding how arguments can be analyzed through the identification and application of enthymeme. It adds to the existing scholarship as enthymeme has yet to be applied to presidential speeches with the same level of specificity that it is used in this analysis. Additionally, this analysis examines the rhetoric of presidents who have not yet been studied at great length in terms of their use of specific rhetorical devices. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend a special thanks to my parents, brother, husband, and grandmother for their continued support and patience. This project would have been incredibly difficult without their words of encouragement, constant reminders that I would not be writing this forever, and their enthusiasm as I progressed throughout this venture. Even if I didn"t always believe in myself, they never stopped. Additionally, I would like to thank my friends for their support. I would also like to thank all of my committee members for all of their guidance, assistance, and patience throughout this endeavor. Major Premise: All Americans should have health insurance. Obama appears to make this argument based on the assumption that people should have access to health insurance. This assumption is addressed again in the speech when Obama states: Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can't get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can't afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or too expensive to cover. ("Remarks to Joint Session" par. 6) This statement includes numerous reasons why individuals deserve access to health care. It addresses the consequences of not having health insurance, such as bankruptcy resulting from a serious illness. All of these arguments lead to the conclusion since insurance will not be available to all Americans until reform is passed, and these issues will continue to affect the lives of millions of Americans. The intended audience for this argument is fairly clear as he explicitly states who he is addressing in his minor premise: people who do not currently have insurance. However, like the previous discussion regarding arguments aimed at the uninsured, this one also addresses issues that a general audience can relate to, even if the topics themselves do not directly apply to their lives. This is one of the key differences between arguments made to the insured versus the uninsured. The arguments aimed at the insured are topic specific and deal with reform in terms of how it will affect people"s existing policies. Arguments to the uninsured are