Compact Disc

Author : Robert Barry (Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, London, UK)

Paperback

Published : Thursday 19 March 2020

ISBN : 9781501348518

Price : €11.69

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Compact Disc

by Robert Barry (Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, London, UK)

Paperback

19 Mar 2020

LITERARY CRITICISM
>> Semiotics AND Theory

€11.69

Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days

Description

The compact disc promised to be the perfect medium for recorded sound, but it presaged the end of physical media for good. Its history shows that the materiality of media can never simply be wished away.--

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

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