- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- The Companion Website
- Introduction: Volume 2
- Improvisation: An Ideal Display of Embodied Imagination
- Anticipated Sonic Actions and Sounds in Performance
- Motor Imagery in Perception and Performance of Sound and Music
- Music and Emergence
- Affordances in Real, Virtual, and Imaginary Musical Performance
- Systemic Abstractions: The Imaginary Regime
- From Rays to Ra: Music, Physics, and the Mind
- Music Analysis and Data Compression
- Bioacoustics: Imaging and Imagining the Animal World
- Musical Notation as the Externalization of Imagined, Complex Sound
- “… they call us by our name …”: Technology, Memory, and Metempsychosis
- Musical Shape Cognition
- Playing the Inner Ear: Performing the Imagination
- Music in Detention and Interrogation: The Musical Ecology of Fear
- Augmented Unreality: Synesthetic Artworks and Audiovisual Hallucinations
- Consumer Sound
- Creating a Brand Image through Music: Understanding the Psychological Mechanisms behind Audio Branding
- Sound and Emotion
- Voluntary Auditory Imagery and Music Pedagogy
- A Different Way of Imagining Sound: Probing the Inner Auditory Worlds of Some Children on the Autism Spectrum
- Multimodal Imagery in the Receptive Music Therapy Model Guided Imagery and Music (GIM)
- Empirical Musical Imagery beyond the “Mind’s Ear”
- Imaginative Listening to Music
- A Hopeful Tone: A Waltonian Reconstruction of Bloch’s Musical Aesthetics
- Sound as Environmental Presence: Toward an Aesthetics of Sonic Atmospheres
- The Aesthetics of Improvisation
- Sonic Materialism: Hearing the Arche-Sonic
- Imagining the Seamless Cyborg: Computer System Sounds as Embodying Technologies
- Glitched and Warped: Transformations of Rhythm in the Age of the Digital Audio Workstation
- On the Other Side of Time: Afrofuturism and the Sounds of the Future
- Posthumanist Voices in Literature and Opera
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Daniël Ploeger investigates the designed sounds of operating systems (OSs), particularly those of Apple and Microsoft computers and devices, from a cultural critical perspective arguing that such sounds are cybernetic prostheses enhancing our capabilities. In a chapter that takes in conceptions of the cyborg (which are overshadowed by the cyborg’s roots in the military industrial complex) to the subversion and use of OS sounds for creative purposes, Ploeger discusses the use and subsequent development of such sounds—from early mainframe computers’ inherent noises to the designed sounds of today’s computing devices—and shows how they underpin the imagining of computers as extensions of the human body. Ultimately, for Ploeger, the recent design of OS sounds serves to propagate pre-existing ideological concepts of the cyborg as evinced by our now technologically prosthetisized bodies.
Keywords: cybernetics, cyborg, operating system, sound, embodiment
Research Fellow, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- The Companion Website
- Introduction: Volume 2
- Improvisation: An Ideal Display of Embodied Imagination
- Anticipated Sonic Actions and Sounds in Performance
- Motor Imagery in Perception and Performance of Sound and Music
- Music and Emergence
- Affordances in Real, Virtual, and Imaginary Musical Performance
- Systemic Abstractions: The Imaginary Regime
- From Rays to Ra: Music, Physics, and the Mind
- Music Analysis and Data Compression
- Bioacoustics: Imaging and Imagining the Animal World
- Musical Notation as the Externalization of Imagined, Complex Sound
- “… they call us by our name …”: Technology, Memory, and Metempsychosis
- Musical Shape Cognition
- Playing the Inner Ear: Performing the Imagination
- Music in Detention and Interrogation: The Musical Ecology of Fear
- Augmented Unreality: Synesthetic Artworks and Audiovisual Hallucinations
- Consumer Sound
- Creating a Brand Image through Music: Understanding the Psychological Mechanisms behind Audio Branding
- Sound and Emotion
- Voluntary Auditory Imagery and Music Pedagogy
- A Different Way of Imagining Sound: Probing the Inner Auditory Worlds of Some Children on the Autism Spectrum
- Multimodal Imagery in the Receptive Music Therapy Model Guided Imagery and Music (GIM)
- Empirical Musical Imagery beyond the “Mind’s Ear”
- Imaginative Listening to Music
- A Hopeful Tone: A Waltonian Reconstruction of Bloch’s Musical Aesthetics
- Sound as Environmental Presence: Toward an Aesthetics of Sonic Atmospheres
- The Aesthetics of Improvisation
- Sonic Materialism: Hearing the Arche-Sonic
- Imagining the Seamless Cyborg: Computer System Sounds as Embodying Technologies
- Glitched and Warped: Transformations of Rhythm in the Age of the Digital Audio Workstation
- On the Other Side of Time: Afrofuturism and the Sounds of the Future
- Posthumanist Voices in Literature and Opera
- Index