In Search of Lost Sound. Experimental Sound Culture in Russia and the USSR in the First Half of the Twentieth Century by Andrey Smirnov

  • Year2020
  • LanguageRussian
  • Edition2000
  • Pages295
  • BindingPaperback
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Garage publishing program

The new book published as part of the GARAGE.txt series is dedicated to the history of sound and musical experiments in Russia and the USSR in the first half of the twentieth century.

A monograph by the Theremin Center founder Andrey Smirnov, In Search of Lost Sound is devoted to the history of the art of sound and music technology in Russia and the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. That era’s developments in the field of sound, which for a long time remained unknown to the general reader, are striking even today, almost a hundred years later. Contemporary practice confirms the integrity of the undeservedly forgotten experimenters. The leitmotif that runs through the book is a look at the history of Russian sound culture from the point of view of media archeology.

“The fate of the culture of revolutionary experimentalists is sad. Many projects that did not fit into the paradigms of the totalitarian culture of the 1930s to the1950s  have been forgotten, instruments and other material evidence of the era have been destroyed, key documents have been lost, and the surviving ones are separated and scattered across various archives. In fact, we are forced to excavate the ruins of the culture of the 1920s. So many inventions that seemed utopian were recreated decades later, some of them we use today, not knowing their origins, with a lot of ideas still awaiting a second birth, probably,” says Andrey Smirnov.

Author

Andrey Smirnov (b. 1956) is a research fellow at the Center for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, Head of Sound Laboratory at Moscow’s Rodchenko Art School, founder of Theremin Center, curator, developer of interactive music systems, author of dozens of academic and popular-science articles on the history of music technology and the art of sound in Russia and abroad, as well as the book SOUND in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia.

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