Customer Reviews

Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Music Culture)

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Amidst all the inflated rhetoric that either denounces technology for making music "inauthentic" or celebrates it for creating new postmodern forms of community, Paul Theberge's "Any Sound You Can Imagine" is a welcome oasis of intelligence. Rather than choosing sides in what often becomes a simplistic debate, Theberge provides a balanced account that, uniquely, puts digital instruments in a broad social and historical perspective. This book has much to recommend it, but the high points for me are the last several chapters, in which Theberge formulates a theory of how instruments work not only practically but symbolically, that goes beyond almost any other book on the subject. As such, "Any Sound You Can Imagine" is heady stuff, but it's also accessibly written. Anyone who thinks they know something about electronic music, whether it be techno or the electronic avant garde, should read this book and see how many of their assumptions are left standing at the end.

An exceedingly well researched and elegantly written text explaining the social and cultural impact of electronic music and especially synthesizer technology on musicians of all levels. This is a most important piece of work, and while written at an almost "academic" and scholarly level, is a book every modern musician will find valuable.