About
Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of
MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012),
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of
The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of
The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; mail by cruise missile; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. Visit his website at
http://sterneworks.org .
Work Shared in CORE
Articles
Other Publications
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003).
MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke, 2012).
edited:
The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012)
co-edited:
Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, Tamar Tembeck, eds., The
Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016).
Essays:
http://sterneworks.org/text/
Interviews:
http://sterneworks.org/interviews/Projects
Current projects:
Broadly speaking, right now I am working on instruments and instrumentalities, histories of signal processing, and theories of the body and its faculties in the wake of disability studies.
More specifically:
with Mara Mills, a co-authored book tentatively titled The Speed of Sound, an episodic history of time-stretching and pitch-shifting from blind phonograph hackers in the 1930s to Auto-Tune and Ableton Live.
with Elena Razlogova, an essay on automated music mastering.
Diminished Faculties: A Phenomenology of Impairment
I am starting to poke around in critical studies of artificial intelligence.
Maybe 2017-18 will be the year I finish that essay on an attempt to deliver mail by cruise missile in the 1950s. Upcoming Talks and Conferences
Fall 2017, I am in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Talks are always listed here:
http://sterneworks.org/Memberships
SCMS. Founding member of Association of Internet Researchers but I’m lapsed. Founding member of the European Sound Studies Association. I also sometimes go to American Studies, International Communication Association, and Canadian Association for Cultural Studies. But I’m more likely to be at a smaller, thematic conference.
