A paper on Cornel West’s “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual” and Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On that I presented on the 25th of October 2006 at Princeton University during the ACLA Annual Meeting: The Human and its Others.
Tag Archives: engineer
new adventures in low-fidelity
This essay makes a case for media-epistemic pluralism, by staging an encounter between Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Ralph Ellison’s autobiographical story ‘Living with Music’. It argues that a medium does not function autonomously, but always forms a complex constellation with other media. This constellation takes shapes through the interventions of the conceptual persona of the engineer.
oh baby, i like it raw
A presentation that I gave on the 27th of October 2008 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the Music and Sound Studies Initiative lecture series organized by Sumanth Gopinath.
a rather fortunate accident
Ironically, the results of mistakes often end up to be far more interesting than those of hard work. Marvin Gaye’s 1970 hit “What’s Going On” serves as one of those miraculous examples of serendipity. During the recording sessions a rather fortunate accident occurred. The singer had recorded two alternate takes of the lead-vocals that were one octave apart. When the artist asked the sound engineer on duty, Ken Sands, to play these two tracks for him, the technician unwittingly played them simultaneously in mono. The unintended result was a duet between the singer and himself