I research sonic arts, computation, and media change. I'm an Assistant Professor in Seton Hall University's Department of Communication, Media and Arts.
When my beloved PhD advisor, Jonathan Sterne, entered hospice care this past March, waves of appreciation and then mourning rippled out from the many communities and institutions he touched. These voices were so helpful in arraying all the things that had made Jonathan a delight to read and to work with: there were the Jonathanisms , the farewells from editors and organizations , a host of voices…
Taught courses on programming , automation , and historical perspectives on AI in the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts University
Meta’s decidedly non-buoyant test balloons for a new class of AI-driven fake accounts, rediscovered this week in a bevy of profoundly cringe-worthy Instagram screenshots, don’t make much sense at all in terms of what platform users might ever want to experience. They make a good deal more sense from a vantage point of labor flows and historical automation trends. Based on those patterns, we should…
Reviewed Neil Verma’s Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession for the Journal of Radio & Audio Media
With Jonathan Sterne, published “When a Format (Almost) Becomes an Instrument: Eurorack in a Logistical World” in JCMS
Reviewed Eric Dienstfrey’s Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology for Film Quarterly
Reviewed Kyle Barnetts’s Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry for the Journal of Popular Music Studies
Published an article in New Media & Society on “Google Radio Automation and the broadcast plights behind platformization”
It’s been very fun and heartening in the last week to see a big wave of people I followed on Twitter moving over to open source federated alternatives, namely Mastodon (or its fork Hometown , in my case). There are a lot of good blog posts making the rounds where people offer tips on getting oriented in the fediverse and reflections on its differences from Twitter; this is not one of those.…
For the sound studies journal Resonance , wrote an essay called “Reflections from an Artist Researcher: A History of Wave Farm at 25” ( PDF )
Through the Journal of Popular Music Studies , published a transcript of a conference panel – “Sounds of Accompaniment: Music, Technology, and Labor amid Capitalist Aesthetics” ( PDF ) – from SCMS 2022 with Alexandra Hui, Alex Russo, and Amy Skjerseth
I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time this summer evaluating a few different text editors after Atom, the application where I did almost all my writing and notetaking between 2016 and 2022, got the axe from its corporate developers. I’m writing this post to capture my reflections from this largely procastination-fueled quest for the right editor before those thoughts vanish on the wind. Maybe…
Contributed a chapter, titled “Radio Automation: Sonic Control in American Broadcasting,” to The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies
Archived and produced artworks for broadcast radio as Wave Farm’s 2021-22 Radio Artist Fellow
Short version: Record a couple seconds of a steady sound (e.g. from a synthesizer or software audio tool) whose fundamental pitch is 25 Hz. Send any recordings to me by email to andykstuhl@gmail.com . I will use your sound(s) in a radio artwork and include you in its list of contributors. Any suitable sounds I receive by May 9 (2022) will be used in the project. Long version: In radio,…
Led, through Wave Farm, an online media arts workshop on Radio Deprogramming
Published an article about the Emergency Alert System in the Canadian Journal of Communication
Contributed with other HASTAC scholars to a collective review of Katina Rogers’s Putting the Humanities PhD to Work
Wrote a field note for the Grierson Research Group about tape media and automation in the 1950s
Contributed to a collective review for Amodern of Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
Built a website for the (COVID-nixed) Containment & Intimacy conference
Helped develop digital humanities applications including Digital Mappa 2.0 and Neatline for Omeka S
Reviewed Damon Krukowski’s The New Analog for Sounding Out!
The composer Pauline Oliveros, who passed away recently at the age of 84, leaves behind a many-threaded legacy of musical adventuring amid vigorous support for colleagues, as Geeta Dayal documents in an obituary for Frieze . In all these pursuits, and in her writing , Oliveros’ voice was harsh in its directness and uplifting in its clarity — the fruit of a rare commitment to distilling avant-garde…
Wrote a master’s thesis in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, titled “Listening in Code: Process and Politics in Interactive Musical Works”
Collaborated with Leigh Kaulbach on a 40-day mail/sound art exchange
Published an article on “Reactions to Analog Fetishism in Sound-Recording Cultures” in The Velvet Light Trap