Congratulations to Jason Currier as our new Vice President, Patricia Frisoli as Treasurer, and Kasey Doran as Social Chair!
Also thank you to Anita Brewer for your service as Vice President!
Jenny Cheng has offered her support as Social Committee and to support the planning and announcing of social events where needed.
Thank you all for voting and welcome to the new board members!
Minutes from the May General Meeting and Elections are available on our site here. Thanks to Anita for taking the minutes.
Thought this might be an interesting video for you to check out: JETAA in the news!
JETAANY was recently featured in a story on Japanese TV about their involvement in the 6th Annual Japan Day at Central Park in New York. Several members of the JETAANY officers are featured and interviewed in this video including President Monica Yuki and VP Kendall Murano.
YOU ARE INVITED to a talk and discussion with Dave Tompkins, author of a new book that explores the intersections of music, technology, militarism and the magic of the unreal voice.
This event is part of the Comparative Media Studies colloquium series, and is co-sponsored by MIT Cool Japan and the MIT Writing Program. There will be a light dinner / reception afterwards. The event is free and open to the public.
How to Wreck a Nice Beach:
Hearing Things with the Vocoder, From WWII to Hip-Hop
Dave Tompkins
May 10, 2012 (Thursday) 5-7pm
Room E14-633, MIT Map
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Colloquium | 05.10.12 | 5:00 PM | E14-633
How To Wreck A Nice Speech: Hearing Things With The Vocoder, From World War II To Hip-Hop
Dave Tompkins
Invented by Bell Labs in 1928 to reduce bandwidth over the Trans Atantic Cable, the vocoder would end up guarding phone conversations from eavesdroppers during World War II. By the Vietnam War, the “spectral decomposer” had been re-freaked as a robotic voice for musicians. How To Wreck A Nice Beach is about hearing things, from a misunderstood technology which in itself often spoke under conditions of anonymity. This is a terminal beach-slap of the history of electronic voices: from Nazi research labs to Stalin gulags, from World’s Fairs to Hiroshima, from Churchill and JKF to Kubrick and Kinski, The O.C. and Rammellzee, artificial larynges and Auto-Tune. Vocoder compression technology is now a cell phone standard–we communicate via flawed digital replicas of ourselves every day. Imperfect to be real, we revel in signal corruption.
Dave Tompkins’ first book, How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop, is now out in paperback. Amazon named it “top pick” for Entertainment book of the year in 2010. He has presented on the vocoder in Germany, Netherlands (Jan Van Eyck), New York (Eyebeam Institute), London, Poland (Unsound Festival), and at the NSA Cryptologic Symposium held at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Tompkins has written for Grantland, Oxford American, The Believer and The Wire. Tompkins is currently researching Sustained Decay bass sub-frequencies in Florida. Born in North Carolina, he now lives in Brooklyn.