Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Help Support the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
- African Studies
- African American Studies
- American Politics
- American Studies
- American South
- American West
- Asian American Studies
- Australian and New Zealand Studies
- British Studies
- Canadian Studies
- Caribbean Studies
- Central Asian Studies
- Chinese Studies
- East Asian Studies
- Eastern European Studies
- European Politics
- French Studies
- German Studies
- Iberian Studies
- India Studies
- Indian Ocean World
- Iranian Studies
- Irish Studies
- Israel Studies
- Italian Studies
- Japanese Studies
- Korean Studies
- Latino Studies
- Latin American Studies
- Mexican Studies
- Middle Eastern Studies
- Native American Studies
- Pacific Studies
- Polish Studies
- Russian and Eurasian Studies
- Southeast Asian Studies
- South Asian Studies
- Turkish Studies
- Ukrainian Studies
- Western European Studies
- World Affairs
- Animal Studies
- Anthropology
- Archaeology
- Business, Management, and Marketing
- Media
- Critical Theory
- Disability Studies
- Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
- Education
- Economics
- Finance
- Geography
- Gender Studies
- Genocide Studies
- Higher Education
- Human Rights
- Journalism
- Language
- Law
- LGBTQ+ Studies
- National Security
- Philosophy
- Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
- Political Science
- Politics & Polemics
- Public Policy
- Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work
- Sociology
- Sound Studies
- Sports
- Urban Studies
About Nathan Smith
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University. His interests tend to fall into two camp: sound studies and mathematical/computational music theory. These two often meet via anthropology, science and technology studies, and continental philosophy. The genres of music he specializes in span across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: jazz, extreme metal, rock, avant-garde, Western art music, and electronic music. Most broadly, he is interested in the cultural histories of technology, sound, and media across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the reception history of the works of Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault in the humanities and beyond.Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).
NBN Episodes hosted by Nathan:
April 15, 2024
Theorizing Music Evolution
What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary t…
April 2, 2024
Sounds As They Are
In a recording, what sounds count as music? Sounds made by a musician's body--including inhales, finger taps, and grunts--have for decades been dismis…
February 18, 2024
Hearing Luxe Pop
Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (U California Press, 2021) explores a deluxe-production aesthet…
November 14, 2023
The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning
What is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in diff…
September 14, 2023
Dreams in Double Time
In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new future…
August 31, 2023
Voice Machines
Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrit…
March 12, 2023
Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brube…
January 7, 2023
Switched On
The Moog synthesizer ‘bent the course of music forever’ Rolling Stone declared.Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstei…
September 15, 2022
Earworm and Event
In Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke UP, 2022) Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contem…