Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed

Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne are co-writing a book entitled Tuning Time: Sequences from the History of Time Stretching and Pitch Shifting. Together, they explore how blind readers, physicists, engineers, artists, musicians, speech researchers, and forensics experts all sought ways to separate the time and frequency, and therefore the perceived duration and pitch, of reproduced sound. The book is at once a cultural, technological, and media-theoretical history of the phenomenon, from early experiments in the 1930s to software such as Auto-Tune, Audible, and Ableton Live today.