Word: soundness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...This may sound like touch-tone utopia, but in reality Murphy's Law prevails. Computer breakdowns and mistakes in programming commonly cause problems. The software bugs that may linger for many months can invoke a state of perplexed ennui in even the most sanguine of computer phone users. Danray, a Texas-based communications firm that was acquired last year by Canada's Northern Telecom, installed a PBX system two months ago at AMF headquarters in White Plains, N. Y. Reports one AMF employee: "The new system has its problems. We have trouble with connections, and quite often calls...
...England, the lashing, defiant sound of the Clash has scored well on the charts. Their songs drive hard and mean business. Just the titles give a taste of the action: Last Gang in Town, Guns on the Roof, Drug-Stabbing Time. In the U.S., air play is scarce. Easy enough to figure that stations programmed for the lulling sounds of California rock or the dull throb of disco might not take to a Clash tune like Tommy Gun. There is even some civic concern about violence at the concerts, to which Strummer replies, "There's as much violence...
...shock people through being sick onstage or through self-mutilation." Jones elaborates: "I never was one for sticking a pin in me nose." The Clash, though hardly elegant instrumentalists, makes far better crafted music than the Pistols ever did. The sheets of sound they let loose have the cumulative effect of a mugging, but the songs, full of threat and challenge, never mean to menace. They are, rather, about anger and desperation, about violence as a condition more than a prescription. Last Gang in Town, a fleet, bleak vision of the immediate future with London deeply riven by intramural combat...
...when the music began, the sound was a far cry from Sousa. Separated by staccato commentaries from the cathedral's pipe organ, densely dissonant sonorities clashed and blended over the listeners' heads. Full-throated blares, splintery muted phrases, the crooning tones of the soprano trombone, the rumble of its contrabass relative-all seemed to accelerate in a circular motion, spinning into the cathedral's 190-ft. cupola like an earthly echo of the music of the spheres...
...Immortal Conflict positioned instrumental groups on various balconies and plazas at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Traffic noise and a thunderstorm made the results "ludicrous," Brant admits. Undaunted, he merely drew the moral that any bold experimenter would have. "The thunderclap," he says, "showed me the scale that sound would have to be on to be heard...