TUE 24 June 2025, 2PM, KCL Strand Campus S3.30
Gavin Williams, Lecturer in Music in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London to give talk at Strand Campus S3.30 as part of the MARC and the Engineering seminar series. There will be refreshments after the talk, courtesy of the NMES Research Culture Fund.
If you are unable to attend in person, you may use the following MS Teams link to attend the event virtually: Engineering Seminar — Dr Gavin Williams
Title : Deconvolved: A Natural History of Digital Sound
Abstract : This lecture explores the convergence, since the Second World War, between seismic survey and oil industries in which dynamite and air gun explosions have become standard ways of sounding the earth’s strata. It considers the history of mathematics, computing, and spectrographic analysis, together with the effects of underwater blasts on marine life. It will also track the implications for early digital audio, in particular, focussing on efforts to clean up shellac discs using digital techniques borrowed from the analysis of seismic recordings in search of oil.
Speaker : Gavin Williams is a Lecturer in Music in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London. His book Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc was published by University of Chicago Press in 2024, and he is currently putting together an edited collection together with co-editors Laudan Nooshin and Annette Davison called Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics.
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