The Brahmaputra River slices an exceptionally deep canyon through the eastern Himalaya. Fission-track and laser-ablation U-Pb ages of detrital zircon grains from the river document very rapid erosion from this region and its impact on sediment fl uxes downstream in the Brahmaputra. Downstream from the canyon, 47% of the detrital zircons in the river's modern sediment load comprise a fi ssion-track age population averaging only 0.6 Ma. Equally young cooling ages are reported from bedrock in the canyon through the Namche Barwa-Gyala Peri massif but are absent from riverbank sands of major tributaries upstream. Simple mixing models of U-Pb ages on detrital zircons from samples taken above and below this massif independently suggest that 45% of the downstream detrital zircons are derived from the basement gneisses extensively exposed in the massif. Constraints on the extent of the source area provided by bedrock cooling ages together with sediment-fl ux estimates at Pasighat, India, suggest exhumation rates averaging 7-21 mm yr -1 in an area of ~3300 km 2 centered on the massif. This rapid exhumation, which is consistent with the very young cooling ages of the detrital zircons from this area, produces so much sediment that ~50% of the vast accumulation in the Brahmaputra system at the front of the Himalaya comes from only ~2% of its drainage. This extreme localization of rapid erosion, sediment evacuation, and bedrock cooling bear on (1) common assumptions in geodynamic and geochemical studies of the Himalaya about sources of sediment, and (2) plans for hydroelectric development and fl ood management in southeastern Tibet and the heavily populated areas of eastern India.

This book was first published in German in 1911. The text sets out a path-breaking hypothesis on the earliest musical sounds in human culture. Alongside research in such diverse fields as classical philosophy, acoustics, and mathematics, Stumpf became one of the most influential psychologists of the late 19th century. He was the founding father of Gestalt psychology, and collaborated with William James, Edmund Husserl, and Wolfgang Köhler. This book was the culmination of more than twenty-five years of empirical and theoretical research in the field of music. The first part of the book discusses the origin and forms of musical activities as well as various existing theories on the origin of music, including those of Darwin, Rousseau, Herder, and Spencer. The second part summarizes his works on the historical development of instruments and music, and studies a putatively global range of music from non-European cultures to demonstrate the psychological principles of tonal organization, as well as providing a range of cross-cultural musical transcriptions and analyses. This became a foundation document for comparative musicology, the elder sibling to modern Ethnomusicology, and the book provides access to the original recordings Stumpf used in this process. This book is available for the first time in the English language.

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When Microsoft unleashed Tay ('thinking about you') onto Twitter on 23 March 2016, the AI bot progressively adapted to its environment, mimicking users and their memes in its 96,000+ tweets before it was taken offline. Modelled on a twenty-four-year-old American woman, Tay's lifespan was just over fifteen hours. While the experiment in 'conversational understanding' famously ended with the bot issuing a hailstorm of racist, pornographic and offensive profanities (which Microsoft officially put down to users targeting its method of learning by imitation), Tay also produced some weirdly unparroted responses. To the question: 'Is Ricky Gervais an atheist?' she answered: 'ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism'. 1 No information was released publicly about the algorithmic route to such deductions, and it would seem the press verdict rang true: 'this is an example of artificial intelligence at its very worstand it's only the beginning.' 2 The interface for her offensive utterances was silent, the flickering screen whose electronic text can stimulate verbal sounds only in the reader's mind. But an interface is inherently reciprocal: a gateway that opens up and allows passage to some place beyond (Galloway 2017, 30). Imagine if Tay could talk out loud. Imagine the sound of her voice, her persona-in-sound.In an age of digital culture, where seemingly all aspects of the aesthetic experience of sound are soluble in information and communications technology, the relations between human and smart device remain both controversial and banal: controversial in objectifying aspects of human interactivity; banal in instilling a 'passion of the object' and its agency (Baudrillard 1988, 84). The rich history of debates on this topic takes a particular turn with the advent of digital processing. While many commentators have celebrated the affordances of digitised music and musicianship, others have sounded the alarm: 'composition, musical praxis and musical perception sit at a crossroads. The rapid development of the digital world together with their networking will not remain without consequence for musical creation' (Kriedler et al. 2010, 8). Another decade into the twenty-first century, and consequences are not hard to identify: the

Appended music examples, index. Early in 1854, Franz Liszt noted proudly that 'there is already a "Wagner literature"-I have contributed to it myself'. 1 Twenty-eight years later, when Wagner received the first volume of Nikolaus Oesterlein's Katalog eine Richard Wagner-Bibliothek, the composer himself dismissively chortled: 'now I can relish all the fuss and bother that'll be made about me fifteen years after my death'. 2 By 1937, however, the quantity of literature accruing led Ernest Newman to begin his four-volume biography defensively by anticipating the 'superfluity' of yet another contribution to the field. 3 Newman's caveat-ostensibly polite throat-clearing-was widely parroted; but given the lack of scholarly rigour in much of the writing about Wagner over the course of the twentieth century (a flipside of the composer's notoriety), the vastness of the literature rapidly became a misleading cliché. Carl Dahlhaus eyed the problem as one of quality as early as 1971, opening his study Richard Wagners Musikdramen with the withering statement that 'the literature on Wagner is legion'. And-as though warning off would-be contributors by instilling an element of paranoia-he deemed the majority of it worthless: 'compounded of wide-ranging, historic-philosophical speculation, insatiable delight in the minutiae of his life, however far-fetched or trivial, and a curious complacency when it [comes] to the study of the music'. 4 Such sentiments were amplified during a hiatus that saw the founding of the Sämtliche Werke project, where the relentless empiricism from scholars such as John Deathridge and Egon Voss successfully reoriented the Wagnerbild away from 'scores of mediocre biographies'. 5