Magnus Schaefer

Magnus Schaefer is Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. Magnus holds a joint M.A. in Art History and Philosophy from Humboldt University and Free University in Berlin and has (co-)organized exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunsthalle Bern, Kunsthalle Zurich, and elsewhere.

Projects 

Magnus’s dissertation charts the historical emergence of digital signal processing as a medium in the 1950s and 1960s. It examines petroleum industry research and development on applying statistical communication theory to problems from oil prospecting; the industry’s investment in digital infrastructure (special-purpose computers, data centers, staff training); crossovers between commercial exploration geophysics and Project VELA Uniform, a U.S. government program funding research on the remote monitoring of Soviet underground nuclear arms tests during the Cold War; and the history of the cepstrum and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) algorithms, which contributed to establishing digital signal processing in communications engineering and are an integral component of contemporary digital image, video, and sound technologies.

Publications

Book chapter on music and the production of “natural” hearing in cochlear implants (in peer review)

Activity

In 2023–24, Magnus was a co-convener of the Sound and Technology working group of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM).