| Description |
xiv, 268 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
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text txt rdacontent |
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unmediated n rdamedia |
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volume nc rdacarrier |
| Series |
Refiguring American music |
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Refiguring American music.
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| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-257) and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction. The acousmatic question : who is this? -- Formal and informal pedagogies : believing in race, teaching race, hearing race -- Phantom genealogy : sonic Blackness and the American operatic timbre -- Familiarity as strangeness : Jimmy Scott and the question of Black timbral masculinity -- Race as zeros and ones : Vocaloid refused, reimagined, and repurposed -- Bifurcated listening : the inimitable, imitated Billie Holiday -- Widening rings of being : the singer as stylist and technician. |
| Summary |
Traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. The author illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre - the color or tone of a voice. The author examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as the vocal synthesis technology Vocaloid to show how listeners carry a series of assumptions about the nature of the voice and to whom it belongs. Outlining how the voice is linked to ideas of racial essentialism and authenticity, the author untangled the relationship between race, gender, vocal technique, and timbre while addressing an undertheorized space of racial and ethnic performance. In so doing, she advances our knowledge of the cultural-historical formation of the timbral politics of difference and the ways that comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience, all the while advocating for a form of listening that would allow us to hear singers in a self-reflexive, denaturalized way. |
| Subject |
Vocaloid (Computer file).
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Anderson, Marian, 1897-1993.
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Holiday, Billie, 1915-1959.
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Scott, Jimmy, 1925-2014.
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African Americans -- Music -- Social aspects.
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Music and race -- United States.
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Voice culture -- Social aspects -- United States.
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Tone color (Music) -- Social aspects -- United States.
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Music -- Social aspects -- United States.
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Singing -- Social aspects -- United States.
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| Genre/Form |
Music.
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| ISBN |
9780822368687 paperback ; alkaline paper |
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0822368684 paperback ; alkaline paper |
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9780822368564 hardcover ; alkaline paper |
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0822368560 hardcover ; alkaline paper |
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