· 2019
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music
- 388citations
- 2019year
Short summary
This work argues that vocal qualities like timbre, often perceived as natural, are socially constructed and used by listeners to measure race and locate racial identities. It examines how assumptions about voices are linked to racial essentialism and authenticity.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Vocal timbre is socially constructed, not an inherent quality.
- Listeners use vocal qualities to measure race and identify racial subjectivities.
- Assumptions about voices are linked to racial essentialism and authenticity.
- The study examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Scott, and Vocaloid technology.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. Eidsheim 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, Eidsheim untangles 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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2019 · DOI ↗
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Field: Music
MusicArts and Humanities